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hellomynameisbisexual · 3 years

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“Faggot.” “Cocksucker.” “Femboy.” “Abomination.” Gay. The list of names I’ve been called since coming out as bisexual in June 2020 doesn’t stop there — nor did it stop when I went public with my sexual identity either.

From a young age, I knew I was different from my peers.

Maybe it was the way I walked. Or the way I talked. Or the way I dressed. I just knew I stood out to them like a sore thumb — or perhaps a rainbow of color in a sea of dull gray.

My differences became evident to me when other children at the preschool I attended in suburban San Diego, California, would forsake my company in favor of each other, already forming cliques and inciting drama at such an innocent age.

When my family and I moved to dreary Erie, Pennsylvania, I knew my struggles would only get worse.

Many of the children in my kindergarten class had already known each other for several years before I entered the picture.

They quickly noticed differences in my mannerisms, speech patterns, thoughts and ideas. I wasn’t like the other boys, but I wasn’t like the girls either. I was an outlier, a foreigner and a stranger considered dangerous and unwelcome.

Though I made friends the following few years — including some who would become lifelong companions — most of those primary friendships mirrored the kernels of a neglected ear of corn: delicious when ripe but quick to harden, rot and flake off.

By my fourth grade year, I was teased and bullied nearly daily for being too feminine, too weird, too annoying to fit into my school’s social circles.

When I told my teachers about my struggles, their solution was to attempt to masculinize me by placing me in groups of athletic boys in my class, boys I had nothing in common with and who certainly had nothing in common with me.

Even my grandparents — then and now my caretakers — noticed my un-boyish behavior and enrolled me in the local little league baseball team — whether to also attempt to instill in me a sense of masculinity and male toughness or to help me make new friends I knew not.

I would grudgingly participate in the sport for six, nigh on seven grueling years, never making a single lasting friend and crying almost weekly from the torment it caused me.

Needless to say, I felt like a floundering fish without fins in a sea of angry, hungry sharks during those years.

It wasn’t until the final year of my elementary education that I was introduced to the concepts of puberty, adolescence and sex.

I was told that very soon, I would start noticing the girls in my class and would begin to want to form meaningful relationships with them. Eventually, I would become sexually attracted to them and want to have children with them.

But in those coming years, though many girls would pique my interest, it wasn’t them who ignited the fire in my soul and made me feel the burning passion of desire — it was men.

I quickly realized it was this that set me apart from my male peers and resulted in me being shunned by the girls. I was a boy — soon to be a man — in every physical way, but I wasn’t attracted to or passionate about girls like the other boys in my class were. I was obsessed with men.

But I couldn’t possibly be gay, could I?

Growing up in a household of religious relatives, I was always taught that sex before marriage was a wicked abomination and that being anything but straight was a sin comparable to none.

I distinctly remember watching a news broadcast with my family around the time I was transitioning to my middle school years. The ABC World News clip showcased LGBT marriages being performed out west and contained affirming remarks from then-President Barack Obama on the matter.

“The Bible says marriage is between a man and a woman,” I remember my aunt saying in utter disgust at the television, murmurs of agreement echoing her around the room.

I resolved then to hide my feelings and my pubescent curiosity from my family at all costs, lest I be scolded, shunned or worse: abandoned.

During middle school, I relentlessly dug deep within myself and attempted to alter what I thought was but a simple mental barrier to social normality. All thoughts of being with men were forcibly suppressed in my mind before they could even become tangible, and each of my increasingly urgent bodily needs went ignored and unsatiated.

I even resorted to religion, the only weapon I thought strong enough to aid me in the war raging inside myself.

Day and night, I attempted to “pray the gay away,” but to little avail. Much to my chagrin, I realized that even divine intervention could not “help” me: My homosexuality seemed to be an immortal, malignant tumor infecting each and every one of my thoughts.

Thus, the preliminary years of my second decade of life became miserable and unfulfilling — I was engaged in a fierce battle with an integral aspect of my identity and was inadvertently shattering the chains that bound a beast capable of obliterating every fiber of my cognitive being — anxiety.

By my high school years, men — mean, nasty and indifferent but awe-inspiring, mystifying and oh-so-gorgeous men — had begun to control my deepest, darkest desires and fantasies. My lust had grown large enough to thwart even my most furious attempts at diminishing it.

As I slowly came to terms with the realization that nothing in the universe could “fix” me, my mental situation severely worsened. I fell into a dangerous downward spiral of self-doubt and woefulness.

My relationship with my grandparents quickly began to deteriorate, as did my relationships with my friends. Every day brought with it a new reason to hate my existence — the constant verbal altercations, the continued teasing and even bullying at school, the countless lonely nights spent sobbing quietly into my pillow.

And, to make matters worse, the true nature of my sexuality seemed to express itself in each of my social mannerisms. It wasn’t long before despicable rumors about me spread through the student body of my high school like wildfire.

My teachers noticed my strife, and some took the time to speak with me about a few of the different mental illnesses they suspected I had. But not even they could halt the hordes of horrifying thoughts racing through my head or the string of ruthless comments that would assault me in the hallways.

Soon, however, the light at the end of the long, grueling tunnel that was public education began to shine: I was graduating from high school and about to start fresh. Nothing could have contained my excitement at the prospect of escaping the largest source of my daily torment.

As I digested the freedom going to college offered, idealistic daydreams began to flood my mind — I could live how I wanted with whomever I wanted, and no one could judge me or tell me differently.

How wrong I was.

My first year as an undergraduate student at Penn State Behrend was a living hell.

Though the petty and immature teasing of high school was no longer an issue, standing up for my newfound political identity was, as well as dealing with my growing anxiety.

I was constantly engaged in polite yet heated political debates with those in my dorm. I felt like they were blatantly attempting to oppress me with their own beliefs and had grown to hate me for mine.

The same situation occurred with my grandparents, and we grew increasingly distant over the course of that year.

It didn’t help that I was still “in the closet,” so to speak, and contemplating methods of publicly revealing my true sexual identity. I hadn’t yet officially told anyone I was bisexual, and it remained my most closely guarded secret.

Needless to say, my social circumstances and the added stress of my adjustment to college academics and lifestyle allowed my mental state to reach an unprecedented low. I needed help.

That same year, I saw my family physician and then a psychiatrist, who prescribed me antidepressants in an attempt to lessen my now untameable anxiety. I took them with gusto and also began attending therapy sessions to teach me how to manage my thoughts and emotions.

For a small while, I felt better — I was actually happy in my skin and even happy with my bisexuality.

But then, even my long-awaited mental comfort abandoned me, and I slipped into the deepest, darkest pit of my life.

I became suicidal but never acted on that petrifying potentiality.

I didn’t trust myself to be alone, so I constantly sought the company of others, which only made me feel like a nuisance and waste of time, energy and space.

About a month later — in October 2018 — I got into an accident.

I was barrelling down the highway, escaping a particularly heated verbal altercation with my grandfather. It was raining that day, and the roads were slippery.

Going around a curve, I lost control of my vehicle and flew into a small ravine, flipping not once, not twice but three times in midair before landing upright — dazed, but alive.

Escaping relatively physically unscathed from the incident, with only a broken right clavicle, I was not mentally the same for weeks afterward.

I decided at that time I would come out and reveal my true sexuality at the soonest possible opportunity — I blamed my silence on every terrible situation that had occurred in my life up to that point. If I didn’t come out, I quite literally thought I would die.

Telling even my closest friends was difficult, but I managed, and the relief I felt was paramount to that of the titan Atlas in Greek mythology: I felt like the weight of the entire world — sky and all — had been lifted from my shoulders.

Fast forward to the present: I’m alive, well, out and proud. I’m no longer ashamed of my innate traits or of my thoughts.

Being a bisexual man has taught me many lessons, but foremost among them is that the people who can’t accept me for who and what I am don’t deserve to be in my life.

My anxiety made it difficult to let go of toxic relationships over the years — I learned that the primary source of my mental strife is a fear of abandonment by those I care about — but doing so opened the door to newer, healthier relationships that build me up and boost my confidence instead of chipping away at it.

I’ve since improved tremendously, and not even the onset of the coronavirus pandemic was able to pause my progress. Every day is a learning experience, and I’ve grown so much from the helpless boy I was mere months ago that if you showed me a map of my mentality from 2018, 2019 or even 2020, I wouldn’t recognize myself at all.

Revealing my bisexuality to the world didn’t solve all my issues — there were and still are other factors that contribute to my anxiety and mental health — but coming out was perhaps the most profound, life-altering moment in my 21 years. Nothing compares to the freedom I now enjoy, nor will any other experience compare to the relief I felt following my announcement.

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alarawriting · 4 years

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52 Project #30 (Writeober #15: Mortality): Everybody’s Happy As The Dead Come Home

Ever since my mother died of breast cancer a few years ago, I’ve been making time to go visit my elderly father about once a month. That may be conjuring up the wrong image in your head, so let me clarify. My father’s over 70, but he still has a lot of the energy he had as a younger man. He works as a consultant for the big corporation he spent his entire adult pre-retirement life working for, for about three or four times as much money, and he enjoys it. He’s got an active social life, spending time with friends he had shared with Mom as a couple, and new friends he’s made from his bereavement group or his consulting work. And my sister, the baby of the family, lives with him, and my two younger brothers come to visit him a lot more often, since they live a lot closer than I do. So if you’re imagining a lonely, stooped old man pining away in a house that smells like stale cat food – that’s not my dad, and I can’t imagine it would ever be.

I arrived late on a Friday night, as usual. My sister met me at the door, and actually looked me directly in the eye. Stephanie’s autistic; she never looks anyone in the eye. “Eleanor,” she said, and that was another strange thing, because she almost never calls anyone by name… unless she’s doing it for emphasis. “When you find out, don’t say anything about it,” she said.

“About what?” Most of the time Stephanie makes sense, but every so often she says something that sounds like her mind has jumped ahead in the conversation without realizing all the missing pieces she never bothered to say.

“You’ll know,” she said. “And you’ll want to ask ‘why’ and ‘how’, and I’m telling you that you can’t do that. Don’t ask any questions. Just come talk to me after you’re done.”

“Done with what?” I asked.

And then a voice called me from the TV room. “Lennie? Lennie, is that you?”

Only my mom and dad are allowed to call me Lennie. And that was a woman’s voice. I froze in place.

“Go see her,” Stephanie said, and headed off to her room.

I turned toward the TV room, slowly. “Lennie! Come out and see me!” my mom’s voice called.

I didn’t know whether to be terrified, or to start crying and fling myself into her arms. I walked very slowly, very cautiously, to the edge of the kitchen, where I could see my parents in the TV room. Both of my parents. My dad was smiling.

“Lennie!” my mom said, standing up. She hadn’t been able to stand up without help for months before she died, but here she was, standing up easily. She didn’t look any younger than she had when she died, but she looked healthier. The extreme thinness she’d suffered from at the end after it had metastasized and she’d barely been able to eat was gone; her flesh was filled out, her skin as taut as you could expect from a woman her age, and healthy-looking. Pale, but her natural paleness, not the weird, sallow, almost yellow color it had been at the very end.

“Mom?” I whispered.

