#he is in fact trans if anyone had even a shadow of doubt about that

[helmbarte]

[sw4tch]

Hey! *Kicks open your door* tell me about your OC's on main! I want to hear about them! (If you want to)

I DO, I DO WANT TO!!!

since I'm stuck during a long bus ride you get to hear my long long rambles about my dnd ocs!! (They're the ocs i think about constantly because they're the ones i get to Play With more lol)

They're all from different campaigns I've played. I'll give you quick info and thoughts about them in chronological order (aka, which one did i create first)

Michi Haasi

- fun fact his name is literally an endearment term for a cat in spanish (something like "little critter")

- which makes sense since he's half tabaxi, aka literally a cat boy. Full anime cat boy! He's a rogue that was trained as a spy assassin from a tender age because his parents got murdered in an unjust massacre carried out by a random noble lord. Now left to care for his little sister and brother, he took on a life of crime with high risk but high reward.

- since he specialized in being part of political conflicts from the shadows, he knew it would make him enemies that would put his siblings in danger. So he left them in an orphanage and cut all possible ties with them. He cares for them deeply though and sends all the money he can to the orphanage so that his siblings may be cared for properly.

- it feels weird not to mention it even though it has never come up in the story and i doubt it ever will, but Michi is a trans boy :3

- outside of the role, there was another player in my table that kept pushing for his character (a hobbit druid girl) to have a hardcore crush on Michi and i didn't feel comfortable with that so uh now my experience rping Michi has been soured a bit. Like yes i do love him as one of my creations but if i never play as him again i will not feel too bad about it (which is good bcus the DM got too busy with his own life so uhhh i guess we'll never play again!)

Ishana Aavrih

- My sweet tiefling paladin girl ♡ the joke i had is that she's literally just a nun with a sword. She's a tall and strong looking blue tiefling woman with fiery red hair. A devout follower of Fantasy Jesus (Ilmater) and her core beliefs were that anyone can be redeemed, anyone deserves a second chance, and that her duty was to protect other's from harm.

- i wanted her to be a pacifist but uhm since that campaign was heavy on the combat she did indeed kill many people. IN HER DEFENSE i did make her ask before the killing blows if they were willing to give up their life of Evil Deeds. No one ever did lmao

- her backstory never came up but: in this setting tieflings are loathed as an "inherently evil" race so Ishana grew up in a convent of a group of tieflings which main ideology was to "repent for the sins of their race". She was an orphan there so she was raised on these beliefs which marked her ideology forever. We love catholic guilt.

And to make it more tragic, she had a best friend growing up with her too in that convent and she loved her a lot, but her friend was more rebellious and mischievous (not bcus she was evil but bcus teens are just like that!). Anyway her friend gets killed to make an example out of her after a Nebulous Incident (aka i never worked out the details here ahdjjdjd) and Ishana is left heartbroken. It does lead her to escape and later on find comfort in the teachings of Ilmater because of the ideology of "everyone deserves a second chance" (since her friend deserved a second chance!)

- anyway in the campaign we had to stop cultists from bringing the apocalypse and one of the head Priestesses named Vannifer wanted help in stopping the apocalypse (because she was basically a slave to the Evil God trying to bring the apocalypse and she wanted to be free).

Vannifer was also a tiefling with a tragic backstory so when Ishana heard her tale and plea she immediately decided she wanted to help her no matter what! It became her life duty to try and free Vannifer from her chains so that she may be happy.

The rest of my party was pretty murder happy so even they wanted to kill Vannifer on several occasions so it became a running joke that only Ishana saw Vannifer as an ally (and she was!!! Like literally she's a NPC meant to help u!!! Why would u kill her!!!!)

Alongside this, in one of the cursed temples my party freed a group of Kenkus (bird people) and one of them was a small orphan crow boy and he immediately got attached to Ishana (and i became attached as well!!!!!!!!!!!) So Ishana adopted him as her son. His name was Purulento (pretty sad name in spanish bcus it's something akin to "infected wound"). Anyway i love him so much and he's my little son boy. My little baby. My sweet little boy. He became a cleric mostly so we could deploy him if any of our players missed a session so Purulento could fill that space in combat.

At the end of the campaign, Ishana realized she wanted to give up the sword and go live with her son and Vannifer in a cabin in the woods. So yeah she basically got her happy lesbian ending and sobs im so happy. BCUS PURULENTO HAS 2 MOMS AND GETS TO GROW UP IN THE HAPPY HOME HIS 2 MOMS DIDN'T GET TO HAVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! SOBS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I love her so goddamn much.

- Also her name is a valid homestuck troll name fun fact.

Eshuu Teevan

Ohhhh boy oh boy oh sweet jelly goddamn crackers HOW TO START WITH ESHUU MY DEEPLY BELOVED!!!!!! He lives rent free in my head even if i have played with him like maximum 7 sessions. Gonna try to TL;DR him bcus if not we will be here all DAY and maybe it's better if i show u the 40 powerpoint presentation i have on him later

- he's a satyr warlock! His patron is Caiphon, an old god and distant star. Akin to a lovecraft horror. Eshuu has a HORRIBLY debilitating Ego so when this elder god came to him in a dream and promised him the secrets of godhood it was all over.

- he's a scholar that loves nature, but most of all fungi! He's fascinated by the idea of Rot As An Extension of Life. In a better timeline he's some sort of druid ♡ we're not in that timeline ♡

- to understand what's wrong with him u gotta know that he lives in a world where Gods walk among them and each year the world celebrates "A Harvest" which is kinda like uhhh the hunger games but the prize is that the winners get to Ascend To The Heavens.

Eshuu being part of the Fey knows that the gods are capricious and not to be venerated. But his best friend Jakobi (an elf) is a devout believer who's purpose in life is to win the Harvest and ascend (as his people have trained him for). Knowing that his most likely fate is death, Eshuu tries to discourage Jakobi from making this his Life Goal but they fight and break up their friendship and something inside Eshuu snaps that makes him want to take over the gods and destroy them ♡ because he could do so much better ♡

- anyway Eshuu is my babygirl and i love him so goddamn much. His favorite spell is acid splash. He thinks he's owed everything. He's obsessed with one (1) guy that didn't let him have the last word. I could fix him but whatever is wrong with him is funnier ♡ He's doomed to go mad with eldritch knowledge and I'm crossing my fingers Jakobi is the one to kill him ♡

Cyril Nightclaw

- my most recent character! I love him lots! He's inside a horror campaign with vampires!!! Aaah!!!

- he's a dark elf (i forgot the term but they're the ones with Advanced Darkness) and he's sensitive to sunlight. He's a cleric of the grave! He dresses like a plague doctor!! He's a devout follower of Anubis!!! He's literally part of a pyramid scheme!!! This adventure is one of the first times he's been allowed outside of the temples!!!!! He's a hoot i love him.

- i say he's a hoot but mostly because i think he's incredibly endearing. He's stoic, genuine, and blunt. Party says he has autistic swag and i am inclined to agree. Perhaps even make canon.

- his one goal is to Maintain the Balance between life and death, which means that any time he sees an Undead Creature he wants and needs to destroy them on sight. This is made much more difficult because we have a sorcerer in our party that likes necromancy and he likes to bring walking cadavers around a lot. Such is life.

- in the campaign we are tasked with protecting this one lady named Irina bcus the Dracula controlling the region has targeted her as his Bride To Be. Cyril, being so new to the outside world, fell in love with Irina because she's the first pretty lady he's ever seen in his life. So you can see how this further motivates him to destroy The Goddamn Dracula Final Boss That Keeps Showing Up And Trying To Kill Us.

- he has a prosthetic leg because his parents tried to use him as a human sacrifice as a baby but the ritual failed (it did take his leg though). He was left abandoned in the steps of a temple of Anubis during a storm and he drowned. But Anubis revived him so that he may serve him. We love a guy that died once but got better ♡

So that's all!! Will share my powerpoints later!!! u need to see my arts for all of them too!!!!! They all have playlists too bcus i love em.

[normal-thoughts-official]

Umm what are your thoughts on Magnus thinking Raphael doesn't need him anymore

Y̴̖̳̏͐̓͝͝͝O̴͉͔̪͙͎͌̋̊̽̚Ü̴̦ ̵̡̧͍̙͎̤̓͜F̵̺̹̼̫̳̻̖̓̈́̎Ơ̵͈̟̘̼̲O̴̤̻̭̻̟̺̖͗̆͌͒͆͊͂L̴̨͚̝̟̙̥͆̏. you absolute idiot. my thoughts on magnus thinking raphael doesn't need him anymore??????????????? C̶̨̛̖̘̜̟̪̱͗̈́̓̑̋͛́̽͛̃̑̈́Ą̵̢̣͕̥͚̩͔̗̤͙̺͝ͅN̷̢̜͇̪͖̫͓̦̟̰͎͈̫͔̹͌̓̏̐̔̊̽͝ͅ'̵̩͇͐̅͌͋̕T̵̡̡̼̰̼̯͇̝̗̼̫̝̺̝͖͑̀̒͛̈͘͜ͅ ̷̧̘̬͕̯̘͇̹̳͔̑̓͜Y̷̨̥̙̻̣̯̦̓̏̏̂̒͐̕Ơ̸̭͔̤̤̮̙͇͙͇͙̩͐̌̂̈́̐̇̌̌̕̚͝U̴̢̡͙͕̖̥̗̔̿̒̓̉̓͌ͅ ̶̺͚̯͙̘̦̻͚͒͒̍͗̌̚͜͠S̶̢͆̉́̋̈́́Ȩ̵̪͚̹͉͉͉̼̱͖̏ͅĘ̶̛̞̣͚̲̳̻̪̤̲͎̳̠̻̎̊̽̀̉̑͝ ̴̧̛̫͖͍̺͙͓͈̹͕͛͊͊̓͋̄͑͗̉͆͠͝T̵̡͍̱͍̙͈̞͍̪̭͌̄͂̎͑͂Ḩ̴̧̫̪͖̫̞̞̀̔̾̿̃͗̋͐̌͊̀̕̚È̴̢̨͓̞̠̲̱̠͉̾̀ ̴̢͇͈̣͙̝̭͔̰͔̫̦̈́̀͘Ṁ̶̡͓̖̭̩̱̗̗̘̯̖̹͖̳̭̙̺͋͐̈Ḭ̷̢̧̢͔̙̪̣̞̣͙̘̑͌̈́̐̾̅̆́̆̑̃͋͒͒̎͠Ş̵̱̘̰͓̫̦̺͚̙̹͚̗͎̭̠͆̀̏͐͋͗̈́T̷̢̡̡̛̪̝̟̻̠̼̦̦̰̦̗͓̣͌̌̐̋͊̐̔͛̕Ą̵͔͉̜̪̦͓̗̤͇͖̘͓̱̰̜̈͒̍̊͂ͅK̵̛͈̜̱͉̜̖͈̈́́̒̀̐͒́̂̔͆̾̏̂͂̕̕E̸̡͓̣̪̮͉̮̻̹̰̒́̾̋ ̴̡̮̝̝͇̫̮̭̞̦̘̙̥̥̗͒̿͝ͅY̷̡̨͙̝̰̗̗̫͛́̕͜͠͝Ō̵̬Ų̶̡̖̗͙̞̲̺͖̣͉̜̿́͒͆́̏̚͠ͅ'̵̮̭̗̙̘̰͍̥̣̪̩̖̦͂̀̋̆̓̉́̅͜R̸̼̤͙̞͚̼̤͆͛͌̄̈́̑͘Ê̸̡̢̩̳̤͙̳̘̲̞̦̳̻̩̔̐̄͐̑̒̿̒̽̈́̌͒̏̚ ̷̛̮̂̈̽̄̇̆̍̄͂̋̒͛͝͝͝M̶̧̢̛͙̮̣͎̮͍̝̪͔͎̘͔̐̊͐̄̃́̄̄͋̆̕͜͝A̵̧̮̙͖͓̭̯̘̪̿͊̌̉̆̄̈́̾̅́͆͋́̾̓͝K̸̘̩̯̼̣͍̠̝͈̤̮̝̻̬̿̈́Ǐ̶͖̹͈̫͙̀͛̀̆͆͊̿͘̕͝Ṋ̸̨͑̏̀̀́̂͗͌̽̈��̨̰͖̳̝͉G̸̢̰̟̜͎̪̬̞̲͔̘͍̋̆. not only is this one of my favorite angsts ever, nay! you just posted self promo bait!!! i have a whole ass fic about it (link). and you know what the worst part is???? im gonna make a huge ass answer to your question anyway!!!! do you understand how naive you were now??? do you have any idea what you have unleashed?????

