#iiii am gonna go shower now

[rainwaterapothecary]

@999week 

Day 5: Junpei (Had a really bad mental health day so I didn’t end up writing this until 2 am) 

As the screen door closed Tenmyoji Junpei looked up over the pencil he had been balancing on his upper lip. The piece of stationery clattered to the counter as he smiled.

“Hey babe. Hot today?”

The blind man shook his head exasperatedly.

“No Junpei, I sweat all over my favorite shirt to make a statement.”

Junpei’s eyes trailed down his boyfriend’s torso.

“That’s not your favorite shirt, that’s one of mine- Hey!”

Light chuckled and hung up his keys. Junpei saved his report and slid off the kitchen stool.

He kissed the back of Light Field’s neck, right below the poofy ponytail he would make fun of until his dying day. 

Junpei pulled a face.

“Gross, you are all sweaty.”

“I am not in the habit of lying, Junpei.”

With a snort Junpei ran a hand down his friend’s spine and turned to return to his homework.

A strong, cold hand caught his wrist and a quick look back revealed one upraised eyebrow from the elder Field sibling. Junpei chuckled and Light’s prosthetic squeezed a touch harder before letting go.

The Japanese man laughed brightly and shook his head as he folded himself back onto the stool.

“You’re incorrigible.”

“Tell me you don’t enjoy it, Tenmyoji.”

“No can do, Field.” The shorter man clicked his laptop awake and listened to Light’s soft footfalls as he got himself something from the fridge.

“I am going to shower, Junpei.”

“Gen eds and statistics, babe. Gen eds and statistics.” Light heard his lover’s fingers clacking away at his keyboard and he leaned back against the chrome refrigerator. He rolled his eyes, sight having nothing to do with the show of attitude.

“Had I known I would be losing both my boyfriend and my favorite spot at the island I would have put up more of a fight at the prospect of continuing your education.” Junpei just chuckled and shook his head. 

Light heard his friend’s fingers hit his pencil in the rhythmic way that meant he was twirling it. He lost more writing implements to his pursuit of looking ‘cool’ than Clover or Light himself would ever let him live down.

“Maybe later, babe.”

“I will hold you to that, darling.” The pencil hit the floor and Junpei swore.

The blind man had no way of knowing if it was his term of endearment that caused the loss of a pencil, but as he had aimed for that outcome he chose to believe he achieved it.

----

It had been a late night already by the time Junpei returned from the corner store with a coke and a declaration.

“I think I wanna go back to school.” The Field siblings looked up from where they were cheating against each other in cards.

Clover caught the way her brother’s hand tensed around his cards and she knew.

He thought Junpei was leaving them. 

Leaving him. 

No, leaving them.

The man in question melted into the couch above them, his eyes moving to the plaster designs of their ceiling.

“Yeah.” He rubbed the back of his neck with one gun-calloused hand. “I was actually in marketing before...” before I was kidnapped.

Clover laid her hand face down on the carpet through force of habit and leaned onto the couch.

“Really? I guess that makes sense, you were able to get everyone on the same page back then.” back in Nevada.

Junpei looked at her in surprise.

“Huh.” He looked at the ceiling again. “I guess that works. I was in media marketing though, which is a little different from HR.” Clover chuckled as he lightly pushed her with his foot.

Light let out a silent breath and unfanned his own hand. He tapped it vertically against one leg as he parsed out what to say.

He didn’t want to stand in the way of Junpei bettering his life or doing something that would be genuinely good for him... but he was still shaky on English so he would most likely outsource to Japan-

“You think there’s any online stuff I could pull off? I’m not sure my English is conversation-ready enough to go to a local campus.”

Light was having trouble breathing.

Junpei would stay? He hadn’t even thought of leaving? Then he... he enjoyed being with them?

“What are you TALKING about Junpei? This is FBI territory we’ve got all KINDS of different languages going all the time.”

“Would you be going back into marketing?” Light finally found his voice, thought his hands stilled as he listened now.

“Iiii don’t know. I kinda want to pick something back up again because I was good at my classes- Don’t even look at me like that Clover, I was.” The pink haired girl blew a raspberry and laughed.

“Why Junpei dearest I never implied-“

“Oh like you wouldn’t take any excuse to call me dumb.”

Light shook his head as the two people dearest to him bickered.

-*-*-*-

Junpei broke the silence of their nighttime routine once they had been lying beside one another in the dark for a couple hours.