“Come here. I need a hug,” Mom said, sounding exactly like she always had – joking, but there was always that note of truth under it. She didn’t wait for me to make my way to her – she never had, not until she was too ill to get up – but came straight for me and gave me a hug, and she smelled like herself. Not like a rotting corpse, not like ozone or nothing or whatever a ghost is supposed to smell like.

When I was a kid, my brother Jeff and I watched the miniseries version of “The Martian Chronicles”. In particular, he was always impressed (and terrified) by the part where the astronauts meet their long-lost loved ones, who turn out to be Martian shapechangers luring them to their deaths. I always wondered, if the people they saw on Mars were dead, how did they fall for it? How did they not know that dead people could not somehow be on Mars?

As I held my mom, who’d been dead a few years now, I understood. They’d wanted to believe. I wanted to believe. Stephanie had warned me not to ask anything – no “how are you not dead”, “how can you be here”, “why are you alive,” nothing like that. I assumed that was what she’d meant, anyway.

“Mom, I’ve been trying to trace some of my past that I’ve forgotten. Do you remember the name of my third grade teacher?”

“Huh.” My mom seemed to be thinking about it. “I think it was Mrs. Wilder, but I’m not a hundred percent sure. Second grade was Ms. Jenner, right? And fourth was Mrs. White?”

“Yeah,” I said. I didn’t, in fact, remember my third grade teacher’s name, and neither did my dad. The Martians in the story had been telepaths; they’d been able to perfectly impersonate the astronauts’ loved ones because they could read the astronauts’ minds. Now I had a piece of information whose answer I didn’t know, and no way to easily confirm it unless Jeff remembered; he was only two years younger than me and had had some of the same teachers. But some of the people I had friended on Facebook were high school classmates, and a tiny number of my high school classmates had also been with me in elementary school, and might remember my third grade teacher’s name.

“I haven’t seen you in so long,” my mom said. “What’s going on in your life?”

“Oh, you know,” I said. “Things are going okay. Mom, if I’d known you were here I’d have brought the kids.”

“You can bring them up next time,” Mom said.

This was so weird. My mom was definitely dead. I had seen her body in the coffin, lying in state, looking nothing like she had in life. But here she was, impossibly, and I was holding an almost normal conversation with her. “Have Jeff or Aaron come over since you’ve… been here?”

“Jeff was here last weekend,” Dad said. “And Aaron lives next door, so he’s been over nearly every day.”

My grandparents used to live next door. When they died, my mom and my uncle inherited the house. My uncle bought out my mom’s share and rented the house out, and my youngest brother ended up renting it. My other brother lives in an apartment down in the city; I’m the odd one out, living in a completely different state, with a husband and kids.

So all of them had known, and none of them had told me. I expected Stephanie and Aaron to never tell me anything, but I was more than a little irritated with Jeff.

“Let me go drop off my stuff,” I said, since I was still carrying my bag.

I went back to Stephanie’s room, which used to be my room, a long time ago. The boys used to room together, but my room was too small for Stephanie to share with me, and she had needed a lot of space of her own… so they’d converted the loft in the garage into a bedroom. It had never been warm in the winter, though, so as soon as I moved out, Stephanie had moved in.

Stephanie was, as usual, on her computer. I shut the door behind me. “Okay. What the hell is going on?”

“She’s not the only one,” Stephanie said, without looking away from her computer. “I’ve been doing research. They’re all over the place. There’s no explanation yet, and apparently none of them will talk about it. I asked Mom and she said I was really rude, and sulked and was really passive-aggressive.”

“So we’re not worried about Mom turning into a Martian shapechanger or vanishing, we’re just worried that she’ll get mad?” To be fair, making Mom mad had always been a thing worth avoiding at all costs. “When did she come back?”

“I don’t know exactly, but presuming that she came to see me right after she came back, it would have been Monday around 3 pm.”

“And no one told me? You have my email address!”

“…It just didn’t feel right, telling you something like this in email. I felt like I should wait for you to be here.”

“And Jeff didn’t? And Aaron didn’t?”

Stephanie shrugged. She still didn’t look away from her computer. “They probably felt the same way.”

“Does Dad… know? Like, does he even remember that Mom is dead, or does he think this is normal?”

“I didn’t ask him.”

I sat down on her bed. “Steph, I’m asking you to make an informed guess. Has he said anything to you that would either suggest that he’s aware this is abnormal, or that he isn’t?”

“I don’t read minds, but I haven’t heard anything from him one way or the other. He’s very happy, though.”

“I got that impression,” I told her. I went to the guest room, which used to belong to the boys, opened up my laptop, and sent Jeff a question on Facebook about my third grade teacher.

Mom appeared while I was debating whether or not to also ask him why the hell he hadn’t told me about her. “Lennie, don’t hide in your room. Come out and talk to me and your dad. You need to catch me up on your life!”

Part of me wanted to break down crying. Part of me wanted to run to the car. Part of me was annoyed the way I always used to be annoyed when my mom wanted to spend time with me and I had stuff to do. And part of me hated myself for being annoyed by my mom for any reason at all. She was back from the dead and I wanted to hide in my room? But I wanted to hide in my room because I wanted to do research to figure out if this was really my mom or not. And what had Stephanie meant by “all over the place”? People all over the place had returned from the dead? Why wasn’t this all over the news?

What I said was, “Okay, mom,” and I went out to the TV room to talk to her.

***

Here I was, having a completely mundane conversation with a dead woman.

Yes, my husband was doing well at his consulting business. Yes, my oldest daughter was doing well in college. My youngest daughter had a rough spot a few years ago but was doing better. The daughter in the middle was putting a lot of time into her music, and was getting really good. I didn’t mention that my oldest daughter had gotten a diagnosis of autism like her aunt, or that my middle daughter was failing all her subjects because all she cared about was music, or that my youngest daughter was openly bisexual and dating a nonbinary teen in her class, because those would be fraught topics around here. My mother would be openly disapproving of the failing in school – as was I, but I wasn’t here to listen to a lecture about what I should be doing differently to make sure Rhiannon passed her classes – and she’d be what she thought counted as supportive about the other things. Are you sure it’s a good idea for Janie to have an autism diagnosis on her medical record? Lots of people will discriminate against her, just ask Stephanie, it’s not a good thing to admit to the world. And if Lori wanted to date a person who claimed to have no gender, good for her, but was she sure it was a good idea to admit to the world that she was bi when the world is so prejudiced? Blah blah blah. No. I wasn’t going there, not with my mother back from the dead.

All the questions I wanted to ask. How? How was she back? Why? Was there an afterlife after all? What was it like? Are you absolutely sure you’re not a telepathic shapechanger who wants to eat us? Is anyone else coming back or is it just you? But I couldn’t do it. My mouth wouldn’t make the words, and I felt like Mom being alive was a soap bubble that might burst any moment. If I said she was dead, would she disappear? I couldn’t take the risk.

Now I knew why Jeff and Aaron hadn’t told me. The compulsion not to talk about it, the fear that talking about the circumstances of her death and her apparently-no-longer-deadness would cause her to stop being no-longer-dead. I wouldn’t be able to tell my husband about this, or my kids, not unless they came here. Not without feeling like Mom might disappear if I did.

Which was probably how Stephanie had gotten away with it, in the beginning. If this was some kind of emotional pressure, something emanating from the presence of a dead woman... Stephanie was typically immune to emotional pressure. Or pretended she was, anyway. She hid behind her monotone and her face that barely expressed anything until she couldn’t, and then she’d go and have a meltdown in the bathroom. But she wanted to please Mom. We all wanted to please Mom. So if Mom had told her she was rude for mentioning the death thing, Stephanie would be unable to mention it again. Because she wouldn’t want Mom to think she was rude.

This felt very much like I was in an episode of the Twilight Zone. Dead mother back to life, check. Weird inexplicable pressure not to talk about it, check. But Mom clearly remembered things that had happened shortly before her death, and showed no evidence of knowing about anything that had happened since, unless it was public knowledge. She talked about interests the girls had had three years ago, interests they’d all outgrown since. She talked about my plan to remodel my own garage – I had completely forgotten that was even a thing we’d planned at one point, because I’d lost my job shortly after Mom died and then the money wasn’t there for the remodel. She didn’t know I was working with my husband in the consulting business now, which a telepath would obviously know because it dominates my life nowadays. Obviously a Martian telepathic shapechanger would have to pretend not to know things that supposedly happened while they were dead, but if I’d forgotten about the garage, what were the odds a telepath could pull it out of my head? There had to be more accessible thoughts in there, after all.

I didn’t know what to ask Mom. How do you feel? That was always a good one, back in the day, because Mom’s chronic illnesses meant there was always something she could complain about, but she wouldn’t do it until she was asked… she’d just quietly resent the fact that no one had asked her. But did dead people still feel things? Would that intrude on the topic I wasn’t supposed to talk about? What’s going on in your life? Oh, nothing much, Lennie, I’m back from the dead, how about you?

So I talked about myself. I was learning to work leather and I’d made myself a wallet, but I left it at home, I could bring it to show her next time. I was also learning to repair dolls. The girls had all abandoned theirs and I felt bad about it, so I was cleaning them up and repairing them and putting them in dioramas. Mom was very interested in both topics, and asked if I could repair some old dolls she had up in the attic. I was pretty sure I’d already done it – if it was the dolls I was thinking of, Dad had given them to me right after Mom died, and they were the ones I’d learned on. But was it safe to talk about? Dad wasn’t saying anything; had he forgotten he gave me the dolls, which was entirely possible, or did he think it wasn’t safe to talk about either?

I’d wanted for three years to be able to tell my mom that she was wrong about all the weight loss advice she’d given me because now it had come out that scientists had never proven that fat made you fat and the low-carb diets were probably better for you than the low-fat ones, but I didn’t know if she could still eat. Also, my mom was back from the dead and I wanted to start an argument with her about a topic I’d always hated when she talked about? Didn’t I have anything better to do? That really kind of made me a shitty person, didn’t it?

When Mom had been dying, I couldn’t talk to her about the future. I didn’t know how to bring myself to talk about things she’d never see. I’d never known how much my conversations with her consisted of me talking about future plans until I couldn’t any more. Now I couldn’t talk about the future or the past, at least not the past three years, and large parts of the present had to be left out too, because I didn’t know what would remind her that she was dead and make her go back to her grave. Even though, logically, I knew that was unlikely to happen because Stephanie had done it and had just gotten a rebuke that that was rude.

At the same time… I knew I had to say something that Mom could talk about, because if I just talked about myself all night, later on she’d probably make some passive-aggressive remarks about how everything always had to be about me. In desperation, I asked her if she’d seen anything good on television lately.

“Oh, I haven’t been watching anything in a while,” Mom said. “It’s been so long since I felt well enough to go anywhere, so I’ve been going for walks, and your father and I have been taking trips to museums and historic sites. We’re going to be going up to Boston next week.”

“I have a client up there,” Dad said, “and they want me to do a training thing. And I was telling them, no, no, Boston’s too far, but I remembered how much your mom loved Boston, so I asked her if she wanted to go and she said yes, so now we’re going. We’re going to fly, though. The days I was willing to drive that kind of distance are long over.”

“You could take the Amtrak.”

Dad made a dismissive gesture. “It’s gotten so expensive. Flying’s actually cheaper.”

“When are you going?”