ok ok ok ok ok ok ok ok. so i think the saddest part about this is magnus' assumption that like... if he isn't useful, he isn't desirable. which we know is 100% how magnus rolls (therapy-needing icon) and would particularly ring true in raphael's case because like... magnus took raphael in when raphael was at his lowest. their relationship was started off by the fact that raphael needed him. and that makes it even harder for magnus to shake that feeling off

like, don't misquote me, it's not raphael's fault and that is not how he sees magnus at all. and i don't think magnus singlehandedly saved raphael or whatever; raphael had to build his own network of ppl and resources to get over his addiction and get back on his feet and build himself back together, as anyone does. no one can carry a burden as big as singlehandedly taking care of any one person, nevermind one in the state rapha was in. but the fact remains: raphael and magnus met when raphael was at his lowest, and they built their relationship because magnus helped him

and magnus knows raphael's got this whole repentance thing going on, he knows that raphael feels like a monster and a burden and like his debt to magnus is unmeasurable. and that makes him second-guess everything about their relationship, imo, because like... raphael probably feels like he has to keep magnus company, he has to do as he says or whatever, because he has a debt

and to some extent it's nice that magnus is like... aware of that imbalance, which is inherent to that situation, but then i think it becomes pretty much... being convinced that raphael doesn't like him and only puts up with him because he has to since he owes magnus

and when magnus "adopted" rapha, magnus was at a particular fragile point. i'm pretty sure rapha was the first person magnus ever let into his life, fully, enough to really know him and his insecurities and his true self, after camille. his other friends - catarina, dot, ragnor, elias - all knew him from before. and we know how after camille magnus locked his heart; yes, he was referring to romantic relationships, but when you are constantly afraid of falling in love with someone in case they will abuse you, you can't fully build platonic relationships either, because there is that wall that is there, a certain level of intimacy that you won't allow yourself

and with that i don't mean that romantic relationships are inherently more intimate or deeper than platonic ones! i mean that to build any sort of intimate relationship, romantic or platonic, you need to be able to allow yourself to be vulnerable, and magnus was obviously not allowing himself that, because he was scared of being vulnerable after it was used so viciously against him the last time he opened up his heart

but magnus is still too caring of a person to leave someone in a state as bad as raphael's - no sire, battling addiction, alone in the streets, probably no knowledge of the shadow world (this is probably where i should add my mandatory disclaimer that i'm not following book canon and i don't care how it went there, i'm talking about the show), no clan, no family, basically no one - alone, so of course he's gonna bring him in for a night and feed him and try to find a way to help him

but then you add to that two facts: 1- magnus is hopelessly affection and touch-starved and desperately needs company; 2- there is not many places raphael can actually go to

so of course magnus lets raphael stay. and it's for his own sake as much as it is for his, because again, magnus is starved, and he is at a point of his recovery where he needs to let people in, even if it's slowly and in a relatively safe situation - like, what can raphael do to hurt him? okay, there's a few things, but still. it's just easier to let yourself be vulnerable when the person you're allowing to see it is someone you've seen equally as or even more vulnerable. especially if they have no connections to people you know, as it is in rapha's case

PLUS, he empathises. i've said it before and i'll say it again, raphael and magnus have so much in common. from background (immigrants, brown, downworlders, one is bi the other is ace which are two groups known for their ties and solidarity with each other, trans if you go by my headcanons which i will because this is my blog and i do what i want) to coping mechanisms (both clearly deal with their problems on their own and try to avoid letting other people help them as much as they can, even if in very different ways - magnus creates a persona so he can be surrounded by people and not let them in too close whereas raphael doesn't let them get close from the get-go), to some of their personal psychological issues (this unbearable responsibility they carry on their shoulders, like everything and everyone is dependant on them and it is on them personally to help everyone they find: see raphael and how involved he got with simon and the way he talked about the other vampires/the clan even before he became clan leader, and magnus and Literally Everyone That Came Into His Path; the feelings of monstrosity they both feel due to their downworlder status and their past; the guilt; the self sacrificial/giving til it hurts tendencies; etc), to a few personality traits (similar sense of humor, both natural leaders, both pretty bold in their own ways; they also have many differences in personality but they are quite compatible/similar in other ways as well).... i could go on. i'm not saying they are Literally The Same Character (that'd be bad writing anyway, and there are notable differences such as raphael being way more recluse than magnus, their different moral codes, etc.) but there is a lot in common, which results in a nice dynamic in which:

they have fun with each other (think "because you're totally unbiased"; that was clearly a tease, neither of them were really upset by it, raphael looked at magnus expectantly like he expected magnus to laugh and magnus just glared at him in a clearly playful way)

they care for each other deeply (think every interaction we got between them or that included them talking about each other to a third person lmao i think this one is undeniable)

they trust each other incredibly (think raphael being tortured and going to magnus before he went to his own clan, then staying at his house, he obviously feels comfortable and safe there more than anywhere else including his own supposed home; and i wish we had gotten to see more of raphael taking care of magnus as well but of course the writers always forgot magnus had friends and family beyond shadowhunters lmao, but still, i think it's undeniable that the trust goes both ways because of the sheer difference in the way magnus treated raphael as opposed to other people who came for his help, including downworlders like simon)

they are openly affectionate with each other in a way they aren't with most people (think them hugging or the way magnus casually touched raphael's face like it was perfectly normal. that is like, the only s3 raphael scene i claim lmao)

hmmm where was i going with this. man i should really get checked for ADHD or whatever

RIGHT they built a nice relationship. which magnus craved!!! he really really needed someone he could be affectionate with, someone he could trust, someone he had fun with! and again, it's not that he didn't have that, but it was the first time he was building a relationship like this again from scratch after camille. plus, i'm sure camille pushed him away from his friends because that's what abusers do, and i'm sure magnus also pushed them away to some extent because again, being vulnerable was hard. but with raphael there was no escaping it. like, he was living at magnus' house

and he needed that! and i think raphael and their relationship had such an important catalyst role in magnus' recovery from camille. not that raphael saved him - again, that's not even possible - but the way their relationship was constructed was essential for magnus to start opening up again. without it i really doubt it would have been possible for him to open up to alec, and i think their relationship and history is extremely overlooked and underrated by the fandom

but like... the fact that he was in such a vulnerable emotional state to begin with, plus the fact that their relationship was kickstarted by the fact that raphael needed him, will obviously lead to him thinking that raphael only puts up with him or whatever because he needs him/feels indebted (because magnus knows at this point that raphael is not the kind to use people, but he also knows that raphael already acts like his mere presence in the world is something he has to make up for it's the catholicism so of course he's gonna feel like he needs to make up for magnus for such a huge gesture. anyone who's not an asshole would, but like, particularly raphael). cue magnus like, probably feeling guilty for getting so attached to raphael because he's an idiot

and like of course raphael feels indebted and grateful but he also does genuinely in fact like magnus (for all the reasons listed above) and also like, he did in fact also need more connections, he had just lost all of his previous ones. but most importantly he does care for magnus and loves him immensely even beyond all that magnus did for him. and he does see magnus as a person and knows about his struggles and vulnerabilities because it's impossible not to when you live/have lived together, and he just... cares and empathises

but also raphael obviously thinks he's a burden to magnus because duh, and i don't think magnus ever really told raphael how much taking raphael in helped him, how much it meant to him and his recovery, how he was doing it for himself as much as he was doing it for rapha, because 1- he's scared of being so open and vulnerable; 2- he's scared of making raphael feel even more guilty; 3- he's stupid and i think part of him assumed it went without saying

like he was always so openly affectionate with raphael (maybe even too much in his eyes, maybe he was scared of being too attached, putting too much on his shoulders, it's not this traumatized kid's job to deal with his issues for fuck's sake) and magnus has always worn his heart in his sleeve and he feels everything so deeply i think he sometimes forgets that it's not actually plain for everyone to see and feel. particularly not non-warlocks, since it's kinda implied that warlocks have some level of sensitivity to each other going on. plus raphael is autistic af so he can't tell what magnus is feeling if magnus doesn't fucking say it, and he has a terminally low self esteem that i assume would be even lower by that point (due to, you know... the general shitshow state his life was in), so of course he doesn't assume he's as important to magnus as magnus is to him, particularly not when he is literally burdening him (in raphael's eyes). so he thinks it's obvious but it's Really Not

so we have like a lot of misunderstanding angst with both of them wanting to get closer but thinking they are imposing on the other and pulling away, and both of them taking the other pulling away as a sign that they aren't comfortable and aaaa

so like i think that rapha would mention moving out so he can get out of magnus' hair, and magnus is all crestfallen because he's so not ready to be alone at home again, but he can't be selfish and hold the kid back just because he has shit he needs to deal with, right? it's not fair

and then like lowkey spiralling afraid that after that he's going to be alone again and raphael won't want to see him anymore, or worse, that he'll force himself to out of pity or guilt, and magnus will just be a chore to him

and raphael feeling like magnus wants to get rid of him and will want him out of his hair and aaaaaaaaaaa

and magnus of course is all put together and excited about it, "yes, my boy, don't worry, i'll help you move" and playfully tilting his head and being all excited and getting into chop-chop mode because as long as he can make himself useful he can avoid thinking about how he's gonna be alone again. and rapha of course taking this as magnus being eager for him to leave

and just doijasiodjasoij they're IDIOTS. i think this would be more or less resolved by raphael because at the very least he has to thank magnus for everything he's done and tell magnus that he means so much to him, that he'll always be thankful. and magnus again is all put together, all "it was nothing, my boy" but rapha pulls him into a hug and suddenly they are Not Letting Each Other Go. like it's tight and maybe they're both shaking a little because Badly Repressed Emotions and they're just. so unwilling to let each other go for what they feel like will be forever because they are sad and dramatic. and raphael even wonders for a second if he's like, super strengthing magnus into the hug by accident, but even when he tries to let go magnus doesn't even notice and is still hugging him tight, so he's like. okay. guess i can stay for a little longer then. and keeps hugging him

and lol i have half a mind to be like "and then raphael ends up staying because neither of them actually wants raphael to leave so what's the point" and actually i think i might be going this route for this particular hc. but of course eventually raphael does leave because you know... kids grow up and all daihdsaioj and i think that they still have some things to resolve, particularly from magnus' side? i think raphael is more in touch with him than the other way around, even if mostly we've seen him coming to magnus for help, but like... that trust is there, you know, and we didn't see a lot of the opposite

i know s3 raphael was fake anyway but like i imagine him finding out that magnus lost his magic and he had no idea or that he lost his home and being like "why didn't you ask for my help?? our help??" because you know all his other friends would have wanted to help him out too, and magnus is just. he doesn't want to be a burden. he feels like if he is, he's going to lose anyone. he needs to be there for them

and it's so much bullshit of course and raphael is pissed - not at magnus, he couldn't be mad at him, but just pissed in general. and he draws magnus in for a hug and tells him that he can always come to raphael, whenever he needs, and raphael will drop everything to help him. the clan is doing okay (especially post-valentine and impending doom and all, you know, they can take care of themselves lmao. like look of course raphael is a very involved leader but you get what i mean, they won't die if he goes help magnus with something) and he has second-in-commands he trusts anyway. and he doesn't want magnus to hide his problems for him and not come for his help and aaa

just.... rapha being like "you think i wouldn't do anything i could for you? anything to make sure you're alright?" and magnus being like "you don't have to" and raphael going, "you didn't have to do it for me either. but you did" "you don't owe me anything" "i do, but this is not about that. magnus, you're my family" and magnus tearing up because it is so immense to him to be someone's family, something he almost can't grasp

and magnus slowly learning that no, raphael doesn't need him, but that's not important because he wants magnus in his life anyway. and they can always rely on each other, no matter what, even if they aren't dependant on each other - and that is a good thing :)

[mlmdarkfiction]

maybe this is too specific lol but could i have hc's for yandere yoosung & jumin being just a little too happy when their crush (who's a trans dude) asks them on tips for being more masculine or just for passing as a guy overall? like they're a little bit happy over the control that gives them & the opportunity to get closer to them? anyways hope you have a great day, love your blog

I JUST REALIZED THIS SAYS HCS AND I WROTE TWO WHOLE ASS FICS UHHH-

I hope this is okay...if you want headcanons let me know! I also didn’t make them very yandere aside from yoosung (but thats kinda canon) because my brain said full comfort. Apparently despite writing all the time I have NO reading comprehension. I cannot read. 

Anyway! I really loved this request actually! and I might try my hand at writing one for all of the RFA and attatch it to this one in separate chapters.  I may even attempt at writing a version with nonbinary specfic, and trans woman specfic reader if there’s interest because lets be real we need more trans reader content for EVERYONE

OBVIOUS CONTENT WARNING FOR DYSPHORIA MENTIONS Read on AO3:

Read Below:

Yoosung:

____: Hey Yoosung?

It’s only a text.

A simple text.

It’s not like you two haven’t texted privately without the gaze of the other RFA members, before.

But all those other instances...It was mostly him who initiated it.

You’re texting him!

You’re really texting him!

And he didn’t even text you first!

He couldn’t be more thrilled if he tried.

Unfortunately for his grades, Yoosung’s homework has been completely ignored, and in his rush to respond back he’s almost completely dropped his phone on his face.

Yoosung: YES Yoosung: Sorry! OMG I didn’t mean to use all caps!!!

He doesn’t have the excuse of caps lock, after all he’s using a phone, not a computer.

Thankfully for him, you find him and his eagerness cute.

It takes a while before he gets another text from you.

He spends the minutes waiting, and watching the three little bubbles on his phone that indicate you’re typing.

There’s no way for the blonde to know it yet, but it’s taking you so long to respond back because you’re

It wasn’t long into your time with the RFA that you told them you were trans. There was just something about the way they assumed you were a woman right away that had made you uncomfortable, so not only did you tell them you were a man, but you told them why exactly that had bothered you.

And to your surprise, everyone had taken it relatively well!

But it doesn’t mean you’re any less anxious. You doubt you’ll ever get over being anxious when it comes to these things.

Finally though you’re able to steel your resolve, and send the text.