“I’m..I’m gonna go into criminal justice.” Light felt his ribs crack around his heart at Junpei’s quiet reveal. The blind man reached over to cover one of his bedmate’s hands with his own. The other man slid his hand beneath Light’s searching one.

“Your degree... You mean your future degree, correct?” He heard Junpei nod, brown hair shushing against the pillowcase.

“Yeah. Yeah, I am.” Junpei seemed to rally himself before pulling the bedsheet closer around his own shoulder.

“You aren’t...Are you making this decision for her or for you, Junpei? I want you to thrive, of course, but I doubt you will reach your full potential if you are living your life for another again.” Especially that woman remaining unsaid but tangibly felt.

If you’re letting her use you again. 

If you’re giving in to the forced enmeshment.

The other man took a shaky breath and flipped his hand so their palms were pressed against one anothers’, Light’s larger hand surrounding Junpei’s darker one. It was comfortable. It was grounding. Junpei was shuddering.

“Light-“ He was choking up? Light’s brow wrinkled in his concern.

“I’m doing this because of her.” He interlocked their fingers and held on when Light tried to yank his hand away and continued. “And because of Hongou, and Santa, and Nijisaki and all those people Alice helps bring down. I can’t justify studying marketing when people- real people are out there hurting each other and I-“ Big brown eyes blinked away moisture before he continued. “- can do something, anything, about it. I can’t let something happen to kids like you and Clover all those years ago. I can’t...I can’t.” He breathed in a breath shaky with emotion and hot with unshed tears.

Light felt like the air around him existed in a vacuum. He had heard what Junpei had said, but now the absence of words roared like the wind over a mountaintop.

“I think... I understand.” Light replied quietly. Long fingers reached over to trace tear streaks down tanned cheeks and cupped them. The two men breathed shakily before Light kissed lips that tasted of salt and helplessness.

Deceptively muscular arms cradled their lover as he wept, the unfairness that had cost his best friends their innocence crashing down on Junpei like an ice floe. Warm lips met the singer’s again and again, whispering apologies that were wiped away with the reverent warm breath of the other. ‘Love’ and ‘Junpei’ and ‘it’s okay’s’ filled the space between them when their lips were not otherwise occupied.

Light thought Junpei was leaving.

Junpei wanted nothing more than to stay.

To love.

To protect.

To grow.

And he wanted to do it with the Field siblings. To do it for them. His self-sacrificing fool of a best friend and bedmate. 

Light was in love. He was deeply and hopelessly in love with the man who rested against his collarbone when the nights got long.

----

Following the grumbling of the college student, Light planted one foot on his boyfriend’s back. The pencil scattered further out of reach as Junpei tipped forward and collapsed onto the kitchen floor.

“Asshole.”

Light smiled into his bottled water.

“Enjoy your schoolwork, love.”

As the blind man wandered down the hall to the bathroom his heightened hearing definitely picked out a ‘motherfucker’ and he smiled, picking out another one of his man’s shirts to change into once he got out of the shower. 

Life was good, or at least that’s what his pilfered shirt said.

[interstellarcanid-deactivated]

moral of the story apparently is Dont wake me up because i will grump and then start crying

[viper-no-viping]

Wweelp. I guess it's Rambling Time.

Not even sure how far I'll get in any particular topic, but, we're still kind of rusty with blathering shit for school assignments, so.. Here I am, exercising my shit-blathering pathways, or whatever.

I guess an initial General Weather Report would be suitable, given that seems to be how our collectively chronophobic ass keeps track of things that we will Almost Definitely forget in the nearish future.. But that would require thinking in detail about Various Things and that's kind of Not My Bag rly, heh, so. I dunno, I guess we'll see what happens.

Suppose starting with the current thought process will suffice. There's this trans chick on YouTube we follow, who posted recently that she's getting bottom surgery, now that she's recovered from her facial feminization surgery. From there I ended up at.. One or two other videos, pretty sure it was two, about her transition timeline.

And now "transition timeline testosterone" is sitting there in the YouTube search bar staring back at me and I'm just like :\ lol dunno, or someshit.. sigh.

This video made some Feely Feels rear their dysphoric heads, because of some Hashtag Relatable shit about the way he described stuff.. And I'm sure the seething jealousy that he got top surgery means something, heh, meanwhile we're over here crossing our fingers that the body isn't too fucked up for even a breast reduction, which, even for that, the co-pay alone.. ugh.

I mean, not like I actually know how much it would be yet, hopefully Tahni will remember to ask about that when we see the primary again for the results of the next ultrasound to make sure that ovarian cyst isn't fucking cancer, fucking goddamn cancer, never would have thought we'd be stressing over that as a possibility but here we fucking are..