“Next Wednesday we’re going to fly up there,” Mom said, which said something about her opinion of the future, at least. “Your dad’s got his presentations to do on Thursday and Friday, and I’ll wander around the city, and then we’ll spend Saturday seeing the sights together.”

“There’s this fantastic restaurant I went to last time I was up there on business,” Dad said, “and I checked their web page, and they’re still open. So we’re going to go there.”

So Mom could eat. Or Dad wasn’t afraid of talking about eating with her, anyway. Maybe ruled out vampire, but Martian shapechanger was still on the table.

I didn’t literally believe my mom – or the entity that appeared to be my mom – was a telepathic shapechanger from Mars like in The Martian Chronicles. But it was obvious that something so far outside the norm that it was only imaginable by making references to fantasy and science fiction was happening.

I tried, very carefully, “How have you been feeling, Mom?”

“I’m great!” She laughed. “I haven’t felt this good in ages. Sugar’s under control, I can see pretty well, none of the usual aches and pains… I’m doing pretty good!”

Did she remember she had died of cancer? Did she even remember that she’d died?

It was 2 am before I got to go to bed.

***

6 am and I was up and out the door before there was any chance of my mother or father being awake, assuming my mom even slept anymore. But at the very least, she was in her bedroom with the door closed and no view of the driveway I’d parked my car in.

Do I sound like a terrible daughter when I tell you I’ve never visited my mom’s grave? I haven’t been back there since the funeral. I always knew my mother wasn’t really there – that if any part of her had still existed in any form, it wasn’t trapped in a coffin under six feet of dirt. It made it somewhat difficult to find the graveyard, though, because I couldn’t remember where it was, or its name, or which church it was associated with, and it wasn’t exactly like I could ask my mom. When I finally found the place– it wasn’t that hard in the end, my parents live in a small town and there aren’t many graveyards – it took me half an hour to find her grave.

It seemed undisturbed. But if Mom had been back from the dead since Monday, that would have been time to fill in a grave. I went looking for the caretaker.

They get to work early in the graveyard caretaking business, I guess; I found him pushing a lawnmower over on the other side of the graveyard.

“Can I help you?” he asked.

“This is going to sound stupid,” I said. “But I got an email from a jerk I used to know in high school claiming he was going to dig up my mother’s grave, and I just wanted to make sure nobody’s touched it.”

“Nobody’s touched any of the graves, ma’am,” he assured me. “Aside from a couple of funerals we’ve had this week, no one’s done anything to disturb the ground here at all.”

“Thanks,” I said, “that’s reassuring. He was talking like he was actually going to do it, but I guess he was all talk.”

“Well, if anyone comes by and disturbs any of the graves, we’ll have them arrested,” he said.

I had my answer. My mother had not climbed out of her grave. Which seemed impossible anyway, now that I knew enough about the funeral industry to know exactly how hard it would be to smash a coffin open, let alone dig through six feet of dirt. I couldn’t rule out her turning immaterial and floating out of her grave, but my mom had seemed very material and biological when she’d hugged me. I’d always thought of ghosts as something that were almost never solid enough to interact with the world, if they even existed.

***

If I was going to get up this early, I was going to get a pancake breakfast at the diner. My parents still think sugarless cold cereal is a reasonable thing to eat for breakfast. They were always night owls; I made myself breakfast and school lunch every morning but the first day of school, every year after about third grade. I was also a night owl, once I didn’t have to get up for school anymore, but I used to make my girls a lunch every night and store it in the fridge for them. Now they’re too old and too cool for Mom lunches. They’re eating something, but it might be cafeteria food, lunch they pack for themselves, or for all I know sandwiches from 7-11 or Starbucks with their allowance.

The point is, I hardly ever get a nice breakfast, because I am hardly ever willing to wake up early enough to cook myself one, and my parents certainly weren’t going to. So I went to the diner.

Normally I don’t talk to anyone at a diner, beyond smiling at them and telling them my order in an upbeat, cheerful voice because waitresses get too much shit from too many people for me to add to it inadvertently. Also because I don’t want them to think I’m eating alone because I’m a sad, lonely bitch no one would love; I want them to know I’m doing this because I really, really enjoy not having to socialize. But today I had something I needed to know.

“I’m a writer,” I told the waitress, “and I’m doing research on ghost stories in the area. Have you heard anything, you know, Halloweeny or spooky? Ghosts appearing, dead people walking around, poltergeists, that kind of thing?”

“Can’t say I have, but I’ll ask around, see if any of the girls know any good stories,” the waitress told me.

And then she took my order back to the kitchen, and I surfed the net on my phone while I waited, and then I got my pancakes, and I ate them. I was chasing the last blueberry around on the plate when another waitress approached me. “Stacy told me you were collecting creepy stories for a book?”

“From the local area, yeah.”

“I don’t know if this is the kind of thing you’re looking for, but… my cousin says that a lady on her street, her husband died a few years ago? But she just saw the guy walking with the lady down the street, having a conversation like the guy never died.”

“Do you think you’d be able to give my email to your cousin and have her reach out to me? That sounds like exactly the kind of story I’m looking for.”

“Uh, sure.”

I gave the waitress my email address. This was probably going to come to nothing; I doubted the waitress would even remember to give it to her cousin. But it’d be really good if I could get the details from someone who knew more about it.

***

Jeff’s more of a morning person than I am. I got a response on Facebook, but I had to wait to get back to my parents’ house, where my laptop was, to read it. On mobile, Facebook will only let you read messages if you have the app, which tells Mark Zuckerberg exactly where you are and what you’re doing with your phone, all the time. I don’t have the app. Sometimes this means I can’t read messages on mobile, but I prefer that to having an evil data empire know everything about my movements.

My parents weren’t awake when I got home. Or they were still in their bedroom. They used to do that a lot. Mom’s desk was in there, and Dad had a laptop… which he usually used on Mom’s desk, since she died. I wondered where her machine was, and if she had made a thing about it once she came back.

“I’m not sure I remember what your third grade teacher’s name was… I can barely remember my own third grade teacher. Were they the same? I can’t remember. I think my own teacher’s name was… Wil-something? Wilber? Wilkins? You’d be better off… well, you’re at the house now, or are you back at your home? Kind of important to know, because I could give you some advice about who to ask, but it’d be a different thing if you were at Dad’s house.”

He meant, “You’d be better off asking Mom, but I don’t know if you know Mom is back from the dead or not.” I was pretty sure, anyway.

I responded. “I’m at Dad’s house. Wondering how I’d be able to tell the difference between someone who’s real and a Martian shapechanger. Could the name have been Wilder?”

Five minutes later I got my answer. “Mom isn’t a Martian shapechanger. It was the first thing I thought of, so I checked.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.

That answer I didn’t get until half an hour later. “I… just didn’t feel right, talking about it in an impersonal medium like the internet. I know you have a cell phone and I probably even have your number somewhere, but I remember you’re not the biggest fan of actual phone calls, so I didn’t want to disturb you.”

I replied with my phone number and the message “Call me.”

And then I had to sit by my phone, doing nothing important, nothing that would engage my attention in any serious way, waiting for him to call. Which took twenty minutes, despite the fact that I could see that he was online.

Finally the phone rang. “You raaaaang?” I answered in my best parody of The Addams Family.

“I’m pretty sure I must have, or you wouldn’t have known to pick up,” Jeff said. “Of course, I might have buzzed. You could have your phone on vibrate. Or maybe I sang, depending on what you have for a ringtone.”

“’You saaaaang?’ doesn’t have the same je ne sais quoi to it.”

“Wow, how long has it been since I heard someone put je ne sais quoi in a sentence? I think we’re old. I think that’s an old person expression now.”

“What’s going on with Mom?” I asked, quietly, in case anyone might be in the hallway to hear me.

Jeff sighed. “I don’t know what is, but I can tell you what isn’t,” he said. “Stephanie confirmed that she eats, sleeps and goes to the bathroom normally, and I confirmed all of that for myself. The toilet in their bedroom is still broken enough that they don’t flush it unless they have to.”

I winced. That was a level of detail I could have done without. “So, not vampire or undead. How did you solve the Martian thing?”

“On Monday, Dad woke up and she was laying next to him in bed. If the goal was to kill him, it would have made more sense to do it then, before he woke up, than to put on this whole elaborate performance.”

“You’re taking me too literally. I’m not worried about aliens trying to take our family off guard so they can kill us. There’s any number of things they could be up to, and they don’t have to be aliens. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The Stepford Wives. My Little Pony.”

“…My Little Pony?”

“There’s creatures called Changelings that feed on love. They impersonate ponies and take the love that other ponies feel for the ones they’re impersonating, as food.”

“Kind of psychic vampires mashed up with Martian shapechangers.”

“Yeah, but without the telepathy, so they’re not as good at it as you’d think. It’s a children’s show; they have to telegraph to the kids that these aren’t the real ponies. In real life, anyone who did something like that would be more competent.”

“How much verisimilitude do we need, though? She’s got moles in the same places Mom had moles. She’s missing a toenail just like Mom. Things I didn’t consciously think about, things I might not have remembered if you asked me to describe Mom.”

“That just means that if it’s not Mom, it has the ability to rummage deeper into our memories than we’re consciously aware of. That’s why I asked you my third grade teacher’s name. I genuinely don’t remember. Mom would, I’m pretty sure. Dad wouldn’t and Stephanie and Aaron were both too young.”

“I’m not sure I remember, but when you said Wilder, that sounded like it could be right. Do you know anyone from elementary school? Some of them went to high school with us.”

“I have some Facebook friends from high school, and maybe one or two went to the same elementary we did, but I haven’t been able to locate any actual people that I remember from elementary school. They don’t have a Classmates.com thing that works for elementary—”

“It says it does.”

“It lies, there’s nowhere to enter your elementary in your profile. All it lets you put in is high school, and it’s from a drop-down, not even freeform.”

“Huh. Guess I never tried it. I’m still in touch with anyone I cared about from back then.”

“I literally don’t care about anyone from back then, but that makes it hard when you’re trying to figure out your third grade teacher’s name.”

“If she can probe our memories,” Jeff said, “then nothing you or I know, or ever knew, would be safe. You’d have to come up with something to ask her that Dad wouldn’t know, or me, or Aaron, or Steph, or yourself, but that you know Mom would know and that you know someone else who would know it too.”

“I could ask Mariana for something.” My mom’s close friend and high school classmate was one of my Facebook friends. We don’t generally communicate directly with each other, but I follow her posts.

“That’s a good idea.” I heard the sound of a whistling teapot in the background. “That’d be my hot water for my oatmeal. If you get anything from Mariana, can you tell me about it?”

“Yeah.” I’d wanted to tell him about the story I’d heard in the diner, but no one got between Jeff and his oatmeal. “I’ll talk to you later. Probably online. Voice is making me paranoid.”

“I know what you mean. Do you need me to come up this weekend? I could make a day trip tomorrow.”

“That might be a good idea. I want to talk to Aaron, do you know what schedule he’s on?”

“He works nights now, so you’ll want to get him around 2 pm or so.”

“All right. Enjoy your oatmeal.”

“I will!” he said, putting a ridiculous amount of emphasis into it as a joke.