____: Do you think there’s anything I could do to pass better?

It takes Yoosung an embarrassing time to realize what you mean. He’s still not the most informed about trans issues, despite trying to learn more so that he can (one day) be a better partner to you.

He wants to be someone you can rely on!

____: Passing.

More texts, because he took way too long to reply.

____: Or like…

____: I just want to look more masculine, you know? Like you

You think he looks masculine?

Yes!

Fuck yes!

But…

Here comes the problem.

Yoosung has never really thought about how he looks, not in the sense of masculinity.

In fact he only really thinks about how he looks when Zen or someone else brings it up.

He kind of just...wears the one hoodie, and aside from a couple of incidents when he was younger no one’s ever really mistaken him for a girl before.

So he just responds the best way he knows how, even if it’s kind of cheesy.

Yoosung: I don’t know how to help with that.

And...For good measure he sends his regular starry eyed emoji before continuing his text, unaware his pause caused you more anxiety.

Yoosung: You’re already more masculine than me!

It’s an honest answer.

If anyone else had said it you wouldn’t have believed them, you would have chalked it up to them just wanting to humor you, but coming from someone like Yoosung you were inclined to believe him.

Jumin:

You’re happy.

Happier now then you had been in a while.

Perhaps for the first time ever truly in your life.

It didn’t mean you still didn’t have troubles, or anxieties.

Like now.

Even as you’re holding onto Jumin’s arm you can’t help but feel a little...self conscious at his side.

It’s nothing he or his business partners have done, that’s just how it is sometimes, especially when dysphoria is involved.

There’s nothing to cause it.

Sometimes it’s just sudden.

Something about being in the room with a bunch of rich and powerful men, although as Jumin’s husband you too are technically a rich and powerful man, makes you feel bad about yourself.

You manage to find a moment in between the conversation to quietly interject,

“Excuse me, Gentlemen, I’m going to go to the restroom.”

There’s nothing off putting about the statement. The meeting had been going on for about an hour now, it was only natural someone at the meeting would need to excuse themselves.

No one thinks anything of it.

No one but Jumin.

And since you’re leaving you don’t notice you’re being watched. You don’t see the way Jumin’s dark eyes follow your form as you leave.

Having anxiety meant that running away to hide in bathrooms, or any other private space you could find, wasn’t exactly uncommon.

It’s nothing new.

You avoid the sight of the mirrors, your own reflection, like the plague as you make your way to a stall, quickly closing it and taking a deep breath.

A moment of peace, a moment to regain your thoughts. That’s all you needed.

Although you know it’s unlikely anyone in the meeting had bad thoughts about you, and even less likely they’d voice them around Jumin, it didn’t help the deep seeded paranoia. That somehow everyone knew you were trans, and that because of them knowing they viewed you as less than them.

And Jumin could only do so much to protect you. He hadn’t asked you to even come along on this trip, you’d been the one to offer, wanting to stop hiding in the shadows but…

People talk.

Tabloids talk.

The more you find yourself stuck alone in the stall trying to force yourself to calm down the more worked up you become.

When someone finally knocks on the stall you almost jump out of your skin entirely.

“Uh-” You clear your throat, and try to make your voice sound deeper in your anxiety. “Occupied?”

A familiar sigh sounds from behind the door, and instantly your shoulders droop with lessened anxiety.

“____?”

“...Yeah.”

As soon as you’ve opened the stall door you’re pulled tightly into a hug.

Jumin doesn’t necessarily understand exactly what you’re going through, you both know it. You’ve tried to explain dysphoria to him before, and although he understands the basics that’s all really...and to be fair it’s not as if a cis person ever could truly understand what gender dysphoria is like…

But that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to do everything in his power to make you feel better.

And at least, no matter how you saw yourself, you knew Jumin saw you as his husband.

[stvlti]

2020 Creator Wrap

I was tagged by @irolltwenties to do the 2020 Creator Wrap: Favorite Works tag! Thank you, lovely (*˘ ε ˘*)

Rules: it’s time to love yourselves! choose your 5 (or so) favorite works you created in the past year (fics, art, edits, etc.) and link them below to reflect on the amazing things you brought to the world in 2020. tag as many writers/artists/etc. as you want (fan or original) so we can spread the love and link each other to awesome works!

Before I begin, let me just tag some friends:

@reaperlight @3dnygma @drowthelynes @transdankovsky @fantomn @lawliyeeeet @dressed-to-keehl @setfa @0akdown @reidsnor @clubolive @mermaides

No pressure, but it would be fun if you guys share some of your works this year ( ˘︶˘ ) let’s see those fics and edits and artworks!! Get the clicks and views y’all deserve 💕 💕

And now, onwards to my 2020 Favorite Works List!

I didn’t write nearly as much as some of you guys did. And though I did exceed my goal of putting out 1 fic per month, I don’t have 5 solid ones I’m proud of. So I’ll just list 4 fics here:

01 // Growing Pains

I’ve always been very nervous about reccing this one, because it broaches a topic that I don’t really have a right to claim? I’m not transgender myself, but I simply adore the trans Dick Grayson headcanon so much it singlehandedly brought me back to the DC fandom and restarted my fanfic-writing habit for 2020 😂😂 plus the writing quality isn’t half bad, and I still really like the idea/metaphor this little story started with and grew from. 

Fave moment (besides the obvious):

"Ka-Pow!!" The boy ventriloquised. Lego Robin sailed through the air in his fingers. One stubby, outstretched leg made contact with a Lego henchman, knocking all the surrounding baddies over like bowling pins. "Sorry Mr. Bad Guys, guess it's way past your bedtime too!"

"Good job, Robin." The boy lowered his prepubescent voice and tried to affect Batman's gravelly timbre as much as possible. In his other hand, he walked Lego Batman across the floor of the crime scene. "How about we round them up and leave it for the Commish? It's getting quite late."

"Oh oh! Can I have cookies on the ride back?"

The boy swivelled Lego Batman's grinning face around. "I don't see why not."

Another night out in Lego Gotham City, another day saved by the Dynamic Duo. This called for a celebration indeed. The boy set the pair of heroes down by the Lego Batmobile and reached over to his own plate of Alfred's after-school chocolate chip cookies. He took his sweet time with the last piece, savouring each bite, sighing at the way it melted on his tongue.

02 // Transference 

This is my best-performing fic in terms of the kudos to hits ratio, so I feel validated in being proud of this one :’) It’s a pretty good marker of the distances I’ve covered since getting serious about reading the comic source material end of 2019, as you can see from the much broader and varied cast of characters I focused on for this story. It also definitely cemented - to me, at least - the fact that I can write action scenes. When I went into “Second Chances” (a fem Jay fic) earlier this year, I was so nervous about writing the action sequence there, because I’ve never written a serious action scene up until that point! To me, this fic definitely showcases the growth I’ve experienced as a writer this year ^_^

Fave moment: (CONTAINS SPOILERS, PLEASE READ THE FIC FIRST IF YOU HAVEN’T!)

When the trio return, Ivy takes her place at the meeting table with a severe expression on her face. She chooses her words carefully, when she speaks. "The odds aren't pretty. We just accepted 100 refugees over the weekend, and the Green is still repairing itself after last week's attack."

Rose exchanges a glance with Jason. He gives her hand a reassuring squeeze, though he's not looking any better than she feels.

"But, each and everyone of us stayed behind to defend the Garden, because we all believed in giving a sanctuary for the civilian survivors out there.

"So bring them here. I'll take them in."

No sooner has Ivy finished the sentence, than Zatanna and Constantine have fired up their teleportation portal, and Harley's cheerful "Good luck!" is lost to the mad dash off to the rescue mission. The rest of the Shadowpact scramble after Rose as she launches herself through the portal—

—and slams into Arsenal, pushing him out of the way seconds before a meteoric explosion of green fire incinerates the very spot he'd been standing in.

03 // Paying It Forward

This one is important to me if only for the reason that it’s the first time I’ve written character dialogues that flowed. And I didn’t even need to plan them out meticulously beforehand! Do you know how rare that is for me as an ESL writer? Dialogues have been the bane of my existence since I started writing as a wee teen. Luckily, the Titans TV show has some solid character dynamics for me to fall back on. And from there I started reading NTT era Dick & Donna, and I just fell in love with their friendship. And now, I can turn to this fic as proof I still got it whenever I doubt my abilities as a writer c:

Fave moment:

Dick glanced at her, eyebrows raised. "She ran out on you?"

"No, no, we never really... I don't think it counts as running away if it never led to anything more."

"But you wanted it to be more." Dick paused, taking in Donna's silence, which would've fooled anyone else but him. "You still want it."

"I-- yeah." Donna sighed and held her hands up as if to say you caught me. "I'm... Sorry? For stealing your girl?"

Dick laughed, bemused. "She was never mine. She knew what she wanted, what she needed - and I wasn't in the right place to give her that."

"And you? You think I'm what she needs?"

"Better you than me. You're Donna Troy. Older, smarter, prettier..."

Donna gave him a deadpan stare.

"... And you know who you want to be. She likes that in a partner. I'm still figuring that one out for myself." Dick stretched his arms up and then leaned back into his seat, lacing his fingers behind his head as he stared up into the ceiling.

04 // When I'm down on my knees, you're how I pray

I’m including this one just to showcase I got the range, babey. And honestly, the fact that I was able to write this fic and actually receive positive reviews for it was a surprise to me too!! This was the first time I ever attempted to write a real darkfic with dead dove subject matters, and I managed to nail the emotional manipulation, somehow ;__; It was a real learning experience too, learnt so much about Catholicism just to write about Dick’s guilt issues in an AU setting nobody asked for 🤡

Fave moment: (dead dove warnings apply)

"Not at all, Richard," Roman said. The boy would come to him, eventually. "Now, it's getting late. If that's all, I'll have Jason fetch your room keys. Seven Hail Mary's before bed, and think about everything we've just discussed. Tomorrow we'll do a proper debriefing."

"I... Okay." For a moment, Dick sounded like he had more to say. Instead, Roman heard a muffled sniffle, one that Dick likely tried to disguise with a hand over his mouth. Silly boy.

"Thank you again, Father," Dick said, after a beat.

"All in a day's work, my child." Roman unlatched the door and stepped out of the booth. He nodded at Dick as the younger man ambled out of the booth after him. "Goodnight now, Richard."

As he set off for the living quarters, Dick called out. "Wait!"

Roman turned around, inclining his head.

"Will you stay?" The candlelight chased shadows away from Dick's face, and for one glorious moment, Roman could see the depth of the desperation shining in Dick's blue eyes.

"Guide me through my prayers. Please."

Roman smiled.

-

Oh did you think I was done? 😂 It did say Favourite Works and not just Favourite Fics, so I gotta include this one on the list too:

05 // 2020 Jason Todd Birthday edit

I said Robin Jason deserves better and I meant it! 👏👏 This edit took me 12 hours and 67 layers ‘cause I made a mistake on like my 8th hour into the editing process o__o but it ended up being my most popular serious graphic edit, so it was worth it. I guess! 

I mean the likes to reblog ratio is still fucked but hey, I broke 1k, which is more than I can say for any of my other edits

[lexicals]

Jfc I am BUZZING what a fucking episode. The first part of this is mostly screaming tbh

I love happy juno but also grumpy juno is my favourite welcome back

I love how firm peter is with him in stopping him from spiralling? It's good

Rita coming into her own!! Learning lessons!! Growing up!! Yes!!!

SO MUCH INFO THOUGH. Dark matters wants the crime family and they want them alive and they don't know anything about two of them but!! Which two!!

You'd presume nureyev is one but..... who knows ahh

This is gonna be mostly screaming I have no time for coherent thought rn

Juno being protective over rita godd

Juno comforting rita while she's panicking ;;

OH HEY FUCK THE NAME? I MEAN LIKE IT WAS ALWAYS A POSSIBILITY BUT RITAAAA

Me thinking no surely he wouldn't have just abandoned them and breathing a sigh of relief when he hadn't only for my boy to DO THIS?? ET TU PETER??

PETER

NUREYEV

DESERVES

TO

BE

BULLIED

I'm not serious but my guy had BETTER have a good reason for this. I would hope it's a long con of some kind or SOMETHING but PETER

Anyway if these people know his name idk if this is either 1. Blackmail or 2. Maybe he didn't get away from brahma all by himself after new kinshasa after all. Maybe he had help and it's finally come back to bite him in the ass. Who knows but I'm fucking 👀 PETER.

MISTER WHO

Also. Robot kisses 🥺

ALSO. Juno just. Picking him up and carrying him out of the room fhshdhdgs

MAMA BUDDY SO ANGRY THOUGH. I thought this would be the case but ooof

LESBIAN WEDDING TIME THOUGHHH Buddy and vespa inventing romance once AGAIN

I mean I'm sad they're retiring (although depending on what nureyev is doing here this "last job" could be UHHHHH DERAILED) but!! Yes!! Married!!