Well. I personally don't have much history, hehe, what with the Iiii don't, exist, Iiii don't, exist.. et cetera.. yeeup, not sure where that was going, but anyway. Yeah. If not from the fucking ovaries, possibly from the goddamn thyroid, which is Fun. Apparently there are no actual known causes for the thyroid cancers, shit just fucking happens, more commonly in "women." Yay.

But I mean, even if it is some kind of fucking thyroid cancer, at this point just take the shit out and put us on thyroid meds for the rest of our life, just make this shit stop.. ugh, but it's probably not even one thing, is it, this whole fucking body is going to shit, and how many months will it be until we've done enough tests and shit to figure out what's even going on..

It's so funny, two years ago they Really Thought it would just be an endoscopy and colonoscopy to find the cause, just a couple tests.. xD Ahh, funny in a kind of lol kill me way.. But at least shit is actually showing UP on tests now. Just having the vague undiagnosable bullshit is a different kind of agony, like before the LPR was diagnosed, it is Fucked Up trying to get any kind of answer on shit when your main symptom is just a constant hellish nausea, not anything that comes back from a lab test with Actual Results that doctors will Actually Respect.. To say nothing of how family and friends start slowly but surely deciding to themselves that it's just you making a fuss out of "nothing."

So, yeah. Different kind of hell, but godfuckingdamn I would take almost any other ailment aside from this fucking Everlasting Period bullshit. Talk about fucking dysphoria, haha. You really hate acknowledging the existence of this entire section of the meatsuit you're stuck in? Here, have some as-yet-undiagnosed ~menstrual issues~ that make the most unpleasant thing that section of the meatsuit does last TWICE AS LONG AS IT USED TO!! THAT SURELY WON'T MAKE YOU WANT TO STAB YOURSELF AT ALL!!!!

Yep. Look how well I'm coping. XDD STFU self, damn.

Or, well, I guess don't STFU, still need to exercise the word-vomit muscles, god knows how the fuck I'm gonna get by the rest of that godforsaken pass/fail How To Actually Do Shit With Your Psychology Degree Part I class.. Due tomorrow is an assignment in place of a midterm, to make a resume and goal list of shit to do that'll make said resume better.

Except there are no accredited fully-online law schools yet, so what in the ungodly fuck are we gonna even do with the degree? It's not like having it is gonna make the body less of a complete medical fucking wreck, it's not like it'll erase the fact that we can never know when we're going to be suddenly fucking incapacitated with dizziness/ridiculous cramps/intense don't-fucking-move-or-you'll-gag nausea for days on end so we can't actually keep a consistent schedule of doing anything outside of the house, what the fuck good is it gonna do me to make a fucking resume reminding me of exactly how worthless of a job candidate we are at this point?

Whoops, that Got Deep real quick, haha. But like, seriously, what the shit do I even put on a resume aside from the fact that we accidentally started the Psychology Club at our high school? If we use the non-chronological resume format it'll make the employment gap stand out less, but it's supposed to emphasize skills and experience instead, and what fucking skills or whatever can we even put on a resume? What fucking skill set will make you a viable job candidate when you can't even stand for the length of a shower without your legs getting shaky, but you don't have a fancy enough degree or the social stamina to handle a job that doesn't require some form of physical labor? Not to mention I think there's also supposed to be a made-up cover letter, something like "Hi I'm XYZ and I'm applying for ABC job with this resume", what the fucking shit can I even put for that when I know how Ridiculously Limited we are at this point?

A bunch of blathered nonsense to fill a page with lots of words and hopefully conceal the fact that we're completely making shit up. That's what. Because I can't just say "I'm Pretty Much Fucked in terms of traditional employment because chronically ill autistic multiple, and am trying to plan out a career in online comics, or if online law school becomes a thing I'll gladly use my psych degree for that." That's how you fail an assignment, even if it's the truth. I can't exactly write a cover letter to the internet announcing our intent to try that shit. So. Yeah. All aboard the Blathering Train, instead.

But yeah, anyway, that's enough financial/career angst for right now. Back to dysphoria angst!, lolol.

Yeah, so, here I am staring at this shit in the search bar and just.. Like, I don't even know if it would be medically safe to try HRT at this point, but aside from that, I don't even think that's what we want, ideally? Not interested in dealing with facial hair, armpit and "downstairs" hair already pisses some of us off enough..