***

Before I could finish writing a message to Mariana – before I could really start, honestly, because how could I explain why I needed what I needed without admitting Mom was back from the dead? – someone knocked on my door. It was Mom. She was wearing one of her usual kind of shapeless but colorful nightgowns, and her hair was not brushed, so it was kind of a wreck. I noticed for the first time that it was grey. Mom had always dyed her hair since she started going grey, and it had still been auburn when she’d died. I’d never seen it fully grey. “Your dad and I are going to the arboretum,” she said. “Do you want to come?”

“Since when have you been into trees, Mom?” My mother had always been fascinated by history, and to some extent natural history like dinosaurs, but I’d never seen her express an interest in nature per se.

“I never was, much,” she admitted, “but the world is so beautiful. I was always more interested in the way humans shape the world than the way it came out of the box, but things like arboretums, Japanese gardens, zoos and aquariums… they’re made of nature, but they’re made by humans, and they say something about the people who chose to make them the way they are. And you know that your dad has always enjoyed nature.” My dad was interested in science, in general, and considered the natural world part of that. He was not exactly the kind of guy who would go camping.

In the past, I would have said “no, thanks.” I was never all that interested in nature myself, certainly not trees – maybe beautiful rocks or interesting landscapes, but looking at trees wouldn’t have seemed interesting to me. I still didn’t care much about trees… but my mom was back from the dead. I’ve gone much stupider and more boring places than an arboretum with her in the past, and now… if this was really her, if she was really alive again, I was going to spend all the time with her that I reasonably could.

“Sure, I’ll go,” I said. “I’ll take my own car, though. Just give me the address.” I always took my own car if I possibly could, because I’d get carsick if I wasn’t the one driving. “Should I ask Stephanie if she wants to come?”

“Sure, you can ask. I doubt she will, though.”

Stephanie, however, surprised me. “Yeah, I’ll go with you. We’ll meet Mom and Dad there?”

“Yeah.” Dad had texted me the address, so I pulled it up in my GPS. “About half an hour from here.”

In the car, she asked me, “Have you found anything out? I know you were looking into the whole Mom thing.”

“Jeff thinks she’s really Mom. We have a plan to get Mariana to give us a question that we don’t know the answer to, but that Mom and Mariana both would, so we can confirm she really knows things and isn’t just reading our minds. And a waitress at the diner said her cousin has seen what looks like someone else coming back from the dead.”

“It’s all over the place, actually,” Stephanie said. “I’m finding reports from everywhere.”

I glanced at her. “Why wouldn’t this be making the news, then? People coming back from the dead!”

“I feel like maybe no one wants to go on the record.” Stephanie looked out the window. “Nothing on Twitter or Facebook. No pictures of dead people on Instagram. I’m seeing things on Reddit and Tumblr – places where people use a consistent pseudonym, not like 4chan, but where that pseudonym can’t be tied to their actual identity. I’ve posted about it in both places, but I can’t make myself tweet about it.”

“Any idea why not?”

“It—” She shrugged, hands exaggeratedly widespread and head canted forward slightly. “It just feels wrong,” she said. “Like… we’re getting away with something. There’s a natural law we’re breaking here. I can post as toomanymushrooms or u/catonahottinroofsundae and no one knows who I am, but if I post as Stephanie Robbins and I tell everyone that my mom Suky Robbins is back from the dead…”

“What if that brought it to the attention of, what, some kind of authorities?”

“Yeah, pretty much. And even if I was just posting under my own name… I don’t have to say Mom’s name. I don’t have to put a mention to her Facebook in a post. But everyone knows my mother’s name, or they could find out from my name if they wanted to.”

“And you think maybe there are a lot of people with these weird feelings?”

“I don’t think so, I know so. A lot of posts explicitly talk about the fact that they can’t bring themselves to say anything in public, or talk about it with their real names on it.”

“Are they all parents?”

“No. It’s all kinds of people. Best friends, siblings, spouses, children… the only pattern I see is that nobody died a long time ago. It’s all, ‘my brother who died last year’ or ‘my aunt who died two years ago’ or something. Longest I’ve seen anyone talk about was a son who died five years ago.”

A thought occurs to me. “I can add something to your pattern, though.”

“Yeah?”

“You’d expect that, even if everyone with a resurrected relative feels this sense of dread about telling anyone about it with their name attached, because they feel it will, I don’t know, maybe cause the dead person to disappear back into their grave… you’d think somebody would do it anyway because they don’t care. Someone whose alcoholic abusive father came back and they wish he’d go away again, someone’s asshole brother, someone’s former best friend who betrayed them. But so far, no one has. How many people have you seen talking about this?”

“It’s hard to say because no one’s using their real names. Someone might post from their main blog and their side blog, or maybe they have a different name on tumblr vs reddit but they posted to both. But I’ve tracked thirteen separate names, and of those, I can tell for a fact there are at least nine unique ones because they talk about different people.”

“Thirteen isn’t ‘all over the place’.”

“I didn’t mean all over the Internet, I meant people coming from all over. I’ve tracked the UK, California, North Dakota, Ontario, France, India and New Zealand. Nobody’s tagging their posts and no one is willing to contribute to a master list, so it’s hard to find anyone outside of the people I follow or the subreddits I’m in, and I don’t know where everyone comes from. But it’s geographically widespread. I suspect it may also be happening in other places where people don’t generally speak English or maybe don’t have Internet access.”

“And what’s their sentiment? Like, are people frightened? Upset? Excited? Weirded out?”

She took a moment to think about it. “They’re happy. People are happy it happened. Weirded out, yes. But happy.”

“No whacked-out conspiracy theories about how it’s the contrails raining down adenochrome or something?”

“Not from the people it’s happened to. There was one flame war I saw where a religious person was saying that the person whose sister was back from the dead had to repudiate her. She’s not really your sister, she’s a demon from Hell sent to trick you, et cetera. And the person whose sister was back turned out to be just as religious, and they threw a holy fit. Literally. A holy fit.” She giggled. “A whole lot of stuff about how the righteous were coming back and Jesus had granted some people eternal life and this was that, and how dare you call these beings demons when they’re obviously blessed by Jesus himself and you’re the kind of person who would have called for Jesus’s crucifixion if you’d been alive then, and all that kind of thing.”

“Did anyone else who’d had returned people say anything?”

“This was Tumblr. None of the people who have had returns are communicating with each other in any way I can see. I reached out to a few on Tumblr private messaging but no one has answered. The only places I’m seeing conversations about it between people with returns have been on Reddit, because it has a forum structure. Tumblr is more like a whole hanging web of disconnected strings.”

“Still, you’d think that someone would be publishing a news article about it. Even if no one is willing to go on the record with their real name…”

“Maybe it’s not enough people. Nine unique instances, maybe up to thirteen, maybe more in places I haven’t surveyed. It’s not like I have access to literally all of Tumblr, after all. But that’s all I can confirm, and what if there isn’t any more?”

“If anyone came back from the dead I would expect the news to take notice.” I turned onto the final road; the arboretum was at the end of this stretch. “I went to the graveyard today. Mom’s grave hasn’t been disturbed. I checked with the groundskeeper. So either Mom’s body floated ethereally through the grave dirt, and her coffin, or her original body is still in there and whatever she is now, it’s not the same as what she was then.”

“It’s too bad we can’t have her exhumed,” Stephanie said.

“It probably wouldn’t tell us much anyway.”

“She’s younger-looking than she was before. Not by much, and the grey hair hides it, but she’s healthier-looking and less wrinkly. And I don’t see any evidence that she still has diabetes, or that she’s taking any pills at all. I haven’t seen her take any insulin shots, or anything.”

“Huh.” She wasn’t restored to her youth, or her hair wouldn’t be grey and there would be no wrinkles at all. She wasn’t restored to what she was at the moment of death, obviously. She wasn’t restored to what she’d have been at the moment of death without the cancer that killed her, if she didn’t have diabetes anymore. I felt like there had to be a pattern here I wasn’t seeing. I really wanted to talk to some of these other people having this experience.

I pulled in to the arboretum’s parking lot. Mom and Dad weren’t there yet; Dad doesn’t drive like an old man, but he doesn’t drive as fast as he used to, either. “Do they do this kind of thing a lot? Arboretums, parks, et cetera?”

“They don’t usually invite me, and I wouldn’t usually come if they did, so I don’t know. They do leave the house a lot.”

Dad’s car pulled in, and he and Mom got out. For the first time I could remember, Mom was actually moving a bit faster than him. Both Mom and Dad were the kind of people who walked quickly everywhere they went, but for a long time, Mom was slowed down by her various illnesses. Dad was still healthy for his age, but he’d slowed down a good bit since Mom’s death – grief was hard on his health, it seemed – and now Mom seemed healthier than he was.

“Did you know there are people who come here from all over just to see our leaves in the autumn?” Mom said.

I did know that; it was typically a factor in making it hard for me to come visit during the autumn. “I think it’s the mountainsides. There’s leaves turning colors all over the country, but not on mountainsides.”

“In California they don’t even consider these mountains,” Mom said. “They call them hills when they come visit.”

“No respect for the elderly,” Dad said.

“Yeah, these young mountains think they’re all that, but wait 100,000 years and see how tall they are then,” Stephanie said.

We strolled around, looking at the trees, reading what it said on the plaques in front of them. American Elm. Yellow Birch. Eastern White Pine. I’d seen trees just like these my whole life, and a good number of them, I’d never known the names.

“You never think about how beautiful the world is,” Mom said. “We’re all rushing through it, trying to accomplish the next thing. Or entertain ourselves. Read a book, watch TV. So few of us really want to interact with nature.”

“Careful, mom, your hippie roots are showing,” I said, teasing.

“I think if my generation had remembered what we were back when we were the hippies, the world would be better off.”

“We didn’t forget, Suky. The hippies were always big news, but you know as well as I do how many people our age just wanted to go punch a clock, buy a house, vote for Ronald Fucking Reagan… We thought we were the generation that would change the world, but it wasn’t our generation, it was us. People like us, who wanted to see a better world and weren’t content to just live like the sheep our parents were… but there’s people like that in every generation. And they’re always outnumbered by the assholes.”

“Actually, they’ve done a study,” Stephanie said. “The reason generations get more conservative as they get older is that at every point, the poor are more likely to die than the rich, and the rich are more conservative than the poor. So by the time you get to middle age, a lot of the people looking for social justice and diversity are dead. And there’s a lot more dead by the time they’re elderly.”

“I don’t buy it,” my dad said. “There’s entirely too many stupid poor people in this country who are brainwashed into supporting causes that help out the rich people and screw themselves over. They’re not living longer than anyone else in this country. The math doesn’t work.”

“Let’s not talk about politics,” Mom said. “I think we all know there’s something more important we ought to be discussing.”

“Mom?” Stephanie said, and looked at her, which is not a thing Stephanie does very often.

“Suky?” Dad said.

I didn’t say anything. I watched as Mom looked up at a tree and said, “It’s time we dealt with the elephant in the room, don’t you think?”

“Are you going to tell us about—” I couldn’t say anything more. I couldn’t bring myself to make the words.

“About the fact that I was dead, and now I’m not?” She looked at all of us. “I think we should talk about it, yes.”

It felt like there were eyes, watching us. I wanted to yell to my mother, to tell her not to talk about it, that someone might hear… but who? And why would it matter?