Knife girlfriend will finally be..... knife WIFE

Juno sniffling in the corner like ME TOO BITCH THE FUCK. Secretly a sap as usual though mr steel I love you

I can't remember other things I just. So much happened. I'm gonna need to listen again at least a few times here

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Oh FUCK also rita!! "When someone tells you what they want you to call them that's what you call them"!! Penumbra said trans rights once again thank you kabert and also ms jones. Bless

Not a second listen yet but more Thots:

Rly good episode...... and the robot kisses were very cute...... but I had this thought in pt. 1 and again this episode that I'm kinda bummed out that we've kinda just.... skipped over all the relationship development for juno & peter. Like on the one hand it's kind of unavoidable to miss stuff given the series format this time around but on the other it feels like 2 seasons of build up for something that.... just happened offscreen :/ Idk I was hoping for a first kiss back together or Something

On the one hand while it seems like nureyev is being a Snake™ I'm gonna hold back on actually saying he's gonna betray the crew bc he's been so consistently set up as the villain, going back to s1 when juno refused to trust him all the way through to shadows of the ship, and he's never actually proven himself untrustworthy a single time through that? Like, murderous mask has been the only time he's actually fucked anyone over for his own gain, and he went back on that one pretty quick

Plus the fact that he's only claiming to deliver the four items they need, not the curemother itself - it could be that he's planning to wait until after they've stolen the curemother when they no longer have a use for them, or at least I'd like to think so peter I'm fucking Watching You

Another thought: you know how else you might describe a debt? Something you owe to someone because, maybe, they have something of yours? A fucking ransommmmm

Also, why! Did! That! Bot! Not! Self! Destruct! Or at least not straight away. It's almost like someone wanted them to get away in the nick of time. There's a part of me that's wondering if the fact that dark matters is under mysterious new management and the fact that nureyev has made himself what seems like a very powerful enemy are linked, but we'll see. Either way I think someone definitely facilitated their escape, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was whoever is holding peter's debt, using the crew as a tool to get their hands on the four items they want and keeping nureyev as a source on their progress

Looking forward.... other people have said this as well, but I don't think nureyev is ever going to be cast as a villain here. At the very worst, he'll do something well-intentioned but kind of stupid, and it's gonna blow up in his face. Like, it's gonna hurt, but I think he'll come out of the other side better for whatever happens. Currently, my thoughts are on whether or not we'll see a repeat of new kinshasa - a high-stakes choice between someone dear to him, and the choice he feels he has to make, whether that's other people's lives again or something else. Idk, maybe not, I'm just thinking about the theming of the series with the past always coming back to haunt them, the fact that he's been said to be at a crossroads back in man in glass, and the part in tools of rust where the ruby gives jet the opportunity to make the same mistake he did fifteen years ago, and he chooses differently. Tbh as usual I'm just excited to see how things play out however that is

ACTUAL second listen this time:

Rita redacted I love you so much x3 combo. I missed this earlier but it needs to be said

Rita says she found nureyev's name by hacking into buddy's notes on him and comparing them to the outer rim criminal records which leads me to ask the question how much does buddy know? Why would rita be checking outer rim records unless something in buddy's notes pointed her in that direction? I've had my suspicions that she knows more than she's saying for a while but 👀

Nureyev sounds so nervous/scared too...... :(

I had this thought on the first listen but didn't write it down: nureyev is so goddamn smart, like so smart, I don't think he gets enough credit for that. Also him saying "one problem at a time, like [buddy] would say" was - oof. Considering how much time he spends referencing mag's advice in man in glass, even if he's bitter about it, I think that reference is very telling on how he thinks about her

Love the way he skirts around saying they have to move sneakily dhsgjf. Also "only twice" I do love him

Juno joking about his track record on not dying.... oh he's come a long way though

The way that nureyev talks to rita throughout them moving around - he's kind of a natural leader (which, ouch), but also it's clear that he has absolute confidence in her, he doesn't ever doubt for a second that she wouldn't be able to do something. It's obviously a little unempathetic when she's so shaken and doubting herself but also he clearly trusts her almost as much as if not as much as juno, and I do love to hear it

Detective falco? 👀

Juno looking on the bright side! Not blaming himself! Saying maybe it's gonna be okay and believing in her! I cry!

Except for when nureyev is in danger though ): I love that this story never shows recovery in a linear way, that juno is still inclined to beat himself up even if he is better than he used to be. He's growing but it's always gonna be a work in progress!

The fact that dark matters seems to be moving entirely towards remote operation now? Like it makes sense tactically, there's no risk of expending agents in a fight, I'm interested if the writers are gonna dig into that considering the real-world state of drone use in the military and law enforcement

Calling their heist marks "radicals", it seems like dark matters is trying to keep track of or maybe capture rogue (or radical) elements out in the universe - things like the knife and the key, which is probably why they were after m'tendere, they themselves being a radical element. I wonder if this is what brought the crew to their attention in the first place; it's definitely why they want to capture them alive at least, they want information out of them on why they're collecting the same marks

They specifically say two radicals though, and potentially a third, depending on whether the book is counted as the third that might mean they don't know about the map at all, maybe

I mentioned this another time but I'm wondering Again if dark matters was behind the mysterious disappearance of all the theia soul chips except for juno's, esp with what rita said about the interface for the bots being like theia tech - experimental tech like that would deffo be considered a radical element and they definitely could have used it as a basis for these new bots

Peter........ he's in a ROBOT stop being HORNY

"Galaxy-class criminals" huh.

Someone else pointed this out elsewhere idr who but buddy's line that sometimes helping people means trusting them to help themselves despite your concerns, when paired with what's going on with nureyev is.... interesting

WOW buddy is mad though

I'm REALLY wondering how much she knows about what's going on tbh, especially seeing as her pov is probably up next. Aaaaa I'm gonna be yelling for the next however many weeksss

Jet sounds so happy about the ruby being fixed aw

Vespa so nervous about making her announcement AW

Buddy sounds so HAPPY AW

Peter starts laughing right at the end when vespa starts threatening juno which,, oh boy ): I rly hope everything turns out okay ;;

Rita saying that sometimes trying to help someone in pain is being selfish because you just don't want to look at the hurt is a really interesting thing to come from her considering her long-standing relationship with juno, huh

“Before the year is out” is a very vague timeframe, once again thinking that nureyev’s plan may well be to only hand the items over once the heist is done

Anyway once again AAAAA

[mychemicalficrecs]

Gerard Works in Comics

A New Design For X and Y by DeadFreddie, Frank/Gerard, 6k, Explicit. Frank Iero is the frontman in a successful band called Leathermouth, and Gerard Way is a comic writer working for DC. When they meet at one of Frank's shows, their mutual respect for the other's work becomes something a lot more personal. Oh and Frank's a trans guy and Gerard's nonbinary because I'm Trans And I Make The Rules.

Mixed Bathing at Home by Bexless, Frank/Gerard, 7k, Teen And Up Audiences. it is a pointless AU where gerard writes comics and frank is in leathermouth, but there is no mcr. gerard gets his toe stuck in a faucet and frank rescues him.

Transatlanticism by tabulaxrasa, Frank/Gerard, 21k, Explicit. Gerard's a comic book writer living in London. Frank works for a record label and has a band in New York. The problem with meeting in the middle is there's a whacking great ocean there.

They Came From Outer Jersey! by thatsfinewithus, Gen, Frank/Gerard, 25k, Rated R. New London Fire is an elite fringe government force assigned the task of protecting the earth from some of its more interesting threats: those from beyond the atmosphere or even the universe. They've handled dangerous cases before, but they've never seen anything like...ZOMBIES FROM SPACE. Vampires, long hunted in lore and legend, are now the earth's only saviors. There is little information as to who sent the creatures until Mikey Way, head of the NLF, finds out more by being abducted. Is it too late for him? Is it too late for the earth? Find out how six vampires, one government general, and one frustrated comic book artist save the earth in...THEY CAME FROM OUTER JERSEY!!

Still Crazy After All These Years by noxeir, Frank/Gerard, 822 words [WIP], Not Rated. Frank doesn’t think it’s crazy. He doesn't know. Maybe he’s crazy. Maybe he’s crazy to still love his English teacher. Former English teacher, he corrects himself. Frank has just resigned himself to the fact that he's hopelessly in love, but with the wrong person when then the local comic shop has a signing with Gerard Way, and Frank can’t not go.

Like sticking a fork in an electrical outlet by aliceboleyn, Frank/Gerard, 6k [WIP], Mature. Gerard is a successful comic writer in desperate search for inspiration and Frank is a dissatisfied 26 year old attempting to express what's inside him. A poem which sounds a lot like a cry for help will tie them together, for, after all, destiny does work in mysterious ways.

Don't Try (Please, please, please try) by semataryeyes, Frank/Gerard, 5k [WIP], Explicit. Gerard is living in New York City working for a company writing comics while nursing a drug habit on the side. He breaks up with his long term boyfriend, Bert, causing him to go to the only person he knows won't refuse him, his brother Mikey. Little does Gerard know that Mikey has a roommate, and he is everything pure in the world bundled up into the enigma that is Frank Iero.

A Pale Galaxy Colliding In Crystal Balls by theloudestgraves, Frank/Gerard, 11k [WIP], Teen And Up Audiences. Frank knew Mikey had an older brother. His name was Gerard, and apparently he was out of art college and working for a comic book company. Frank never expected to meet him, and he guessed he was alright with that. But one day, Mikey said, “I think it’s time you met Gee.”

Get up, get out and be social (Frerard) by Rachel_Carter, Frank/Gerard, 5k, Not Rated. Gerard is working on an art assignment in a coffee shop where he meets Frank, a pre-med student. When Frank gives Gerard his phone number, their relationship develops.

stitched up heart by 10rings, Frank/Gerard, 2k, Mature. Gerard was born unlike most, he doesn't feel entirely normal until he meets the short tattooed cashier at his local grocery store.

It's Raining Men (Hallelujah) by thisishowidisappear, Frank/Gerard, 849 words, General Audiences. Frank is getting sick of being single. Luckily for him, the perfect guy is just around the corner. Or, you know, up a tree

Hold On Tight and Don't Look Back by romanticizingchemicals, Frank/Gerard, 48k, Explicit. The whole concept of "love at first sight" is ridiculous. Absolutely untrue. Blasphemy, Okay, maybe not for Frank and Gerard. Gerard Way is an aspired comic artist, with a desire to do big things. Living with his brother, though, really prohibits him from making much of a change. Frank Iero is a man of many talents; from guitar to singing to working his several jobs, Frank really is a "Jack-of-all-trades". He's just recovered from a very abusive relationship, but hides its effects very well. When the two meet, you have your average love story. But soon enough, that relationship evolves into something more. Hopeless crushes and glimpses of each other turn into something both of them could have never imagined.

Cruise ships and comic books by Leah_Red, Frank/Gerard, 2k, Teen And Up Audiences. Hermit comic book artist Gerard Way decides to finally get away from home and go on a cruise, where he finds that one of the staff has a look that's too amazing to not draw.

Two Dreams Came True that Day and Gerard hadn't even Known about the Second One by wellthisisprettyrisque (collettephinz), Ryan/Brendon, Frank/Gerard, Ray/Mikey, Steve Rogers/Tony Stark, 5k, Teen And Up Audiences. Gerard Way had been one of those types-- One of the few people who had been in complete and utter denial concerning the apparent “death” of Cpt. Steve Rogers, a.k.a. Captain America. Gerard Way had known, without a shadow of a fucking doubt, that Captain America was still (somehow) alive, and then, lo and behold, he was right. Now his brother, Mikey, was dating a robotics engineer that worked in Stark Tower and Mikey had invited Gerard to tag along in an official tour of the building and everything inside and rumor had it that Steve Rogers was actually living in Stark Tower and Gerard was absolutely fucking certain that his dream of meeting Captain America-- alive and in the flesh and not a museum exhibit-- was about to come true. (and let's be real, a celebrity-crush on Steve Rogers has to be the healthiest celebrity crush you could ever have on anyone)

The Hairdressers!AU by messitallup, Frank/Gerard, 11k, Explicit. Gerard really, really didn't need his hair cut okay, it was fine. In his opinion anyway.

Schizophrenia {A Frerard Story} by Shadow_Hunter_8, Frank/Gerard, 14k [WIP], Teen ANd Up Audiences. Gerard Way and Frank Iero have been dating since high school. Their lives seem perfect. Gerard is a comic book artist, while Frank works as a teacher. Their love for each other is so strong, they're sure that nothing can tear down their relationship. Then Gerard gets diagnosed with schizophrenia. Frank, having taken a psychology course in college, is determined to take care of Gerard instead of sending him to an institute. But as Gerard's condition worsens, will Frank be forced to admit that he isn't prepared to care for him?

Trying To Escape The Inevitable by Transboywitcher, Frank/Gerard, 60k [WIP], Mature. Gerard is an absent minded comic artist who looses his daughter in the supermarket. Frank is an over worked check out attendant with too many bands and too little sleep who helps him find her. Somehow idiots fall in love. ~“You know this happens all the time right?” Frank asked, ducking down to check under the produce bins, he’d found a whole group of kids eating a packet of skittles colour by colour under there once, like some kind of weird new age lord of the flies shit. Supermarkets man, you saw fucking everything.~

The one where Frank's a journalist and Gerard's an artist by theghostofvenom, Frank/Gerard, 6k, Teens And Up Audiences. Frank's a journalist and has to interview a Mr. Gerard Way; comic book artist. They fall in love over a cup of coffee.

Like a Fish Out of Water (You Drown in the Air) by art_brutal, 6k, Mature. Gerard's a washed-up comics writer more in thrall to the party circuit than creating art. It's going to take something or someone extraordinary to turn him around.