Not sure if we're interested in being perceived as male, I guess, but not really wanting to be perceived as female either? I'm pretty sure at this point most of us are either specifically agender, or don't subscribe to the concept of gendering traits at all and just call themselves non-binary..

Like, the vast majority of us have fucking hated the body's boobs since they first showed up in middle school. We gave Not A Fuck for gendered shit, in general, but on an autistic sensory level we Fucking Despise pressure on the body's chest and these bitches are heavy. Even moreso than usual, recently, what with the hormones being fucked up. Fucking hate it.

But like, how do you explain to a doctor that you want the boobs off completely? The best we can probably realistically hope for is a reduction because back pain, but I dunno if it would Raise Questions if we asked what the smallest possible size they could do was. Could we settle for As? Would it be weird to ask to go from DDs to As? Weird enough that someone would take the time to be like "now hang on a second" and start trying to make us go through the red tape bullshit to be on record as Officially A Trans TM?

If we could get away with not wearing a bra without looking like we're wearing weird droopy melons under our shirt, I feel like that much would be enough for several of us, even if the body did still technically have some small boobage. As long as it didn't impede us or anything we wanted to do, if it didn't get in the way or weigh down on our chest, if it didn't make our shirts fit weird, I feel like we could deal with that..

But then I see this trans bro on YouTube here and hhnnghh why can't we just not have themmmm..

I mean, ideally, why can't the fuckers be detachable so those who don't hate them can put them on when they feel like it and the rest of us can go on our merry way without them, but, heh, science isn't quite there yet.. Next best thing seems like it would be getting top surgery and letting whomever felt like having boobs just stuff a bra when they wanted to. But of course, insurance won't pay for it if it's just because We Really Want It, we'd have to either be Officially Trans TM and jump through all those hoops and hope top surgery is covered, or we'd have to just settle for a breast reduction covered under back pain.

I guess it also Says Something, that so many of us in the system are asexual-and/or-gay dudes, or simply never thought about it and are female "by default" aka because the body was categorized as that and we didn't care enough about gender to think there was any other option, we just accepted the narrative presented to us, that we were just "not like other girls." None of us have ever felt super masculine or super feminine, that I can recall, because What The Fuck Even Is Gender, and why the fuck is it necessary to divide up traits into human-created categories anyway..

But it makes it hard to figure out exactly where we are in terms of transness.. We've known Basically Forever that we "aren't like other girls," but gender means so little to us that we never particularly wanted to be a boy either, so calling ourselves a trans guy or even just non-binary transmasculine still seems odd, even though it seems like the latter should fit..

But then, how much of that is just cisheteronormativity in action? Because I know we've had several dreams wherein we had a wang and it felt pretty natural, not foreign and out of place like the body's current genitalia setup. But like, what the fuck does wang-creating surgery even look like, that sounds like a whole mess of complicated shit to figure out, and we're already medically compromised..

With the arrival of our newest non-straight dude, one of several in the system, some of us have had to seriously reexamine where we stand on gender shit. I guess at this point it's generally accepted that we would have been much better suited to existence as "semi-effeminate AMAB homoflexible non-binary ace," rather than "pan-quoiro AFAB possibly transmasculine non-binary ace"..

I guess it feels like masculine should have been the starting point that we feminized to our liking, instead of starting off with feminine and not knowing if we want to be "masculine enough" to be categorized as "transmasculine".. Is it "masculine enough" if we want the boobs off but can't do HRT because half the shit this other video mentions sounds just as bad as having the boobs? We can't stand body hair and acne and all that, and god knows how HRT would even work with all the hormonal issues the body's already having..

The more I think about what we ultimately would ideally want, the more it seems like we would really just prefer having no AFAB reproductive parts/periods and no boobs, maybe a wang and a lower voice, and that's it. I guess maybe we could try out the aesthetic of some minimal beardage, but body hair in general already irritates several of us.. So like, for various reasons I don't see HRT happening.

We already know most of us would have the boobs off tomorrow if we could, but I guess what's tripping some of us up now is the fact that Vern is way less genitalia-repulsed than most of us, and in fact seems to generally handle the notion of Having A Body better than most of us.. And he definitely identifies as a guy, a non-binary semi-effeminate robot guy but still definitely masc-leaning, so.. What does it say about us if so many of us have already been questioning this for so long, and now the one who's most secure in his gender identity out of all of us is one of our masc-leaning non-binary guys?