“Is that something you’re okay with, Suky?” Dad asked.

“I’m fine, but I’m getting the impression the rest of you aren’t,” she said. “Why haven’t any of you brought it up, except Stephanie, the once?”

“Well, you told me it was rude,” Stephanie said.

Mom sighed. “I guess I did. I’m sorry. This isn’t really easy for me either.”

She sat down on a bench, and Dad sat with her. Stephanie and I sat on a short stone wall around a tree. “I suppose I should start by saying, I don’t really know much more than you do. I don’t have any memories of being dead. I woke up in bed, next to your dad, on Monday morning, and for a while I couldn’t remember how I’d gotten there… I assumed I went to bed the previous night, but I couldn’t remember what had happened the night before. I couldn’t pin down anything I remembered as to exactly when it happened, not in the recent past. And when your father woke up, the shock on his face and the fact that he kept asking me if I was really here made me think, wait, the last thing I remember was that I was in a hospital dying of cancer, so why am I here now?”

“So you don’t remember any kind of afterlife?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I believe I had some sort of existence, but I don’t remember anything about it. When I wake up, I have flashes, feelings that I dreamed something about it, but I can’t hold it in my head long enough to write it down or even talk about it. It just… disappears, leaving behind only the memory that something was there a few minutes ago.”

“You know how unlikely the idea that an afterlife exists is, scientifically, though. Right?” Dad said. “Consciousness is an emergent property of a trillion neurons working together. Imagining that there could be some sort of construct that exists outside the brain and body is like imagining that a video game character could be waltzing around in front of us.”

“And yet I’m here,” Mom said.

“Time travel or a Star Trek transporter with some modifications would make more sense than something supernatural, like an afterlife,” Dad said stubbornly.

“It doesn’t matter,” Stephanie said. “If Mom doesn’t remember…”

“Have you had a medical exam?” I asked.

Mom laughed. “I don’t have health insurance anymore. I’m dead, remember? I can’t even begin to figure out how we’re going to address getting me a legal identity again, and to be honest… I can’t know I’ll be around long enough for it to matter.”

“None of us know that,” I said, “about ourselves or anyone else.”

“True, and it’s going to be hard to travel if I don’t have a legal identity. So I suppose I’ll have to address it eventually, if I last that long.”

“Thank God your state ID hasn’t actually expired yet, or there’d be no way we could fly to Boston. The passport’s expired,” Dad said. Mom had been legally blind when she died, so she’d had a state ID rather than a driver’s license.

“Is there any reason you might not? Aside from the things that could kill anyone?” I asked.

Dad said, “Your mother and I discussed… when she first appeared, I found it nearly impossible to talk about the fact that she’d been dead. When she broached the topic, I could talk about it to her, but I couldn’t tell you kids.” He shrugged. “My working theory is that there’s some kind of alien experiment going on or that time travel is somehow involved, but the fact that none of you kids were able to tell each other about it until you knew the other one knew suggests to me that someone with the ability to directly affect human emotions or thought is, for some reason, making it hard to talk about this. Maybe that means it’s a short-lived experiment.”

“Maybe I escaped from hell and no one wants to talk about it for fear the devil will take me back,” Mom said, but she was laughing. Mom had never believed in hell. Dad was an atheist; Mom definitely had strong spiritual beliefs, but they were kind of a package of woo that included reincarnation and ghosts, even though she’d been raised Catholic.

“There are others like you,” Stephanie said. “None of them have talked about it themselves, but family members or friends have talked about it online, under pseudonyms. I haven’t found any evidence that anyone has mentioned anything under their real names.”

“A lot?” Mom was surprised.

“So far I count between nine and thirteen unique individuals, plus Eleanor heard a rumor that someone who might live in town might have come back. We don’t know any details, though.”

“We need to find them,” Mom said. “I need to find them. I have a second chance at life, and I’m not ashamed of it. I won’t be silenced about the fact that I exist.”

“It might not be the best idea, Suky,” Dad said. “There are a lot more crazies out there than there were when you died—”

“—there were plenty of crazies then, Dee—”

“—right, and even then it wouldn’t have been a good idea. There might be some religious nut job who thinks that if you were dead you should stay that way. Or someone else thinks that you know how you came back, and wants to force you to tell them.”

“Those are valid points,” Mom said, nodding. “And to all of those people who might want to harm me because they think I shouldn’t be alive or they think I know how I came back, I say a hearty ‘fuck you.’ I won’t be silent because there are crazy people in the world. I’m not afraid of death, not anymore.”

“You’re going to risk Eleanor’s kids?” Dad asked sharply.

“I agree with Mom,” I said, standing up. “Nobody should have to keep quiet about the fact that they exist. But I have to tell Will.”

Stephanie made a face. My family doesn’t like my husband. They have justifications, but in the past few years, since Mom died, Will’s gone to therapy and has done a lot of work on himself. Mom was the only one in the family ever willing to forgive anything, though, so I’ve never tried to get them to change their minds.

Mom said, “Well, is he still a total asshole?”

“He’s… been trying not to be. He’s in therapy, and we’re doing couples counseling, and he’s working through a lot of baggage from his upbringing.”

“Why not tell him to bring the kids up and join you here, then. Coming back to life, might as well start a clean slate and see where things go from there. And you’re right, he needs to be involved in the discussion. Your girls, too. They all are old enough to understand what’s going on here, and what could happen.”

“You know I will never stand in the way of anything you want,” Dad said, which is the kind of thing Dad says rather than “I love you”. Things like, “If they ever fail to respect you, I will smite them” – talking about us and our treatment of Mom – or “You have always been my worthy opponent.” Yes. Sometimes my father talks like a comic book character.

“I don’t know if it’s a good idea,” Stephanie said, “but I know you taught me to be who I am to the world and fuck anyone who gives me shit about it, so… same principle. I don’t think you could be you and lie about who you are.”

“And we need to involve Jeff and Aaron,” Mom said. “I’ll call them and get them to come here.”

“We turned off your cell phone ages ago,” Dad objected.

“Dee, we still have a land line. I know we do because I hear it ring, and sometimes you even answer it.”

“Oh. Yeah, that’s right, we do.” Dad shook his head. “This world where everyone carries around their phone in their pocket all the time… it’s strange how you get so used to a technological or societal change that you forget that you did it a different way for 67 years.”

Nothing ever stopped my mother when she wanted something strongly enough, if she believed it was right. I hadn’t even thought of the considerations my father brought up before he talked about them, but I’ve never believed it’s okay to hide in conformity and live in fear. I didn’t think Will had ever believed in doing that, either, and my daughters had grown up going to political protests.

“We need to find out more about these other people,” I said to Stephanie on the way home. “See if we can contact them directly, find out if any of the actual returned people are planning on going public like Mom. We could coordinate if they are. Strength in numbers.”

“The religious right are going to crap their pants,” Stephanie said, laughing. “A Deist who believes in reincarnation, is married to an atheist, and has a gay son, came back to life. Jesus Christ hasn’t got a monopoly anymore.”

“That is probably going to be the most fun part of this going public thing,” I said.

***

So now I don’t know what will happen. My husband’s driving up from home with our girls, my oldest younger brother’s on a train, and Mom’s been looking up contact information for journalist friends she had once, checking which ones are still alive, using Facebook – we never deactivated her account – and my dad’s LinkedIn. Stephanie’s found two other people who have family members who came back from the dead, and one of them’s been willing to talk to her in private messaging on Tumblr.

I still have a hard time telling anyone who doesn’t already know, but it turns out, I can write about it without feeling the pressure, the fear. Don’t know if I can post it, yet. I guess we’ll see. I’m hoping that if I can get more information from more people who’ve been through something similar, maybe we’ll find a pattern, a point of commonality… maybe even an explanation for why we all feel this pressure not to talk about it.

Tomorrow we’re all going to talk about whether we’re going to do this or not, but I know my family. What my mom wants, she gets, if it’s possible and if it’s ethical. My husband and my kids are going to be in favor of her going public, and my brothers won’t stand in her way any more than my dad would. So we’re going to do this. The thing we’re really going to talk about is how to keep ourselves safe when we do.

Everything in the world is going to change. I just don’t know exactly how yet.

***

Obligatory notes because I’m so fucking late with this piece:

I have fucked up royally. I went into this without an outline and about 6,000 words in I realized I had attempted to consume a ball of energy larger than my head. This is going to end up being novel length, most likely. I struggled really hard to find a place I could reasonably end it as a short story, and yeah, it is absolutely not an ending. No followup on the Martian shapechanger thing, new idea is brought in and then treated like it’s the climax, protagonist is almost entirely reactive and passive. As a short story, it’s shit.

Unfortunately I found this out after I was already late. Not going to bore everyone with why this was a week late except that it’s allergy season and I’ve been exhausted lately. So there was no time to try to write something else. I hope you found it entertaining, if somewhat frustrating; it’s shit as a short story because it’s plainly a piece of a novel. Which I’m not going to write real soon because I have like 3 novels ahead of this one in the queue, but if I live long enough it will get done.

It’s kinda cute that story #30 falls on the 30th now because I’m late and story #31 is the last of my Spooky 5 Halloween-appropriate stories. But not cute enough to justify how late this is.

BTW, while this is not as autobiographical as “Radio” from Inktober, it is heavily drawn from real life. I altered some things because this is fiction, but the mother and the father in this story are pretty close to real life. Except that my mother hasn’t come back.

#52 project #writeober 2020 #alara's october 2020 prompt fics #spooky5 #late!

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whatwouldmindykdo · 4 years

Text

I wrote a little something about coming to terms with my sexuality and thought I’d share it here...

For as long as I can remember I’ve dreamt of my wedding day. As soon as I was able to comprehend the concept of wedding and marriage it became my only goal, my ultimate achievement: I wanted, I needed to get married. This would make me successful and prove my worthiness. I would be happy forever. And so, for years, I’d spend hours imagining the magical day: the dress, of course, and its designer, the venue, the guests, the music, the menu, the bridal party, the decor. And of course, the groom. Because it was always a groom. However, I would find it extremely difficult to imagine him. I could think of qualities I would look for in a partner, but that was it. Looking back now, I think that, more than any of these things, what I dreamt of was being loved and being in love. I was just hoping to find the kind of unconditional love I grew up surrounded by. Not a person but a feeling. An ideal.

I grew up in what you would probably call a liberal family. My parents are very open-minded, left-wing voters and I grew up having political debates at the dinner table. But it was always about tolerance. Every love is love, they would say. Everyone deserves to be happy, they would say.

This, however, was not true for them growing up. Both my parents grew up in working class families and worked their way into the middle class. As liberal as my parents are, their own parents were rather conservative in thought.

My father’s parents had grown up on farms. Their own parents, my great-grandparents, lived a life I cannot even begin to comprehend. After the Second World War, as life was changing everywhere, and especially in the countryside, my grandparents left for the city (well, a city, not THE city) to work in factories. They were deeply religious and my father was raised a Catholic. However, he also enjoyed great freedom. He was free to come and go, almost as he wished, to play with his brother and friends. He was free not to work in school, drop out after middle school and go on to work with his father. Which he did, for a while, until he realized he didn’t want to do that his entire life. In other words, he was free to fail, and try again. Would it had been the same thing had he been a girl? We will never know, as he was one of two boys.

