#makes them both the gayest custom cowboy outfits he can

[ultrainfinitepit]

Pen and 12

Art Fight piece by @gadjetomyart, thank you again for the lovely artwork!

12. Does/did your OC ever wish they could change the way they are? Why? If it’s in the past, how did they get over the feeling? (this can be about internalized homo/transphobia)

Pen is one of those angels that will never be 100% comfortable in his human form, and it has made his many mortal lives challenging.

Back when he had full range of his powers, Pen enjoyed spending a bit of time here and there in forms of all different types. He was secure in the knowledge he could always return to his preferred form. If some silly human was a little ignorant, mis-gendered him for example, he wouldn't mind - they didn't know anything anyway, and were just looking at some temporary physical manifestation. They could never perceive Pen's true form in all its glory.

Then Pen became "human" and now was stuck in one body. And he found himself becoming more particular about it, hating parts of it for how they could not be changed to what he wanted; or how others would perceive it.

Pen had never felt such discomfort and hatred for his own body before. He could no longer be what he preferred on a whim and it made his preferences stronger. People misunderstood who and what he was all the time. He got angry at the silly mis-gendering humans, they made him feel bad! To be affected at all by the words of a human while being a glorious angel, Pen had never felt like more of a failure.

To his shame, it made Pen lash out at some of his peers. He envied how easily they seemed to adapt to their human bodies, how they didn't care about the humans' words - while Pen felt more and more strangled by them.

Eventually Pen found ways to be more comfortable in his mortal forms. If needed he would take medicines or potions to shape them in subtle ways. Pen has a fear of surgery, it reminds him too much of past lives where he was stabbed to death, so that was off the table. Instead he would carefully tailor his clothing to hide or shape his form. He would do his best not to think too much about the body underneath that clothing.

But Pen found ways to accept his body too in the end. It helped him a lot when he began to date Ham - who while being experienced as an angel had not lived many human lives, and thus didn't have a head so clouded by human ideas. Ham has only ever seen Pen as a man without hesitation, to him Pen's body is a man's body because that's what Pen is and wants to be. It all seemed rather simple to Ham, it made Pen think it might really be simple.

Even once he gets his full angelic form back, all these thoughts about Pen's preferred gender and form stay with him. He is fairly certain there is no going back to how carefree he once was about his physical presentation, and that is one of his greatest sorrows.

He also regrets how critical he was of the others, but Pen is not a particularly nice person and will probably never apologize. He might simply be extra helpful next time they come to him asking for answers or a book recommendation, and enough of that is equal to an apology in his mind.