Half Of Something Else by fleurdeliser, tuesdaysgone, Frank/Grant/Gerard, 58k, Explicit. Frank left New Jersey for LA because of music, and staying was always just a means to an end. He never anticipated that the industry where he'd get his foot in the door would be comics, or that he'd be working as the one and only Grant Morrison's personal assistant. Comic artist Gerard Way is both a reminder of the place he left behind and a chance for something more. Problem is, Frank has started to see Grant as much more than just a boss…

The second one (or: Adventures at JerseyCon) by mwestbelle, Bob/Gerard, 20k, Explicit. Bob is a good personal assistant (the best) and he definitely knows better than to fall in love with his boss. But when your boss is the goth-pop comic master of our time, Gerard Way, there's more to the job than keeping a datebook. There are appearances to shepherd him to, showers to make him take, and deadlines to remind him to meet. And, really, he's so earnest, it's not that surprising that a crush might develop. Just at tiny one.

[one-chicago-fanfiction]

Trans Connor Rhodes

((Full disclosure, I am trans. Thankfully my father is way better than Cornelius Rhodes))

Looking back, you don’t even know how it happened. One day you were quiet, because silence was safety. Only speak when spoken too. Don’t say anything he wouldn’t like. If you didn’t say anything wrong, he couldn’t make you pay for it. Sometimes he punished your silences. You were sullen and rude, weren’t the kind of daughter he’d ever wanted. Girls were supposed to be easy to raise. Girls were supposed to take dance classes and blush around boys and dote on their fathers. Girls were supposed to wear makeup and dresses and have their soft, safe rebellions. Why couldn’t you be more like Claire? You couldn’t even blame it on your mother’s death, he told you. Your sister was still vibrant and loving—why weren’t you? After your mother died, after that terrible night with the roof, with your mother’s body in a pool of blood below—you were alone. You grew up stranded in the shadow of your twin, your father using his money to play at being a king. Sometimes he ignored your existence. Other times he made it hell. 

You were never really meant for a quiet life. 

You were seventeen when it happened, when you stopped being quiet.

Happened. As if it were a single event, and not the culmination of every thought you’d ever had, every moment your heart had spent beating. You had spent years moving through the world knowing who you really were, keeping it buried beneath all the masks your father handed you with his cruelty. Smile more. Wear makeup. Dance at his parties. The doting, dutiful daughter. Beneath the fancy clothes he bought you, beneath the makeup Claire did for you before parties, you weren’t the kind of daughter he’d wanted because you weren’t a daughter at all. 

You were a son. That fact was laced through your blood, electricity that came from your very bones. You knew it every second. You’d never doubted it once. You just didn’t have the words to say it aloud. 

You were so used to the dull ache of your heart, the way you’d never truly been happy—not even when your mother was alive. It was just life, you thought. You looked like a girl, so people treated you like one. It was just the way you were always going to be. Fine, but not happy. A secret boy who’d never get the chance to live the way you were meant to. How were you supposed to find the words to unearth all of that—to show it to the world? How were you supposed to be happy?

Connor. You chose your name on a Saturday night, pale moonlight streaming in through your open curtains. It was late, so late your father was asleep, but not late enough that your sister was back from her night out. She’d asked you to go, and the invitation had sat like a stone in your gut for the rest of the night. It was the first olive branch Claire had extended in a while, and you turned it down. Things had been weird between you lately, and you just couldn’t face a night on the town with her friends. They all thought you were weird anyway. You and Claire weren’t so identical anymore—her with her long hair and short dresses, you with your oversized hoodies, you with your hair cut short. 

You came out slowly, over time, until you came out all at once. 

Years ago, you thought you might tell Claire first. If you ever told anyone, you thought it would be her, but the secret language you shared as children was gone, forgotten in a lost corner of your mind. You couldn’t have conversations just by glancing at each other. You didn’t spend evenings and weekends hiding from your father together. She hid with her friends, on nights out, at slumber parties. Night after night on couches across Chicago while you stayed quiet at home. You hid behind the locked door of your ensuite bathroom, headphones in, medical textbooks on the ground before you. Whatever you and Claire had shared, whatever tether the two of you had been born with—it was gone now. 

In the attic, a few months back, you’d found a dusty notebook filled with your mother’s scrawl. You ‘d studied it as closely as you studied your textbooks, studied it until the passage that cracked your chest right open, that made you realise things didn’t have to be this way. In the passage, your mother was pregnant. Twins, they’d just discovered. According to this account, your parents were terrified but thrilled. You could barely remember your mother. You clung to thoughts of her smile, the memory of her sweet perfume as she leaned down to kiss you goodnight. You didn’t like to think of her terrified, but you could picture it. You’d seen it before. You’d seen her real life terror, moments before her death. But you couldn’t imagine your father being thrilled about anything. And in your mind, even though it was impossible, you knew that Claire was the baby they’d planned and you were the twin. You were the one they’d never expected. 

Your mother had lists of names in the back of her journal, most of them starting with C, and you trawled through the boys names that summer. Cameron, Caleb, Christopher. 

Connor. 

In the end, you told them both at once. As soon as the words were out, you wondered if Claire would ever forgive you for the way you did it. As soon as the words were out, none of that mattered. Coming out wasn’t a closet for you. It was like crawling out of your own grave. 

This is how it happened. 

Your father could be truly vile. It was something about a business deal, something about manipulating a potential investor at a party. Your father bought new dresses for the pair of you, low cut things that came halfway down Claire’s thighs. She pressed yours into your hands, your dress teal and her’s black, telling you how great you’d look together. She’d do your makeup. It would be like old times. You could see in her eyes that she was trying to claw back the person you’d never truly been, the sister who didn’t exist. Your father made a comment about the investor’s sons, barely out of their teens, about how much they would enjoy the sight of a pair of stunning girls. If you’ve got it, your father said, flaunt it. 

“What if I don’t want it?” You asked. “What if I don’t want any of this?”

“Come on,” your father laughed. “I’ve given you everything. What could you possibly want that I haven’t already bought for you?” You steeled yourself, bit your tongue against the first response that hit you. I want my mom back. 

“A suit,” you said, as if you weren’t afraid, as if your hands weren’t shaking at your sides. “If you want me at your parties, I want to wear a suit. And I want you to call me Connor.” A long silence passed. The walls closed in around you. Your father looked from you to Claire, then back again. You caught the silent conversation they’d shared in their look, but you couldn’t decipher any of it. Your palms were wet, your heart pounding, legs on the verge of giving way beneath you. You could barely remember how to breathe. 

“That’s what you want?” Your father said, his voice slick with sarcasm. As if you’d asked for something unattainable. 

“It’s a start,” you said, your voice trembling with the words. But you didn’t break eye contact. You stared your father down until he pulled his gaze away, until he swallowed hard and held Claire’s gaze a moment longer. 

“Very well,” he said, and for one stupid, naive moment your heart actually leapt. You felt it, felt the world get lighter suddenly, your shoulders a little less heavy. Your father met your eye, and brought the world crashing down once more. “Claire, be ready at eight. Connor—get out of my sight. I’ll deal with you, and your delusions, in the morning.”

You can only imagine what would have happened if you’d stuck around, the things your father might have tried to get you to see sense. Conversion therapy, handsomely paid anti-trans therapists. You had no idea. Locking you in your room and denying you access to the things you needed? He would poison Claire’s mind. He was only a person, but he was your father and he could ruin you. He’d been doing it slowly for years. 

So you left. One duffel bag full of thrift store boys clothes, a couple books, some cash procured from your father’s study. It wasn’t fancy, but it got you out of there. Three buses later you showed up on your grandfather’s doorstep in the middle of the night, and that was the end of living with your father. 

Now all this time has passed, and here you are with him again. Your father, the play-pretend-king, pasty and sick and barking orders from hospital beds. He looks at you a little kinder now. You’re a healer. You’re part of the team that saved his life twice over. Your father shouts at everyone in that room who isn’t you, and when they all slope out, he doesn’t tell you to go with them. You see his mask slip a little bit, the sigh of relief that comes when it’s just you and him. The door clicks shut and the room is too quiet. 

“You’re kind of an ass,” you tell him, but your voice is soft. “Do you know that?” Your father’s laugh hacks through the silence, descends into coughing.

“It got me—this far—didn’t it?” He said, but his smile slips away quickly. He isn’t fooling anyone. He isn’t fooling you. You’re sure he can see it in your eyes.

“Listen,” you say, and it’s almost like you’re that frightened seventeen year old again. I want you to call me Connor. “You’re sick. You’re doing okay for now, but we both know how this ends.”

“Are you reminding me—that I’m going to die someday?” Your father asks, this tiny smile on his face, so forced and humourless that he almost looks afraid. Of you. 

“I’m telling you,” you start, “that you know what we have to do here.”

“Do I?” Your father’s voice is barely more than a whisper. You can see it on him, how he wants to look commanding, how desperately he wishes this hospital bed were his throne. You give him a look, an almost-smile. Something sympathetic. You see his hands shaking softly on the bed, and it turns your stomach. You lower yourself into the chair at his bedside.

“We have to talk about this,” you tell him. “About everything.” 

The silence stretched so long between you it felt like miles rather than seconds. “Yeah,” he admits at last. “I suppose you’re right, Connor.”

[eldritchsurveys]

1065.

5k Survey LXXIX

4051. What have you heard about the next Harry Potter book? Will you pre-order it? >> ---

4052. Would you rather go out or stay in? >> I mean, there’s a pandemic raging, so I’d rather stay in by default. In more normal circumstances, my desire to go out is still less frequent than my desire to stay in, unless it’s to a park or something. Like a dog, I’m always up for some park action. 4053. What's your favorite song to hear on halloween? >> I don’t have a favourite song to hear on Halloween. 4054. What song makes you feel all tingly like you want to laugh and scream and cry? >> Definitely Death is the Road to Awe. It makes me feel things I’m not sure are replicable in any normal human experience. 4055. If you were starting a website that was not about you, what Would it be about? >> I wouldn’t start a website.

4056. Do you ever take the long way just for fun? >> I don’t drive, so I doubt this is applicable to me. 4057. '..and god said let there be ____and there I was.' Fill in the blank, as if if you were talking about yourself. >> I can’t think of anything. 4058. What do you think of when you hear the word 'mill'? >> Like, a lumber mill. 4059. What do you think of when you hear the name: weird al? I assume we’re going with specific songs, here? Eat It. bob dylan? That song about the times changin’. That was him, right? michael jackson? Beat It. henry rollins? I don’t have a specific song of his that comes to mind. I did think of this random movie I saw him in once... fuck, what was it called? Ugh, I can’t remember now. billy idol? White Wedding. gary numan? IDK who that is. will smith? Miami. paul mcartney? Nothing. alice cooper? School’s Out. J Lo? I’m Real. 4060. What is one social disater you have had? >> I’m not sure what defines a social disaster. 4061. Can you moonwalk? >> I do know how to do it, but I wouldn’t say I do it well or anything. 4062. If a presidential candidate went on late night tv, picked up a guitar and rocked out on it and could really play, would that influence you to like/respect them more? >> No. I’d appreciate their skill, but knowing how to play an instrument has very little, if any, bearing on whether they can run a country or not. 4064. If it was possible for people to instantly change from one sex to another, would everyone be straight in the end? Would you change your sex? >> Everyone would not be straight in the end because being gay does not at all mean you wish you were the opposite sex so you can be in a straight relationship... Anyway, no, I wouldn’t change my sex. I’m not a binary trans person, I have no desire to just... swap to the opposite end of the spectrum. It is absolute in-between-ness or absolute outside-ness that I desire. 4065. Finish the sentance: nobody broke your heart, if you're alone... >> ??? 4066. Would you rather have a best friend OR a boyfriend/girlfriend on a Friday night? >> ???????? 4067. Would a woman rather be complimented about her intelligence OR her looks? >> Try asking a woman. By which I mean a specific woman, to find out what she’d rather be complimented on, personally. Because it’s a personal preference. 4068. Do you tend to think of the right thing to say after the moment is gone? >> I usually think of more snappy comebacks after the moment’s passed. 4069. Would you rather a potential mate have nice hair OR nice legs? >> --- 4070. Okay,…. nice hair OR a nice rack/bulge? >> --- 4071. What is one thing you thought you would enjoy, but actually didn’t? >> I can’t think of anything offhand. 4072. Be in the spotlight OR in the shadows? >> --- 4073. What is your favorite part of the newspaper? >> I don’t read the newspaper. 4074. What in your life has been an “acquired taste” for you? >> Stability. 4075. Do you find sunlight makes you happier? >> It very much does. I like to say I’m solar-powered. Of course, that comes with the downside of seasonal depression. 4076. If you could conquer one fear, it would be...? >> --- 4077. What's the dumbest thing you've ever seen someone do or heard anyone has done? >> --- 4078. How do you feel about the fact that J-Lo earns 37 million dollars a year? Do you buy anything that contributes to her salary? Is J Lo the ultimate ideal of what a woman should be? >> I don’t feel anything about that except “that’s... an inconceivable amount of money to me”. I highly doubt I buy anything that contributes to her salary. I don’t think there is an ultimate ideal of what a woman should be, and if there was, I sure as hell wouldn’t peg a celebrity to be a candidate. 4079. What is unforgettable beauty? >> ??? 4080. Worst fashion mistake EVER: >> --- 4081. What is your advice to someone on their first date? >> I don’t have advice for that. Besides, that’s a very general question and I don’t believe in one-size-fits-all advice. 4082. Is there a musical performer more ridiculous than Avril Lavigne (I don't think there is)? >> Well, that’s rude. 4083. What is the best: daytime talk show? late night talk show? 4084. Are you afraid of total freedom? >> I don’t know what that is. 4085. Do you live in an invisible prison? >> Perhaps. 4086. Who do you feel distant from, that you used to be close to? >> --- 4087. Rate the following song lyrics (1 = you like it the most, 9 = you like it the least). >> I’m not going to do this, but I did see lyrics from a Guns n Roses song I really like that I rarely see referenced anywhere, which was a nice surprise!