My mother, on the other hand, was not. Her grandparents had been mining workers, as almost everyone in the area. Her own parents had been saved from this life, and pushed to look for work in other industries. They had married young and my mother was the eldest of two. Her parents were heavily involved in political and union movements, pushing for workers’ rights. This gave her an awareness of the political situation and an ideal of what is achievable when you work for it. My mother, however, is also a woman. And as such, her parents expected her to behave a certain way.

She was expected to be the perfect little girl. Calm, pretty, smiling. Not to take too much space. Do well in school. Be polite. And so my mother tried her best to be this ideal girl. She excelled in school, practiced many sports, and took it upon herself to keep the family together and happy. She eventually went on to work and had to move out to another city, but always close to family as she was sharing an apartment with her aunt. When she found another job closer to her parents, she moved back home. Eventually, she met my father. They dated for a couple of years, but moving in together was unfathomable. Not before marriage. And that’s how my parents ended up married without having ever lived together, something I honestly find quite hard to imagine. Her brother, on the other hand, lived a life closer to my dad’s. He could not roam the streets or drop out of school but he did leave high school without graduating, moving out to work away and never looked back. He introduced many girlfriends to his parents before eventually having a child and getting married, in that order.

My parents would probably tell you that they raised me and my brother the same way. That not more was expected of me. That I could do the exact same thing he did. And to some extent that is true. We were both expected to excel in school. To be polite and respectful. We were both told we could dream of being whoever we wanted to be. But what had been instilled to my mother was also, somehow, perhaps more sneakily, taught to me. I also had to be the perfect little girl, no excuses. The one that doesn’t move. The one that doesn’t scream or make a scene. The one that helps at home. As Michelle Cliff says in Notes on Speechlessness, ‘I am reminded that a great compliment of my childhood was: ‘she’s such a quiet girl’’.

Instead of rebelling against this system I made it mine: it was my way of taking up space. My way of being remarkable. I was expected to excel at school: I was top of the class. I was expected to be calm and discreet: I would literally never speak. Even today it takes a lot for me to be able to do things I know my parents disapprove. Because I have built myself through others’ approval, and then who am I once they don’t approve?

What does that have to do with being a lesbian, you may wonder. See, I knew about lesbians. I knew about gays. It was not entirely unknown to me. I saw them on the news, we talked about them at home. But no one in my family was gay, lesbian or part of the LGBTQI+ community, at least not openly. That was not what we did. As much as my family rebelled against capitalistic society, we were expected to conform in certain areas, and this was one. We, as a family, are heterosexuals. And so I unconsciously associated being a good girl to being heterosexual.

I don’t remember the first time I heard of the LGBTQI+ community, nor do I remember the first time I had a crush on a girl. I am quite sure she was my primary school best friend. I very clearly remember wondering whether I was in love with her or whether that was just how you felt for your best friend (hint: I kinda knew the answer). And so, little me moved on with life. Eventually the feeling wore out, and there was a very intense and dramatic fall out. But that was it, no more questions about my sexuality. Not until I was well into my teenage years, at least. When I made it to university I had began what I would call my transformative journey, learning extensively about feminism, inclusivity and human rights. I was passionate about these subjects and wanted to learn more, and more. I surrounded myself with people who were open-minded, teaching me about these very topics, and, for some of them, part of the LGBTQI+ community. At about this time I began identifying as pansexual or bisexual. I have never been really sure about this. There was no major coming out though. I just stated here and there that I thought love was about a person and their soul, not their gender. Even though I was identifying as pansexual / bisexual, the doubt never really left. I felt ill-at-ease with the identification. Maybe I’m not into labels, I’d think. Maybe.

Deep down, I knew. I think I’d always known. I would get major crushes on women in films and TV shows. Maybe that’s just identification. I could hardly imagine being in a relationship with a man. Maybe I just haven’t met THE one. I would feel uncomfortable whenever a man flirted with me. Maybe I’m just not into him.

I just couldn’t imagine being a lesbian. And that’s not to say that I could fathom the very existence of lesbians. I knew they existed, I had a friend as they say. I truly believed that all love is love. What I couldn’t accept was that I was a lesbian. How could I not like men? Good girls like men. Good girls are straight. Good girls get married TO A MAN, and have children WITH A MAN. No way. I must be pansexual. Or bisexual. Not lesbian.

Funnily enough, the pandemic was a big transitional time for me. I was able to truly connect with myself. Away from the world and the mundanities of everyday life, focusing on what really matters for the first time, I came to a realization. I do not like men. I do not find pleasure in imagining a relationship with a man. This realization was validated by experience. I signed up on a dating app (what??? I know, don’t judge). My immediate reaction was to set up my preferences to women only (that should have been another hint right?!). However, almost immediately I changed those preferences to everyone (men and women). Why? Because, I thought, by excluding men I might miss out on the one (he’s always somewhere). What if I miss on the opportunity of happily ever after because I renounce to dating half of humanity? And oh boy did I regret that. I was instantly contacted by half the male population of my surroundings (the joys of being on a dating app) and it really felt like it was not for me. I was feeling miserable rather than happy, anxious rather than excited. I switched back to women only and I have felt safer and more myself ever since.

I guess you could say that I have been feeling rather at peace with who I am. I have come out to a few (selected) friends, in the least dramatic way possible (well, they also are the least dramatic women I know). There remains the question, however, of coming out to family. Because although I have come to term with being a lesbian, I am still scared AF when it comes to coming out to my family and the main reason is: what if I am not lesbian after all (eye roll emoji)? The real reason, though, is that I know that as open-minded as my parents are, a coming out also means a period of adaptation, of understanding what it means exactly. And for someone like me who hates both confrontation and disappointing this feels like a big deal. Selfishly, I wish someone had been there before in my family. That I would not be the first. The trailblazer. The odd one out. The lesbian aunt. But then, I think of my little cousins. And how I could be that person for them. If I allow myself past the fear.

Thing is, I also truly believe that I will not be able to be fully happy until I come out. I will not be truly happy until I can be who I am fully, knowing that the people who accept it are the ones who love me, for real. But what if that means losing my grandfather? What if it means that people will literally never stop talking about it?

As much as I have talked about the hardships of coming out and coming to terms with my sexuality, I will also mention that coming to terms with this reality has been a huge relief. It has opened me to a world where love and inclusion are legion. A world where you are accepted for who you truly are. It has given me role models, values and a political awareness that I probably would not have had otherwise. In other words, being lesbian is a blessing because it is who I am, fully. And when I get to be this person, I can finally start to breathe. I can finally start to live.

My problem lies with mainstream culture and the way it portrays lesbian relationships. I have grown up with the ability of seeing gay couples loving each other, hating each other, flirting, breaking up. Mainstream media and popular culture have very much romanticized gay relationships. What of lesbian relationships then? The reality is completely different. And how could it not be when Instagram still censored the ‘lesbians’ hashtag two weeks ago? When we only have The L Word as a reference? Where on TV and in films have lesbians been given the space and time to actually develop a relationship except in that show? And I’m not even talking about the perfect, happy relationship. Just any relationship. More than 3 minutes of screen time. You’ll have to agree that this is rather recent.

How different would my life have been if I had seen lesbian couples on TV? How different would my life have been if people had not shied away from lesbian relationships? It is time for pop culture to be inclusive of our people. Little girls need this representation. They need to know that this kind of love exists, is normal, and brings fulfillment. I wish this had been my reality so that I wouldn’t have been mad when Casey from Atypical dumps her boyfriend to explore her relationship with Izzie. Because then perhaps I wouldn’t have been mad at her for doing that. I wouldn’t have been mad at Izzie for being honest. Because that is how deeply rooted my fear of being a lesbian was: I was mad at these two women for having the courage to explore their feelings and be true to themselves, when Casey could have had the perfect ending with Evan. And that is not ok. I need to let go of the idea that the perfect life means being in a heterosexual relationship. Because I know that this is not for me. This will not bring me fulfillment.

#lesbian #lgbtqplus #about me #sexuality #coming out?#gays of tumblr

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gaylotusthatexists · 4 years

Text

safe

pairing: roceit

summary: After accidentally letting out his secret, Roman runs away from home to his boyfriend Janus.

trigger warnings: running away from home, homophobia, bad family relations, sympathetic janus

word count: 1382

a/n: heyyyy i’m a day late with this one bc trash man’s birthday, but day twenty... five? i think? yeah. yesterday’s prompt was ‘mistake’, and this was a lot of fun for me asfhfkdhd. hopefully i should have today’s fic up later tonight as well, but for now enjoy this :)

ao3

Roman had made a mistake.

This wasn't rare for him - as much as he tried to deny it, he was always a mess, and an absolute idiot, and really he should have seen this coming. Still, he'd made a huge mistake, and he wasn't sure how he was supposed to fix this.

That was why he ended up outside his boyfriend's house at almost eleven pm, shivering from the cold (because of course he'd forgotten to grab his jacket) and debating whether he should just turn around and sleep on the street for the night. Going back home wasn't the best idea - he'd just ran away from home, returning would just complicate things further. But he didn't particularly want to stay outside in the cold, either, so instead he knocked on the door and waited for a response.

An older woman opened the door and Roman's face fell. He didn't recognise her - this was Janus' house, right? Yeah, Roman walked Janus home every day, this was definitely his house. Although, Roman had never actually been inside, and also hadn't met Janus' parents. He really should have thought this through a little more.

"Can I help you?" the woman asked, looking a little confused.

Roman cleared his throat. "Uh, sorry to come so late at night, but may I just ask if Janus is in?"

The woman nodded. "Yes, I- I think he's still awake. Janus!"

There was some shuffling upstairs, then footsteps coming down, and Janus emerged behind the woman. He frowned. "Roman? What are you doing here?"

"I..." He glanced at the woman, then back at Janus.

Janus sighed. "Mum, is it okay if Roman stays over?"

"It's eleven, Jan, I don't even know this kid-"

"Please."

A long silence, and then, "Alright, fine."

She moved away, heading further into the house, and Roman leapt into Janus' arms, just now realising how much he was shaking. Janus held him there for a while, awkwardly rubbing his back, before leading him up into his bedroom and sitting him down in his bed. Roman clung to Janus, refusing to let go - he'd always been a touchy person, of course, especially with Janus, but this was a little more than usual. Still, Janus allowed him to hug as tight as he wanted, until eventually Roman pulled away.

Janus looked at him, seemingly waiting for some kind of explanation.

"I'm sorry," was all that Roman could manage.

"It's okay," Janus promised, repositioning himself in bed so they were both leaning against the wall, with Janus' arm around Roman's shoulders.

"I... I made a mistake," Roman whispered. "A huge mistake. And- And I think my parents are going to kill me."

"I think that might be a slight overreaction-"

"They found my Twitter."

It took a moment for that to sink in, until Janus finally said, "Oh."

"I was doing so well keeping everything hidden, but..." He closed his eyes, breathing in and out. "They know everything now. About- About you."

Janus hugged Roman tighter, and Roman leant his head on Janus' shoulder. "Everything will be fine," Janus promised. "I'm sure they'll come around."