I don't even know how we would.. React to it, I guess, if we did try to.. I dunno, embrace being transmasculine or something.. It doesn't feel like we'd prefer to do anything drastically different, behavior-wise, and we don't care enough about pronouns to try to figure out something gender-neutral that isn't "they" because gender-neutral "they" within a plural "they" system is confusing as fuck.. So like, I don't think most of us on the fence about being transmasculine would change our names or whatever, or use he/him pronouns, it would just.. Feel better to not have certain anatomical bits be perceived as part of who we are?

But then that just kind of makes us wonder if we're being a Bad Trans TM or something, like if that counts as reducing gender to body parts or something.. This is all so goddamn complicated.

Hot damn, finally got around to looking up some YouTubeage about how the fuck a phalloplasty actually works.. Taking skin, fat, a nerve, and an artery from the donor site to make it, that sounds so fucking unnerving to even think about, taking body stuff from one area and like.. Making a wang? Ughh, there are so many stages.. Yeah, no, even getting the AFAB reproductive bits out seems like possibly too much intense surgery for us, I don't see how we could ever manage this kind of bottom surgery, shit sounds fucking terrifying, I guess the notion of taking so much shit from another area on the body just kind of gets us in a body horror kind of way..

So yeah, I don't see us being able to do that.. And I mean, we're not really sexually-focused to begin with, so like, aside from just the base-level comfort of Having It, it's not like we'd desperately Need a wang or anything to have a fulfilling life? Just NOT having the AFAB reproductive shit/periods, that would be the main thing, not having that shit and not having the boobs. If we had a lower voice we could pass as a guy if we wanted to, and we'd probably like that, but weighing that one thing against the whole list of other shit that comes with HRT, it's probably not worth it.

But how do you ask for, much less get covered for, removing the boobs and reproductive stuff with no Official Medical Reason, just "because I don't want it"? Non-binary dysphoria doesn't seem like it would be considered a Valid Enough reason for it to be covered, but we don't want to go into a Full Transition either, so.. yeah, I dunno how we'll end up being more comfortable just existing in the body, with so many roadblocks.

I dunno, objectively it's probably internalized transphobia/nb-phobia or whatever the name for that is, not feeling "trans enough" and whatnot.. But I guess part of it is also, why can't we just be a fucking gender mystery and be allowed to exist that way? It's our fucking meatsuit, why do we have to pigeonhole ourselves into either Male or Female just for our insurance to believe that certain bodyparts cause us extreme dysphoria and we'd be better off without them? Why can't we just be a person with no boobs and maybe a wang and a voice that can't be readily identified as male or female?

I dunno why I'm even rambling about this, I know why, cisheteronormativity and various historical fuckeries, et cetera. I guess it's just frustrating trying to figure out where we are on the gender spectrum when we're blocked from making the modifications that would make the body feel less alien to us. Maybe if we could actually get top surgery, we would have a better idea of whether we consider ourselves transmasculine or just some kind of masc-leaning genderfluid non-binary, which is where several of us seem to be right now..

Hnngh. This guy seems like a good example of where we might end up one day if we do end up trying out HRT, but the idea of the body being more of a pain than it already is in terms of body hair/acne/et cetera just seems so shitty..

Haha, is it weird that I'm kind of hoping that ovarian cyst will end up being cancer and they'll give us an option to remove the whole reproductive setup in there? Because we would do that shit in a heartbeat. What's that called, a hysterectomy? A total laparoscopic hysterectomy with bilateral ovary-something-something.. How do you convince insurance that you Need that to improve your quality of life, without establishing yourself as Fully Transitioning?

Wow, this guy's scars are so small, huh, would have thought it'd be worse.. Goddamn, we'd love to have all that shit taken out. Not like we're fucking using any of it, it's just been causing us more and more agony since puberty, can't be doing this fucking 11-day period bullshit anymore, the dysphoria was bad enough on its own..

ugh, why the fuck am I even looking at all this, not like we can do any major surgeries for a while yet, if at all..

I don't know, I guess trying to work out what we would collectively be least-dysphoric with is useful, it's just extra depressing thinking about how hard it'll be to get the boobs off, or even reduced, much less the whole reproductive removal biz.. feh. Time to ramble about something else.

hmph, actually, should probably do the other quiz for that pass/fail class.. -.- That way we can just deal with the resume/goal list bullshit tomorrow, mmmmboy.. meh, that would require more focus than I probably have though, guess it'll be tomorrow.

I dunno. The 10th-to-12th anniversary is fast approaching, probably best to just disappear into distractions a bit longer, at least until it's passed. Still not sure if it'd be best to avoid tumblr or what, on the 12th, but I guess we'll see.. meh.