Maybe you shouldn't care/throw away those dreams/& dare Eden lets me in/I find the seeds of love/And climb upon the highwire/I kiss and tell all my fears I know the pressure is on/In a race for the life of endless love/If it seems to much/Remember/All these things are endless I see the wind, oh I see the trees/Everything is clear in my heart/I see the clouds, oh I see the sky/Everything is clear in our world Inflatable doll/Lover ungrateful/I blew up your body/But you blew my mind Well I jumped into the river/too many times to make it home/I'm out here on my own/drifting all alone/and if it doesn't show/ give it time/to read between the lines The very thought of you makes/My heart sing/Like an April breeze/On the wings of spring/And you appear in all your splendor/My one and only love now I've had lots of girls/most of them from other worlds/but lookin through the galaxey/the valley girls are the ones for me I'm the dandy highwayman so sick of easy fashion/the clumsy boots, peek-a-boo roots that people think so dashing/so what's the point of robbery when nothing is worth taking?/it's kind of tough to tell a scruff the big mistake he's making 4088. Can you name any of the nine bands/songs above? >> Just that one Guns n Roses song (Estranged). It’s the “well I jumped into the river” lyric. 4089. What would your reaction be if a total stranger called to say s/he loved you and told you that you were to pass the message on to others in a telephone call you make yourself? >> I wouldn’t have even answered the phone, so this would not happen to me. 4090. Would you like to take a journey to jupiter? >> I mean, sure, if that were possible. 4091. Can you crack nuts in your bare hands? >> I don’t think so. Unless it’s, like, a peanut. 4092. Do you take walks at night? >> No. I have, but I don’t now. 4093. Beavis and Butthead or daria? >> Daria, absolutely. 4094. Cow or chicken? >> --- 4095. Do you think you will visit China in this life? >> I don’t know. It’s possible, I suppose, but maybe not probable. 4096. Are you having a happy day? >> It was a fun day, sure. 4097. When was or will be your 'golden birthday' (when your age is the same as your birthdate, like turning 17 on the 17th)? >> My golden birthday was 5 years ago. 4098. Enlighten everyone with something profound: >> No. 4099. When has the third time been the charm for you? >> I have no idea. 4100. What is kinda sick, but fun? >> *shrug*

[franeridart]

you made me start shipping bakugou, kaminari and Kirishima (i forgot their ship name). They're sucha good ship and your drawings for them are amazing!!!!!!!

Oh man thank you!!! I’m super happy I could make you like them!!!!!! They got amazing dynamics, don’t they? :D

Anon said:Your ocs are always so cool and cute i love them??!? Do u have more information about them?

THANK YOU!! And yesssss I do, actually! And I’ve also talked about them a while ago already!!! If you’re looking for more info specifically about Josh and Chris I blabbered about them here!!!

Anon said:I love your art ! And I love your Bakugo, but, have you ever thought of a undercut Bakugo ??

I sure have!!!! Tho I guess I do draw him more often with a side shave haha

Anon said:This is probably annoying, but I just wanted to say that I LIVE for your art! Its so amazing and I love it so much!! You’re one of my favorite artist on Tumblr. Plz continue to be awesome

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! why would it be annoying anon!!!! Thank you so so much for the good feelings!!!!! :D

Anon said:What u think about Traitor Theory in BNHA :,)?

I find all the theories going around incredibly interesting and well thought, actually! But they all feel pretty unrealistic to me, after all, and as of now Horikoshi still hasn’t given me any reason to change my mind about the traitor actually being Tsukauchi

Anon said:Oh honey.. everytime i got a notification of your art, my day become better. Stay safe, happy and manly💛💪

A Kiri anon ;O; ohhh boy this ask made me seriously happy hahaha thank you!!!!

Anon said:I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, and I REALLY want to hear your opinion on this. What about a Bakushima Star Wars AU wherein bakugou is a badass Sith warrior who feels the pull of the light-side and Kirishima is the only Jedi Knight who actually trusts him enough to help him with converting to the light-side of the The Force. Oh and Bakugou dual wields red light sabers and Kirishima only has the one Blue saber but wears heavy armor. What do you think?? Thanks! Love your art!!

It’s a pretty amazing concept, actually? :O one I wouldn’t mind thinking about more, even though Bakugou as a sith………….. does feel pretty unrealistic to me, not gonna lie haha he’s such a good guy in the soul, Katsuki~

Anon said:oh my god i absolutely adore your linearting. it’s so neat and smooth. i hope i can achieve that kind of smoothness one day

Thank you!!!!!! A good stabilizer setting and a lot of ctrl+z might help you in your endeavor, anon hahaha my linearting is more about the patience to erase a line sixty times than it is about skills lol

Anon said:yo! have you ever watched digimon or yugioh??

DIGIMON!!! YES!!!!! My first fandom ever!!!!! I was five when I got into it!!!!!! I’m behind with a couple of the movies, atm, but I still love it a whole damn lot!!!!

On the other hand all my knowledge about yugioh comes from when I watched it on tv as a kid and from my dash obsessed with it, so I can’t say I’m well versed in the topic haha

Anon said:YOUR SERO IS SO CUTE

THANK YOU!!!!!!

Anon said:AAAAAAA I CANT BELIEVE YOU MADE A CUTE COMIC THING FOR MY BAKUGOU ASK! omg ty :‘0 and yeah, i see how it could stand for king or katsuki! seems like something he’d do lol

IT WAS A GOOD INSPIRING ASK ANON thank you for the involuntary prompt!!!!

Anon said:A FULLY COLOURED COMIC!!??!? WOW GOOD JOB!!

THANKS!!! Sometimes it seems like I can actually manage to put together the patience for that sorta things too haha

Anon said:You know the bnha ending where all the characters are in this au fantasy world? I’ve been curious to know what type of mythical creature or fantasy being deku and kirishima are…? :/

Uhhhhh aren’t they just humans? Well, the fandom as a whole has decided that Kirishima’s probably the dragon, but I think the general, original concept was that most of them are just humans haha

Anon said:Kiri’s dragon tail looks fantastic!!! I love the way you colored it.

;O; thank you so much ohhhh boy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Anon said:i literally l i v e for your kiribaku and bokuroteru art 😍😍😍

THANK YOU!!

Anon said:I came for the art, stayed for the wonderful person you seem to be, then scrolled down to fangirl over more art. Your art is a blessing and I hope you know how great you are! 🎉

Oh my gods thank you so much this is such a sweet message !!!! ;O;

Anon said:How do you usually find your inspiration?

Hmmmmmmmm what a question. I guess, through life? This sounds like such a bullshit answer haha but yeah, I found that the best way to keep your inspiration going is to live life and experience new things. Most of the ideas behind what I draw come from things I did myself or saw or said or heard and so on - talking to my friends and family inspires me, books inspire me, music inspires me, going out and looking at people/places inspires me, other people’s fanworks inspire me a whole damn lot too! As far as I’m concerned, inspiration is sort of everywhere - there’s days in which I’m more receptive to it, and days in which it flies right over my head and I sit there wondering where the hell it went, but in general as long as I’m living and doing things ideas in the end will come my way haha

Anon said:Hmm…If Bakugou wants to be the best at everything…would he be the best at playing the flute? :o

I wouldn’t say Bakugou wants to be the best at everything, it’s more like he wants to be the best at everything he’s interested in doing - so if he had any sort of interest in playing the flute, he sure as hell would make sure to be as good as he possibly can at it haha

Anon said:have u ever considered: tokoyami/tetsutetsu OR tokoyami/shinsou

You know, this is actually an interesting question because I’ve actually been asked about both these ships already? Are they actual ships that exist in this fandom? :O I can’t say I’ve ever thought about them - well, tokoshin does interest me in the sense that I’d really love to know if Shinsou’s quirk works on Dark Shadow, but that’s about it haha

Anon said:I really like what you said about trans Bakugou! Like…I know it’s canonically improbable but I still really like the idea of Izuku being trans, because that’d add another layer of adversity and self doubt he’d be facing while trying to become the top hero. So I think it’s neat when people acknowledge that something isn’t canon but still completely accept the headcanon of it. Love your work! Keep it up~

It’s why it’s called transformative work, after all!! If you want to keep as close to canon as you can then all the power to you, but once you start transforming the canon (shipping non-canon is included in it, of course), putting a limit on how much you can transform it would just be unfair! As long as we’re all on the same page about the fact that it’s not canon, and therefor no one can force the idea on anyone else, I don’t see a problem with it!

[commander-passiflora]

Toril and Friends!

So here’s that fun little info post I promised about Toril, my norn Commander, and her partners! These are similar to the little blurbs on my characters page, but go a little more in depth than I’m able to there.

Toril Dragonslayer (Tainesdottir)

Toril Tainesdottir grew up in Hoelbrak and came from a long line of Raven shamans, so it was expected that was what she would become. When she was instead chosen by Bear to fight for her people and to become Tyria’s champion, it left her family more than a little shaken. At times, she doubted her path, but her connection to the Mists as a revenant made it easier to maintain her relationship with Bear and keep focused on her goals.

After defeating Zhaitan, many of the Norn (skaalds especially, and even more especially her partner Auslog) began referring to her as Toril Dragonslayer, and she eventually took up the name for herself. She saw it as a way to distance herself from the history and expectations of her family, who openly disapproved of her choice to pursue the dragons.

While her public persona is carefully crafted, ensuring she is perceived as a tough, no-nonsense leader who stares death in the face without fear, underneath it all she’s the biggest softie. She may try to hide it, but in truth, she would do anything to protect those she loves, from her guildmates in Dragon’s Watch to her partners.

Toril is bisexual and polyamorous, with (currently) three partners: Erlend Holgerson, Auslog Iceshaper, and Solana Aksim. She’s married to Erlend, but sees all of her partners as being of equal importance.

Erlend Holgerson

Erlend was born and raised in Lion’s Arch by his mother (a weaponsmith and his teacher) and his father (a Lionguard). He’s often treated differently by other Norn because of his unusual upbringing and the ways in which it shaped him.

Erlend has a shop in LA, crafting weapons of all kinds for any adventurer, hunter, or hero who seeks him out. His work is prolific the world over, with people coming from as far as Elona to commission him. However, he’s far from a fighter, preferring to offer support rather than a sword of his own.

He met Toril years ago, before she became the infamous Commander of the Pact, when she purchased a set of swords. She was the one to make a move, asking if he’d like to share a meal with her. Naturally, he said yes.

While he often worries for Toril’s safety, Erlend supports her in her endeavors and is incredibly proud of her, often going out of his way to talk about his wife whenever possible. Others have teased him for this, of course, but he’s always thought it’s more their own jealousy than anything else. Basically, he’s been chugging that Respect Women Juice his entire life and he’s incredibly in love with Toril (*John Mulaney voice* AND THAT’S MY WIFE), and he makes sure everyone knows it. 

Erlend is straight, asexual, and monogamous, but doesn’t mind that Toril has multiple partners because, in his own words, “Nothing could keep that woman from loving everyone she meets, no matter how much she refuses to admit it.” He wouldn’t want her any other way. He also has a bad leg from an injury he sustained during Scarlet Briar’s attack on Lion’s Arch, and uses a cane on days when it hurts particularly badly.

Auslog Iceshaper

Auslog grew up in Hoelbrak and trained as an elementalist. She and Toril met early in both of their lives, and quickly became close friends. Often, people joked about never seeing one without the other, as they spent most of their time together. Eventually, they both confessed to wanting their relationship to change into something more romantic, and have been together ever since.

Auslog is notorious as one of the best ice sculptors in Tyria, using her powers as an elementalist to aid her, as well as occasionally fulfilling the role of skaald. She was the first to refer to Toril as the Dragonslayer, and many other skaalds followed along. With many people coming to her homestead to commission her, she worked unofficially with the Order of Whispers for years, feeding them important information about prominent clients. 

When Toril formed Dragon’s Watch, Auslog decided to abandon her homestead and her sculpting to tag along. A fierce fighter, her skills as an elementalist quickly became invaluable to the guild. 

Auslog also became close with Braham during her time in the guild, eventually developing a romantic relationship. Toril sees Braham as her best friend and supports their relationship entirely, and was in fact the one to push both of them to admit their feelings. The three of them often spend their time between missions together, just hanging out and being pals and swapping kisses while cuddling. However, Toril has a strict rule about them actually telling anyone she partakes in the hanging out and being pals and swapping kisses while cuddling, which is mostly a joke actually. Mostly. 

Auslog is a bisexual, polyamorous, nonbinary trans woman and a proud part of their little polycule. She tends to be a bit emotionally reserved at times, but much like Toril, loves deeply and often.

Solana Aksim

Solana, a human thief, grew up in Elona. For quite a while, she served as a spy for the Order of Shadows, eventually moving to Cantha to monitor the situation there and send reports back. Her time in Cantha was traumatizing, to say the least, and when she finally made it home to Kourna, it took her years to recover. She resented the Order for sending her, eventually leaving and offering herself as a mercenary to anyone who could afford to pay her. 