"They won't." He felt like he might cry, but tried his best to hold out. His parents knew he was bisexual now, so what? This- This shouldn't be that big of a deal, right? Right... "We had an argument about it," Roman continued. "They- They said I was just making it up for attention, and eventually I'd settle down with a wife and kids and all, and I just... I told them about you, and that just made them even more angry. So- So when I went up to bed I just kinda... jumped out the window, ran here."

Janus was silent for a while, slowly moving his finders around Roman's back in a circular motion, before he said, "I'll fight them for you, if you want."

“No, I..." He breathed in. "I just don't see what their problem is? It's like... they always tell me that they love me no matter what and that they always just want me to happy, but like, as soon as I express that I'm just a little different to the way they think I should be, they hate me for it."

Roman's phone started buzzing in his pocket. Groaning, he pulled it out and glanced at the screen - his mum, of course. He knew he should have left his phone at home.

"You don't have to answer it, y'know," Janus said, allowing Roman to move away from him a little.

Roman bit his lip. He... He supposed his mum did deserve to know where he was, chances were she was just worried upon seeing an empty bedroom and an open window, but at the same time Roman felt like she didn't deserve to be a part of his life anymore, if she was unwilling to accept him for who he was. He didn't want to pick up the phone just for his mum to yell more abuse at him.

He let the call go to voicemail, then collapsed against Janus' side. Janus pulled him back into a hug, wrapping both arms around him now as they sank down, moving to cuddle under the covers. Roman felt safer in Janus' arms, safe enough that he could close his eyes and drift off to sleep.

He woke up again a few hours later, to the sound of his phone ringing next to his ear. He sat up, Janus mumbling a quiet protest next to him, and grabbed his phone, not thinking before he answered it.

"Roman, thank God, are you alright?" the voice on the other end said.

Roman blinked a few times, trying to figure out what was going on, before his eyes widened. It was his mum calling, again. Shit. "Uh, hi, Mum," he said, heart beginning to pound in his chest. Janus stirred next to him, slowly sitting up as well and looking at Roman in confusion.

"We've been looking for you all night!" his mum exclaimed, concern leaking into her tone. "Where are you?"

"I'm-" He glanced at Janus, then locked his eyes on the wall. "I'm at a friends, don't worry."

He heard shuffling on the other side of the phone, a door opening and the sound of wind. "I'm coming right now, what's the address?"

Roman's heart started pounding in his chest. He was beginning to remember the events of earlier that night, and why he was at Janus' in the first place. He didn't want to go back home, not after that, not just yet. "Mum, I-"

"Roman, just tell me the address."

"No-"

"Roman."

Roman hung up and turned his phone off, throwing it across the room. He took several deep breaths, holding his head in his hands, before Janus slowly wrapped an arm around his shoulder again, pulling him back into a hug.

"You don't have to go back to her," Janus whispered, rubbing his hands in circles on Roman's back.

Roman sunk into Janus, trying to stop tears pouring down his face. "I- I think I have to."

"No, Roman, you don't." Janus sat up and repositioned himself, forcing Roman to look at him. "You deserve better, okay? You can stay here as long as you need. At least until it's safe at home."

"It... It is safe-"

"From what I've heard, it doesn't sound safe." In all fairness, Janus wasn't wrong. "Just stay here a while, yeah? My mum will understand."

"I..."

Janus hugged him again, and Roman buried his head in his boyfriends chest.

"She'll find me," Roman mumbled. "She won't let me see you again."

Janus continued to rub his back. "She won't find you here. I'll make sure of it. She doesn't know where I live, correct?"

Roman was silent for a moment. "Yeah, she doesn't."

"Nor does she know where any of your other friends live?"

"I don't tell her about any of my friends," Roman said. "All she knows about is our family friends."

"Then she won't find you here," Janus concluded. "And remember, I turned the location off on your phone so the government can't track you-"

"-so neither can she." Roman let out a breath. "I'm... safe."

"Yes Roman." Janus planted a small kiss on Roman's head. "You're safe."

#prideprompts2020 #thomas sanders #sanders sides #roceit #janus sanders #roman sanders #my fanfic #my writing

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trashcatsnark · 3 years

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What’s your opinion on Kerry being available to only male V when it’s mentioned in-game that he’s bi (correct me if I’m wrong, I have terrible memory)?? I feel like they should’ve had bi romance options if they were able to implement both gay and straight ones.

Oh anon, oooooh anon. I love you dearly, but you intentionally or not might as well have thrown lit dynamite in my ask box. This discourse has been such a strange beast within this fandom and I have definitely shared some vague thoughts about it before. I’m putting everything under a read more, to help stave off some....harassment or putting it in people’s lives who may not want it.

I still remember I was frankly heartbroken and upset when I first learned Kery wasn’t romanceable by female V when the game first officially came out, but before I played it; River and Panam weren’t even really known about, cause they weren’t talked about much in the promo material, plus Kerry was shown in romance scenes with what looked to be female V. So, if you go back far enough you’ll find me in December cope posting and being the saddest and angriest of beans, because other than Johnny who I knew was likely off the table. He was one of the only characters I wanted to potentially romance. Now, I’m further away from it, have processed my feelings regarding it and am more rational I believe regarding the issue.

But, that being said, a large issue of this sort of discourse is that; no matter what anyone says, someone somwhere is upset. I’ve been insulted, blocked, accused of fetishizing gay men, and so much over my opinion regarding this matter. I’m still currently debating if I even wanna tag this, cause the issue almost always brings negativity to my blog and to me. I have very little interest in being berated for this, so we’ll see how I feel after I finish typing this all out. I’m going to try to go through all my issues, my points, my troubles and feelings about the matter. But, at the end of the day, it is merely my opinion. If someone disagrees, fine, just don’t attack people or berate them over pixels in a video game. Just dont. That’s all I ask. Okay, so I’m gonna divide this into talking points and whatever, now.

Firstly, Kerry is bisexual. Point blank, period. I’ve seen folks try to argue that his wife was like comphet, which if you dont know means that sometimes exclusively homosexual people will try to force themselves into heterosexual relationships because society has conditioned them to believe they have to be straight. While, I’m not negating the fact that this happens, as a bisexual/pansexual (I use the terms interchangeably to define my experience and feelings) person I’ve struggled with it when making sense of my attraction to women. It genuinely is something that happens. This is not the case for Kerry; he doesn’t ever hide his attraction to men, between TTRPG lore and the video game he has had two wives , and he is stated by game developers and TTRPG creator to be bisexual.He is bisexual. Getting that out there, saying other wise, in my opinion is a level of bi erasure. That being said, I do still have my grievances with how the game chose to handle his bisexuality and bisexuality as whole, also imo, the game generally doesn’t seem...to treat players who are attracted to men well…

But before I get into that, I wanna make clear, I feel like Cyberpunk 2077 should have had more romance options for every orientation. If you’re not going to create a player-sexual style of romance; ie where every romanceable character is attracted to the player regardless and wish to focus on each character having their own predetermined sexuality; only have one character for each sexuality is kind of bullshit. If you’re a lesbian player and you’re not into Judy, you get nothing, except a fuck around with Meredith (who I will get to later). You’re a straight woman, but not into River, shit out of luck. You’re a gay man who’s not into Kerry, sucks to suck bud. You’re a straight man who’s not into Panam (kind dont get how you wouldn’t be but who am i to judge), well, you can fuck Meredith… so woooo. Oh also, if you’re not attracted to women, you will still be forced to watch in first person pov a sex scene with Alt and if you want Johnny to like you, you gotta date a girl. Also, all the male love interests will be sidelined mostly…. Hooray… But I digress, either go in with all romance options bi/pan/player sexual, or give more options for romance. Cause now you have the issue of people not getting the partner they hoped for and not liking their only option. Now, you got people trying to make the Judy bi, which is lesbian erasure and lesbophobic, along with people saying Kerry isn’t bi and can’t be with women which is bi erasure and biphobic. Whereas, if you had just gone in from the get go with either more options or a player-sexual romance system; we wouldn’t be here, CDPR.

Okay, so next thing, now that I’ve addressed my issues with the entire romance system and that yes, Kerry is bi. Should Kerry have been able to be romanced as female V? Yes and no. Which sounds vague, but I’m going somewhere. With the current set up of it; Kerry being romanceable to a female V would have unfairly given female players an additional love interest over male players. Female V would have the option of Judy, River, or Kerry. And Male V’s would have the option of Kerry or Panam. That’s not fair. I get that, inherently. CDPR painted themselves into a corner, by only letting there be two romances for “each” gender, one for “each” sexuality, and then using a canonically bi character for one of them. They played themselves, they were either gonna have to give an unfair amount of love interest to one side of their gender system or make a bi character who will only pursue one gender. So, they went for the latter.

Now, some people feel thats fine, because Kerry having a gender preference is fine and its okay for bi people to lean a certain way in regards to gender and its okay for them to not be attracted to people. And that is true. I am a bisexual woman who leans a little more towards men, I get that. However, I have only been given one reason for Kerry’s preference for male V over female V. And it was by a developer of the game who stated that Kerry pursues Male V and not Female V because Male V reminds him more of Johnny… And I hate that. I personally, hate it so deeply, because to me it does a complete disservice to Kerry and V’s relationship and Kerry’s arc. Because even with female V you see him being preoccupied with Johnny and V’s connection to Johnny, then you see him move past that. So, to then state, its still a deciding factor in him romancing V is so wrong to me. Like why???? Why would you do that to people who like Kerry??? Why would you put that in their heads, that Kerry on some level, subconsciously or not, was thinking about Johnny when he decides to romance V. Cause that’s not in the game, in the game you get the vibe he’s moving on past Johnny, like he’s growing, developing, genuinely likes V. But that stupid tweet, just radiates rancid vibes, whyyy???

And then, outside of that nasty tweet, I have to ask what other reason is there for why he prefers male V over fem V. They’re...the same characters essentially, just with different pronouns and body type. They also can look like whatever you want; they’re completely customizable. So, Its based off of what the game associates with gender characteristics and nothing else, meaning, his attraction is rooted solely in their gender and he turns down fem V by virtue of them being a woman and nothing else. Which, yeah, bisexual/pansexual people have preferences but when that preference completely excludes a gender based on nothing but gender…. Uhh????? See my issue????

And I’ve seen people saying, well, its better than CDPR playing into slutty will date anybody bisexual stereotypes. But, the thing is...THEY STILL DO THAT which is what drives me up the god damn wall; they managed to do slutty bi stereotypes and I don’t even get kiss the boy, which again, I get the need for fairness but wow, just wow. And lemme explain.

Meredith is the only character, other than joytoys, whom you can have sex with regardless of gender, body type, etc. She is the only character who shows that she is attracted to V on some level regardless of gender.

She is a one night stand. Her sex animations are the same as joytoys. She treated like a promiscuous love phobic woman. And having characters like that is fine, my own V is promiscuous and love phobic. But, we can acknowledge that in a video game by a AAA game company having the only character who is at least physically attracted to the player no matter what, be nothing but sex fodder...isn’t great bi representation, right?

Oh, and Kerry himself still is a promiscuous bisexual man, he just won’t romance female V because apparently, according to a dev, they don’t remind him of Johnny enough. AND THATS THE DEVS WORDS, NOT MINE, I HATE THAT. Like, Kerry is shown to have people’s lingerie around his house. He’s stated by Johnny to be someone who fucks around. He gets a blowjob from a man in a stairwell.