When she first heard tell of the Commander’s appearance in the Crystal Desert, she was intrigued, and even more so by the deeds of heroics travellers shared. When Toril’s guild came to Kourna to fight Joko, she knew she had to introduce herself, and was absolutely taken with the norn. 

Solana just kind of...inserted herself into Toril’s life, and the Commander took notice. As their relationship developed, Toril not only grew to love Solana, but also saw a goodness in her that had been suppressed by her own disillusionment with her former life as an agent for the Order of Shadows. At Toril’s encouragement, Solana began training as a sunspear, eventually taking up the role of head of the Sun’s Refuge guard. She often misses her love terribly, but sees her dedication to protecting the Refuge as a way to connect with her and honor their bond.

Solana is a polyamorous lesbian, but for the most part prefers casual encounters outside of her relationship with Toril. However, she’s open to finding other long-term partners, she just has a very hard time trusting. She also has severe PTSD from her experiences in Cantha, which she’s slowly working to overcome.

[if-this-is-a-woman]

Rebecca Solnit: if I were a man

By Rebecca Solnit, www.theguardian.com

View Original

August 26th, 2017

Growing up, the author joked she was the perfect son: intelligent, ambitious, independent. How different might her life have been?

06.00 EDT Last modified on Wednesday 20 September 2017 05.26 EDT

When I was very young, some gay friends of mine threw a cross-dressing party. My boyfriend at the time, with the help of his mother, did so well that a lot of straight men were unnerved; they needed to know that the lust-inspiring, simpering siren in the tight slip was not compromising their heterosexuality. I was not nearly so convincing as a Rod Stewart-ish man with charcoal five o’clock shadow, and I was a little taken aback to realise that, to me, impersonating a man meant manspreading on the sofa, belching and scratching personal parts, glowering and cursing. There was a sense of not having to please anyone and not having to be likable that was fun, but it wasn’t necessarily someone I wanted to be.

I am old enough that girls weren’t allowed to wear trousers to school until midway through my elementary school education; that I remember a local newspaper columnist arguing in a grumpy panic that if women wore trousers gender would vanish, which he saw as a terrifying thing. I have worn jeans and shoes that are good for rough terrain for most of my life, along with lipstick and long hair, and being a woman has let me walk this line between what used to be considered masculine and feminine. But I have wondered from time to time what life would be like if I were a man. By this I don’t mean to aspire to, or appropriate, or suffer from gender dysphoria and the deeper issues around bodies, sexuality and sense of self that trans people contend with.

I like a lot of things about being a woman, but there are times and ways it’s a prison, and sometimes I daydream about being out of that prison. I know that being a man can be a prison in other ways. I know and love a lot of men, straight and gay, and I see burdens they’re saddled with that I’m glad not to carry. There are all the things men are not supposed to do and say and feel; the constant patrol on boys to prevent them from or punish them for doing anything inconsistent with conventions of heterosexual masculinity, those boys for whom, in their formative years, faggot and pussy – being not straight or not male – are still often the most sneering of epithets.

Back in the 1970s, when some men were figuring out how their own liberation might parallel women’s liberation, there was a demonstration at which guys held a banner that said, “Men are more than just success objects.” Perhaps as a girl, I was liberated by expectations that I’d be some variation on a failure. I could rebel by succeeding, while a lot of white middle-class men of my era seemed to rebel by failing, because the expectations had been set so very high for them. That had the upside of more support, sometimes, for their endeavours, but the downside of more pressure and higher expectations. They were supposed to grow up to be president, or their mother’s pride and joy, or their family’s sole support, or a hero every day – to somehow do remarkable things; being ordinary, decent and hardworking was often regarded as not enough. But success was available to them, and that was an advantage – and still is. We still have wild disproportions on those fronts; the New York Times reported in 2015 that “Fewer large companies are run by women than by men named John”. Among the top firms in the US, “for each woman, there are four men named John, Robert, William or James”.

Back when my mother was alive and well, I used to joke that my problem was that I was a perfect son. What my mother expected from me was, as far as I could tell, profoundly different from what she expected from her three sons. I used to joke that they were supposed to fix her roof; I was supposed to fix her psyche. She wanted something impossible from me, some combination of best friend confidante, nurturer, and person she could dump on about anything at any time – a person who would never disagree or depart. She lived about 20 miles north of San Francisco, where I’ve lived since I was 18, and I was willing to show up regularly, including holidays, Mother’s Day and her birthday, bring gifts, listen, be helpful in practical ways, while carrying on with my own life (I’d left home and become financially independent at 17).

As it was, she resented the opportunities I had that she felt she had not, starting with college, which she was not encouraged to go to, unlike her brother. This resentment is common, I think, between her generation and mine, and in some ways she saw my career as disrupting my proper role as her caregiver, or as a caregiver generally. I knew that the acceptable escape from being devoted to her was to devote my life to some other people – to get a husband, to have kids – rather than to be unavailable because I was working and living my own life. When I was young, she would recite to me the couplet “A son is a son till he takes him a wife, a daughter is a daughter all of her life.” In her expectations was an undertone of: I have sacrificed my life to others; sacrifice yours to me.

I’m not a sacrifice, but my work was a source of conflict for others as well. I started college early, graduated early, went onward to the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley, where I took a degree just before I turned 23, worked for a magazine, left the magazine and inadvertently found myself a freelance writer, which is largely how I’ve earned my living these past three decades. I published a book at 30, and then another one – 20 to date.

Photograph: John Lee for the Guardian

Early on in my friendship with an older feminist writer who has written many influential books, we used to laugh about the guys we met who were upset that we had published so much. They seemed to feel that they had to be more successful than whoever they were attracted to; that somehow our creative work was an act of aggression or competition. I don’t think women approach men the same way (though a novelist once told me his ex-wife made him feel like a race horse she was betting on). We joked, “If I knew I was going to meet you I would have burned the manuscripts.” Or as I’d laugh later, “Do you think this book makes my brain look big?” Boys can be stigmatised as nerds and geeks, but they can’t really be too smart. Girls can, and a lot of girls learn to hide their intelligence, or just abandon or devalue or doubt it. Having strong opinions and clear ideas is incompatible with being flatteringly deferential.

What is confidence in a man is too often viewed as competitiveness in a woman; what is leadership in a man is bossiness in a woman; even the word bossy, like slut or nag, is seldom applied to men. A few decades ago, I knew a woman who was a world champion martial artist. Her husband’s family was disconcerted by the fact that he could not beat her up. They did not suppose he wanted to, but they presumed he was somehow emasculated by not being able to, by the fact that she did not make him feel mighty in this abominable way. He himself, to his credit, did not seem to give a damn.

As a girl, I would have liked to have my intelligence and intellectual labours regarded as an unmitigated good and a source of pride, rather than something I had to handle delicately, lest I upset or offend. Success can contain implicit failure for straight women, who are supposed to succeed as women by making men feel godlike in their might. As Virginia Woolf reflected: “Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.”

I have met a lot of brilliant men whose spouses serve their careers and live in their shadows, and marrying a successful man is still considered the pinnacle of women’s achievement in many circles. Some of those women flourished, but not a few seemed diminished by their role as helpmeet and handmaiden, and if they got divorced, they divorced the identity they’d helped build and maintain. There have been so many women who stayed at home and raised the kids while men went off on adventures and pursued accomplishments. There still are. These straight men with brilliant careers and families – no one asks them how they manage to have it all, because we know: she’s how.

Ms Magazine’s first issue in 1972 published a landmark essay titled Why I Want A Wife. It’s an appalling list of all the things a wife might do for her husband and children, of a woman as a sort of self-managed servant. Even recently, one of my best friends told me he’s taken aback at the smiles-and-compliments response to his going about in public with his new son, as if taking care of his kid is some sort of optional special credit he’s earning. It’s as though everything fathers do, economics aside, is bonus; nothing mothers do is enough. This is one of the reasons why a woman might want to be a man (and why choosing to have children can mean something entirely different for a woman than a man, unless she has that still-rare thing: a partner whose commitment to the work is truly equal). Were I a man, or had I a woman as partner, I might have made very different choices about marriage and children.

Photograph: John Lee for the Guardian

One often hears statements implying that it’s generous of a man to put up with a woman’s brilliance or success, though more and more straight couples are negotiating this as more women become principal breadwinners or higher earners (and Leonard Woolf was exemplary in his support for his wife’s work, which outshone his own). But growing up, I knew that I was supposed to be the audience rather than a participant, or the centre of attention.

I’ve written before about men explaining things – about that dynamic in which some men assume they know when they don’t, and that the woman they’re talking to doesn’t when she does. A 2008 essay I wrote on the topic never stopped circulating, apparently because it resonated for so many women and maybe some men. The word mansplaining now exists in more than 30 languages, according to an article this year, and I realise that built into the idea is a dynamic in which women are eternally the audience. There are no signs that mansplaining is going away. An acquaintance recently told me, “A man once asked me if I knew of the Bracero program [for Mexican farmworkers in the US], and when I said, ‘Why yes, I wrote my undergrad thesis about it,’ he replied, ‘Well, I’ll tell you about it.’ I said, ‘No, I’ll tell you, fucker!’ And then the dinner party got weird.”

Like most women, even after the age when strangers demanded I give them a smile, I’ve had complete strangers come up to me to unload their theories or stories at considerable length, without reciprocity in the conversation, if conversation is the term for this one-way street. We know the reality of this from studies about how boys are called on more in school, and grow up to talk more in meetings, and interrupt women more than men.

In the 1990s the artist Ann Hamilton gave her students lightweight 4ft by 8ft sheets of plywood to carry around everywhere they went for a week. The exercise made them conscious of navigating space; they were awkward, forever at risk of bumping into people and things, probably offering up a lot of excuses. Success sometimes seems like that for women, an awkwardly large thing that is supposed to be in other people’s way and for which you might need to apologise periodically. The phrases sometimes used for men who partner with successful women – taking it in his stride, not put out by, OK with, dealing with, cool with – are reminders that female success can be regarded as some kind of intrusion or inappropriate behaviour.

What would it feel like to have a success that does not in any way contain failure, that is not awkward or grounds for apology, something that you don’t need to downplay, to have power that enhances rather than detracts from your attractiveness? (The very idea that powerlessness is attractive is appalling – and real.) Ann Hamilton has had a tremendous career, and some of it came from the sheer scale and ambition of her work from the outset, which seemed exceptional when she appeared on the art scene in the late 1980s. I remember all the women art students I met in that era, who made tiny, furtive things that expressed something about their condition, including the lack of room they felt free to occupy. How do you think big when you’re supposed to not get in the way, not overstep your welcome, not overshadow or intimidate? Ann wrote to me when I asked about that plywood assignment long ago: “I am still trying to break the habit of apologising for myself – even though I have little hesitation in asking for help on projects – asking for myself brings out the old, ‘Please excuse me.’”

Hillary Clinton during the presidential debate. She has talked about facing hostility at law school from men. Photograph: Julio Cortez/AP

I know things are changing, and younger women have different experiences, but women older than me have horrifying stories to tell, and we are not out from under that shadow. Supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg says of her arrival at law school in the 1950s, “The dean then asked each of us in turn to say what we were doing at the law school, occupying a seat that could be held by a man.” Hillary Clintontold an interviewer a few years ago about meeting with similar opposition in the 1960s, from the young men who’d shown up to take the law school admissions test at Harvard when she did. One even accused her of being homicidal in her ambitions: “If you take my spot, I’ll get drafted, and I’ll go to Vietnam, and I’ll die.” He didn’t imagine she had a right to compete; or that the place that neither had yet won was no more his than hers. It’s not just trouble at the top: women plumbers, electricians and mechanics have told me about being treated as incompetent, intrusive or both in their field.

It isn’t hard to find contemporary horror stories of women who can’t wedge a word in edgewise at meetings, have their ideas taken up by others, don’t get promoted as they might if they were men, who get harassed and groped or, in the white-collar world, not invited to the executive bonding sessions. This year Silicon Valley has been haemorrhaging workers’ stories of sexual harassment and discrimination, and the gist of many is that the tech companies tolerate harassment more than they tolerate people who report it. Even this month a Google employee, in a now infamous screed, insisted that the deeply unequal landscape of Silicon Valley’s white-collar jobs is due to nothing more or less than men’s superior capacity.

We still have a long way to go. A young woman enrolled at a women’s college told me this summer she was thrilled to be in an intellectual habitat where no shining young men were going to dominate the classroom conversations the way they had in her high school; walking home across campus at 3am without thinking about safety was another pleasure. (Women do engage in sexual assault, but in numbers that are minute compared to those of men.) Women are targets in the online world, too; in a little experiment on Twitter last year, the journalist Summer Brenner borrowed her brother’s profile picture and turned her first name into initials – the harassment she had experienced online dropped to almost nothing. Women may aspire to be men just to be free from persecution by them.

If I were a man… I didn’t want to be someone else so much as I wanted, from time to time, to be treated as someone else, or left alone as I would be if I was something else. In particular, I’ve wanted to be able to walk around alone, in cities, on mountains, unmolested. You can’t wander lonely as a cloud when you’re always checking to see whether you’re being followed, or bracing yourself in case the person passing grabs you. I’ve been insulted, threatened, spat on, attacked, groped, harassed, followed; women I know have been stalked so ferociously they had to go into hiding, sometimes for years; other women I know have been kidnapped, raped, tortured, stabbed, beaten with rocks, left for dead. It impacts on your sense of freedom to say the least.

A small part of my consciousness is perpetually occupied by these survival questions whenever I’m outdoors alone, though there are a few places I’ve been – Iceland, Japan, extremely remote wildernesses where bears were the only menace – where I felt I didn’t have to think about it. Solitary walking is where a lot of writers – Wordsworth, Rousseau, Thoreau, Gary Snyder – got a lot of their thinking and composing done; I have, too, but it got interrupted both from outside and from this internal monitor, always thinking about my safety. I know that my whiteness tips the balance the other way with this; it lets me go places that a black person can’t, and the short answer to what my life might be like had I been born black would be: different in nearly every imaginable respect.

There are many stories of people cross-dressing not as self-expression, but for practical purposes, just as there are of people of colour passing as white. Deborah Samson and Anna Maria Lane are among the women who fought against the British in the revolutionary war dressed as men, and more women did the same in the Union Army during the civil war. The novelist George Sand used a man’s name to traverse the literary world of 19th-century France and then men’s clothes to traverse Paris. She wasn’t just hiding out from harassment, but putting away the treacherous shoes and yards of fabric that made it hard to walk through a city that was rough-surfaced and filthy. She traded those fragile things in for solid boots and sturdy clothes in which she could roam confidently in all weathers and times of day and night, and loved it. Sylvia Plath, born a century later, wrote in her journal when she was 19 that, “Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.”

Supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was asked at law school what she was doing ‘occupying a seat that could be held by a man’. Photograph: J Scott Applewhite/AP

Not a little of the stuff women wore, and still wear, is an impediment and a confinement. Some women evacuating the World Trade Center on September 11 did so barefoot, lacerating their feet because their shoes impaired their mobility. What is it like to spend a lot of your life in shoes in which you’re less steady and swift than the people around you? Some women wear tight clothes that hamper free movement, fragile clothes, clothes you can trip over. These garments can be fun and glamorous, but as an everyday uniform they’re often incapacitating.

Trans people have been remarkable witnesses to how differently the world treats them when they transition. I have read many stories of a woman finding that she no longer has the right of way but will be bumped into on the street; a man finding that he is no longer interrupted. Gender shapes the spaces – social, conversational, professional, as well as literal – that we are given to occupy. Who we are, I realised as I co-created an atlas of New York City, is even built into the landscape, in which many things are named after men, few after women, from streets and buildings – Lafayette Street, Madison Avenue, Lincoln Center, Rockefeller Center – to boroughs – nearby Paterson, Levittown, Morristown. The nomenclature of the city seemed to encourage men to imagine greatness for themselves as generals, captains of industry, presidents, senators. My collaborators and I made a map in which all the subway stops in New York were renamed after the city’s great women. Last year, when I discussed it with students at Columbia university (named after Christopher Columbus, of course), a young woman of colour remarked that she had slouched all her life; that in a city where things were named after people like her she might stand up straight. Another wondered whether she would be sexually harassed on boulevards named after women. The world is an uneven surface, with plenty to trip on and room to reinvent.

I like being a woman. I love watching and maybe smiling at or talking to kids I run into in parks and grocery stores and anywhere else; I’m confident no one will ever take me for a creep or a kidnapper, and I know that it would be more complicated if I were a man. There are more subtle advantages about the range of expression I’m allowed in my personal relations, including in my close, supportive, emotionally expressive friendships with other women – and, through all my adult life, my friendships with gay men, many of whom who have boldly, festively, brilliantly broken the rules of masculinity and helped me laugh at the gaps between who we are and who we’re supposed to be. Liberation is a contagious project, and growing up around people who took apart and reassembled gender helped liberate even a straight woman like me.

So I don’t wish I were a man. I just wish we were all free.

[angelwithoutleave-moving-blog]

Not a Doctor | Castiel & Sam

Pulling my thread with thexboyxking over here from the archived blog~ My next response will be reblogged directly from your blog to this new one!

To say Sam Winchester was miffed would have been an understatement.

Of course that wasn’t to say he didn’t like what he was doing for the Morningstar Law firm he was interning at but he didn’t like THIS part of it. He didn’t like that he was stuck on research duty. Scratch that. Sam LOVED research. It was a passion of his and why he got stuck with the job more often than not. What he didn’t like was that he was stuck researching THIS.

The fact was, try as he might, medical terms just weren’t his thing. When it came to medicine, dosages, side effects, or even just medical law terms Sam always blanked. He’d even tried to explain that to Ava and Jess but they’d both just shrugged and told him they all had to do their fair share of work…which was their way of saying they hated this case too and didn’t want to have to spend hours looking through medical crap.

Heaving a sigh Sam closed the book he was going through and rubbed at his eyes. The issue with the case was that the incident happened ten years ago and the research done hadn’t made it past a few medical journals here and there, none of which had been posted online. It meant a lot of books, a lot of notes, and Sam was still coming up empty.

Getting up he grabbed the copy of the journal he’d just finished skimming through and made his way back down to the medical section of the library, exhaustion weighing heavily on his shoulders. He’d find something soon and then he could go home and pass out, that’s the mantra he fed himself anyways as he walked the now familiar path.

                    “Excuse me, sorry. I just need to put this back.”

He offered what he hoped was a friendly enough smile to the man in the row of shelves with him but he doubted it looked anything more than an exhausted rehearsed attempt at politeness.

Spending long nights nestled between the shelves of the school library was par for the course for Castiel Novak. Even when he was an undergrad, he could be found among rows of books more often than in his own dorm. It wasn’t that he had so much more work than the average medical student – though the program for neurosurgery was particularly rigorous – but more Castiel’s own habitual research tendencies that kept him immersed in large reference volumes until one of the librarians shook him awake.

A few of the professors who found his lengthy essays either intriguing or bothersome mislabeled it “overachieving.” Really, it was just insatiable curiosity. He couldn’t seem to shake an obscene addiction to footnotes, no matter what the topic was. If he hadn’t taught himself to speed-read a very long time ago, his reading list would be unmanageable – it nearly was already, seeing as it was never-ending.

He knew he was already collecting information he couldn’t use. His paper was on the effects of malaria on the brain, and he’d somehow ended up skimming a chapter on the life-cycles of trans-organism parasites. His internal clock told him that it was already late, and it had an unfortunate tendency to underestimate.

The shadow caught his attention first, suddenly casting the fluorescent-lit page into darkness. He’s barely looked up before the tall man was pardoning his passing, and Castiel nodded with an accommodating step back. He watched as his fellow student replaced a book on a shelf and stared at it under thick eyelids. He looked like someone trying to read a foreign language through a haze of exhaustion.

Hesitantly, Castiel cleared his throat. “What are you looking for?” he asked. He didn’t work here, but he probably knew the medical section better than anyone who did.

Sam tore his eyes away from the books in front of him and looked at the man offering to help. From the looks of it he was a fellow student but not one bearing a name tag indicating he worked here in particular. What Sam did notice though was the fact that he was not only in the medical section but was reading a book on it too so maybe at the very least he could point Sam in the direction he should be going.

“Umm well, I don't know really.”

He heaved a sigh and dug the palms of his hands into his eyes rubbing away a combination of frustration and sleep.

“I’m looking for a medical journal written by Dr. Robert Calvin. It never made it past his journals but the research is on a radical sleeping pill he’d developed and tested on a small group of volunteers with insomnia. It’s just…it didn’t pan out so there’s not much written about it but I need that journal for a…”

A case.

Already he’d said too much more than he should have been.Their library had the journal, at least it had Calvin’s full collection and he really needed the notes from that particular study and some of the subject’s names in particular. The problem was there were ten journals and no one seemed to know which one it would be in.

“I guess unless you've read these you probably can’t but hey, thanks for the offer.”

It wasn’t often anyone around here offered to help anyone else. Most people, Sam included, were too weighed down with their own work and studies to do much more than utter a quick apology when bumping in to someone else.

Castiel had already ascertained that this wasn’t a medical student, and that was precisely why he offered to help. These texts looked like Greek even to undergraduates in his degree program, let alone people who had never read a diagnostic manual – and who clearly belonged in a bed rather than a library.

He stepped just a little closer to hear the man’s explanation, his brow furrowed with concentration. As soon as he mentioned the name, Castiel’s expression eased, and he straightened, waving off the student’s dismissal.

“Insomnia studies are indeed found in this section, but Dr. Robert Calvin was a psychologist. He was observing the effects of sleep deprivation on mental health, specifically anxiety disorders. His experiments were ahead of his time, though, and unfortunately, he lacked the proper equipment to find the results he was looking for.”

He paused, realizing that his nearly encyclopedic knowledge of anything pertaining to the brain might sound… pompous. Clearing his throat, he finished, “He never found a correlation between insomnia and neuropsychology, so those journals weren’t published independently. The collection of his journals is in the psychology section, though. Three rows that way.” He pointed to indicate.

Dropping his hand, he averted his eyes and stepped back. “At least, I hope that helps.”

Sam wasn’t sure if those studies would be of particular use or not but he was willing to look through them and see if there was any information on the medication their client insisted had made her ill. It there wasn't anything in the ones he was being directed to then they could very well lose their case on unfounded basis and Sam didn’t want that to happen,especially not because of any leads he left unturned.

                     “You seem to know a lot about this stuff.”

He grinned and put back the journal he had started pulling out.

                     “I know you probably have your own stuff                      to be getting to so thanks for the help. I’m                      Sam by the way, Sam Winchester.”

It wasn’t always exactly easy to make connections around here unless of course it was with the other student interns helping around the office. Usually in the library he would keep to himself but this guy had been nice enough to each out and say something to him first which made him a nice person in Sam’s mind.

                     “I should go find those journals.”

Castiel was trying to make it seem like he was more interested in the book he still had open in his hands, but it was difficult to keep his eyes off of the handsome stranger. He felt anxiety lurch in his stomach at the comment. “You seem to know a lot” wasn’t usually a compliment, in his experience. But when the man flashed him a smile, Castiel was surprised, and he tried to return it a moment after that window of socially appropriate response time had closed.

“I’m… Castiel,” he answered the introduction, trying to catch up. “Castiel Novak. I’m a medical student in the neurology–” He stopped himself before he kept Sam up talking about himself, like so many of his classmates had an unbearable tendency to do. “Anyway, I read here a lot.” Once he said that, it didn’t sound like a sentence. “Good luck,” he added with a nod, “finding what you’re looking for.”

He went back to staring at words on the page in front of him, though not reading them. Social interactions never really came naturally to him, but being complimented by someone attractive reminded him that he really wasn’t completely certain he belonged to this species.

It was about two hours later that Sam had finally found what he was looking for. It was at least enough to swing their case in the right direction and he’d only found that because of the other student. As he was packing up his books about to leave he’d considered swinging by to say another thanks and see if maybe Castiel wanted to hang out sometime. When he didn’t see him in the same section Sam gave up and decided to just leave instead. He still had some work to do at home before their meeting tomorrow morning with the client.

Later when he looked back at the situation he’d blame the lack of coffee and the over tired rundown feeling of needing a good night's sleep for not seeing the dog. Besides who kept a dog on campus anyways?

He’d barely hit the thing but Sam knew from its whining it was hurt and he knew from picking up a stray two weeks ago that there wasn’t a decent vet within half an hour of the campus which all bus sucked. Pulling off his over shirt he wrapped it around the dog lifting it into his arms and debating what the hell to do.

Maybe someone in medical…he didn’t have a lot of friends though. Castiel…the kid from inside had mentioned something about being medical though. Something about neurology but still…that was something at least.

Setting the dog in the passengers seat he turned and headed back to the parking lot throwing the car in park before dashing into the library.

             “Cas?? Castiel? Hey,has anyone seen a medical student              named Castiel?”

He was being too loud, hollering for Cas and earning looks everyone trying to get work done and god if it was reversed he knew he would be heated but he had to find Castiel again if he was in there.

If nothing else, his run-in with Sam reminded Castiel that the book he had been reading was barely even tangentially related to his research. When he tried to go back to it, he couldn’t remember what footnote in which manual had gotten him to the chemical effects of bactrim in the first place. He put the book back in the pathology section and returned to the small table, tucked in a corner between the anthropology and environmental sciences sections, that he may as well call his desk.

He had to reread his progress and, after trying in vain to find follow-up studies to support his hypothesis, came to the unfortunate conclusion that he needed to restart his paper with a different one. By the Time he finished the outline, his eyes were puffy and heavy. It was only more disappointing to know that this outline, which seemed rough and sloppy now, would probably look like complete nonsense in the morning.

He was just collecting his things when shouting from the main lobby made his brow furrow. People sometimes failed to contain their outbursts even within the sacred walls of the library, but not usually at this time of night. Immediately after irritation flared in his blood, concern crept up Castiel’s spin right behind it.

And… those syllables sounded familiar. But why would anyone be calling for him?

Abandoning his belongings at his tucked away table, Castiel strode to the stairs and reached the top of them in time to confirm that someone was indeed shouting his name. By the time he reached the first landing, he registered the very new voice.

“Sam?” he asked, quickly crossing the open room as soon as he reached the bottom stair. “What’s wrong?” He was almost surprised by the degree of calm control in his own voice. Adrenaline was flooding his veins, and Castiel was now wide awake.