The two most blatantly canonically bi character in this game are promiscuous; one wont romance V at all and just wants sex, the other will only romance a male V because at worse, he’s comparing them mentally subconsciously to his dead friend and at best….because….reasons…. Literally, from what I understand for Kerry to romance V, they have to have the “male” body type and “male” voice. Meaning, fem V could literally by all appearances look like masc V, body type wise, but because she uses female pronouns and has a feminine sounding voice...no… the stars say no…

In my honest opinion, it is bad bisexual representation and a not so well thought out romance system for a game.

But, that being said, I literally never romance anyone, because I’m a Johnny simp. So, the fuck do I know.

oh god do i tag this.... ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

#anon #asks #i can't put these in the main tags or kerry's i cant #im so weary of this #im sorry anon #im a pussy who's grown so weary of discourse #Anonymous

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werevulvi · 4 years

Text

I haven't made much of any personal posts here lately, and it's mostly because I've been too busy burying my feelings to be aware of them, and too busy living my life. Don't really remember what I posted here last time, but was probably either that bisexual coming out post or a gender ramble about identifying as a trans man again. So let's take it from there.

I intend to make a youtube video on this topic as well, in which I'll go more in depth, so I'll try to keep this short...er than usual.

For most of this year, I've been back to "presenting male" (i.e. not trying to pass as female again, and instead going with my "new" default which is that I just look like a dude) and for the past few months or so I've been back to labeling myself as a trans man again.

However, I still see myself as a woman deep down. I'm just terrified of facing the consequences yet again, of being open and honest about it, without detransitioning. Because I don't want to detransition anymore. Only re-identify. And I wanna go back on testosterone again simply because I felt better on it, and its pros outweigh its cons for me personally. It even feels like I was somehow healthier on it, actually. Or at the very least, testosterone has been very kind to me.

Also, I've been thinking lately that maybe I don't actually have any sex dysphoria anymore. Because I don't wanna be male anymore, and I've come to truly like being female, after overcoming my past trauma, which caused my hatred of being female to begin with. However, I also genuinely like my transition traits, which I always have, and cling on to them firmly. My discomfort with looking clearly female on a clothed surface level seems to be more similar to how any/most masculine women feel discomfort in dresses and makeup.

It's only dysphoria in the sense that it's a persistent and consistent pattern of comfort/discomfort with my gender presentation - NOT in the sense that I actually wish I was the opposite sex. And I'm actually grateful that transitioning can't take my female nature away from me, only change what it looks like. So, the reality of what transitioning can do, is EXACTLY what I want. Transitioning is not an escape from my sex; it helps me connect better, more positively, and more strongly to how great it can actually be to be female. It's just my strongly preferred presentation and social role. I do not wish to actually be male for real. So basically, I'm just gender non-conforming in an unconventional way. I've thought that thought many times before, but never quite managed to understand what it means until now.

I'd still prefer being able to continue presenting very masculine/male, but just declaring myself as a woman instead of as a trans man. Problem is though, that doesn't work particularly well in practice. Unless I wanna explain wtf I mean by "I'm a woman" while looking like a whole ass man, to every single person I ever meet. And frankly, I don't have enough spoons for that shit. No one fucking does.

I don't mind being seen as a man by default. The only thing that's missing is that I can't help but feeling like I'm not allowed to speak my truth in its full honesty, be vulnerable and real with people about myself. Not everyone needs to know how I see myself deep down, but sometimes I just want to be able to speak freely about things relating to me being a woman when that is relevant, you know. And believe it or not, that comes up rather frequently.

But I feel like I can't do that because people are only ever interested in debating whether I'm actually a real female or a zero effort trans woman, and question my reasons for living as a man. People don't have to agree with me or validate me, but what I can't understand is what's so difficult to understand about a woman choosing to live as a man? The only difference is that I choose to do it by medical means additionally to dressing and the social roles I take on. Because we have that option now in the 21st century.

The idea that I have to put in effort to even just be believed to be female... it upset me so bad that I basically started feeling that I can't ever talk of myself as a woman again, and have to keep pretending that I'm a man at all times, only because of the way I choose to look. Despite my female nature is a permanent condition, I feel like I'm often not allowed to reclaim my womanhood unless I desecrate my body first. I was flabbergasted by the astonishing absurdity behind that. It made reach out for the trans man label once again, but unfortunately I ended up hiding behind my same old lie a second time. Because I was essentially bullied away from identifying with my own sex, because I wasn't performing womanhood "right." How far am I willing to go for the sake of authenticity...?

To clarify, I'm not speaking of wanting any "right" to have others recognise me as a woman or to call me by she/her or any of that shallow shit - I'm only speaking of my wish to call myself a woman, and the extremely disheartening backlash that comes as a result of doing so. And how much I've debated with myself whether it's even worth it then. And I guess I've realised that it is worth it. Because I'd rather hurt from the other people's shit getting thrown in my face, than hurting myself. But I have no idea how to actually handle it in practice.

I feel a lot of shame about it, admittedly. I feel like it's shameful for a woman to look like me, let alone willingly. I've seen the frowns on people's faces after telling them, and I can't help but interpret their narrow mouths and upturned noses as expression of disgust at my character. And oh fuck it hurts so much, it sends me spiraling into dark places, until I can't stand my own reflection anymore. In my panic and desperation I then turn to other labels to call myself, to hide under and -protect- suffocate myself with.

Truth is I'm incredibly ashamed of being this extremely masculine, hairy and balding, as a woman. But I like it if I just don't think of myself as a woman. And it's not because I feel bad about the way I look. On the contrary... it's because I genuinely like the way I look, but society's standards on women eat away at my confidence. Oh why does it fucking matter, it's just a label? You might be thinking. I'll tell you why it matters: I feel empowered and proud of myself, at being credited as a woman. But I feel robbed of that power and pride, when credited as a man. As though I am being over-shadowed by a lie which was put in place only for the comfort of others. Because a man did not accomplish what I did. A man did not struggle through the hell I lived. A man did not learn to love himself after a lifetime of self-hatred, against all odds, to overcome what he hid. A woman did. It does make a difference whether I speak of myself as a trans man who grew up female and is happy with his transition, but no longer hates the nature of his biology - or if I speak of myself as a woman whose traumatic female upbringing brought her through a gender transition, which she now refuses to leave behind, just like her womanhood. Because it is those two aspects combined, that truly makes her shine. And I want to shine. I hope that clears it up.

#detransition #transition #ftm #trans man #woman living as a man #dysphoria #gnc #masculinity #social backlash #difficult choices #re-identifying #reclaiming womanhood #gender expression #female masculinity #labels

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trunkzbriefs · 4 years

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Any Son and/or Briefs family headcanons? Spicy hot takes? Truths Toriyama and Toyotaro themselves can not handle? Straight up lies?

GODDAMN SORRY this took a while cause i suck at putting thoughts together. i apologize for my obvious briefs bias i have more hcs for them than the son family despite loving them both :pensive: anyway heres some random stuff

briefs hcs:

all of the briefs are pros at non-verbal communication. i hc that saiyans have their own language (and also in my own Mind Canon they still have their fuckin tails) and a lot of it is done through tail movement/body posture/grunts/etc. etc so theyve all sort of picked that up. even bulma, who doesnt have a tail, is pretty good at getting across what she means without actually speaking. they still do speak normally but it comes in handy sometimes considering that both trunks and vegeta are prone to running out of speaking energy or getting very frustrated with words, so having another way to communicate works very well for them

vegeta is fffffffffffffffffffurry. without getting too deep into my own General Saiyan hcs (thats why i made a whole ass four subspecies!!) i think that the entirety of planet vegeta tended to be very hot aside from the part where the castle was, where the temperature would drop. meaning that saiyans working in the palace would grow thicker fur around certain parts of their body, and in the royal saiyans theyd be Especially fluffy. he kept it down on earth, but he has thick patches of fur around the bottom parts of his arms and legs. kind of like snowy boots and gloves! he also has fur that grows in on his neck like a lions mane.

future trunks is an actions sponge, vegeta is a words sponge. vegeta will pick up words VERY quickly regardless if he fully understands the meaning of it or not (completely inspired by 'THATS RIGHT BOYS... MONDO COOL' in z) and future trunks will unintentionally mimic the actions of people - around people he looks up to he might take a few small mannerisms from but this extends to copying the disposition of anyone; he's just very adaptive. this is the most obvious (and funniest) when he's around vegeta bc it really shows like. yeah damn that sure is vegeta's son

vegeta & bulla have an intimidating bastard smirk naturally. their natural smiles are pretty frightening and they have to put effort into a 'normal' one. this also extends to current trunks, his default smile is the Vegeta Bastard Smirk but he learned to have a normal smile quicker than his father and sister. future trunks has a slightly unnerving natural smile (the fact that his pupils are always drawn so fucking small makes me hc that he just has a very intimidating look of 'cat thats about to pounce on an unfortunate trapped mouse' whenever he smiles) but he learned to look normal even quicker than current trunks since he's around humans a Lot and is sort of their uh, Hope. don't want to look scary to the people who depend on you!

bulma has some fighting knowledge and mildly good ki control. vegeta taught her it as a just in case so that she'd be able to defend herself against Bigger threats if he wasn't there and also so she could raise her own ki to alert someone to her if she had to.

vegeta is extremely clean and can not stand to have things disorganized for more than like... an hour before he has to tidy everything up. every time he goes down to the lab and bulma is passed out in a pile of bolts and circuit boards it kills him inside just a little bit

future trunks has little concept of power control. since his timeline was always in danger it wasn't really an important thing for him to learn. the amount of mugs he's accidentally crushed is impressive

vegeta tends to not sound like he's asking questions when he is. he doesn't add the proper infliction to the end of his questions and just sounds flat most of the time. it's confusing to people who dont know him well.

im not even gonna lie, im a BIG fan of the chill demon panchy headcanon so i love the idea that the briefs have a Lil bit of demon in them but just dont know it ghjnkm

[banging my fists on the 'hcs that not even got could take away from me' table] future trunks has OCD

vegeta doesn't really get labels but he's bisexual & "debatably a man", bulma is bisexal & bigender transfem (sometimes shes Wamen and other times its like "gender? no"), bulla is a nonbinary lesbian, current trunks is a bisexual trans man & future bulma forgot to explain the concept of gender and sexuality to future trunks so he's a little confused on that front and his gender & sexuality are "i have literally never thought abt these concepts in my life but i think men are nice. i refuse to think about gender though" (i actually have two main hcs for future trunks which are either gay trans man or more-feminine-presenting nonbinary bisexual)

son hcs:

goku is Not as fluffy as vegeta at all, but he does have fur on certain parts of his body. namely on the back of his elbows + ankles, down his back connecting to his tail, and on his shoulders. its inherented from gine!

gohan is learning saiyan language from vegeta! vegeta acts grumpy about it but he's glad to have someone to teach. when gohan learned that most of the history had been lost he basically wished shenron for a big ol book on saiyan culture and gave it to vegeta just as an act of kindness and vegeta was like [in an angry voice but very touched] "Ok. Sit down. You're learning." by extension gohan is also teaching the rest of his family!

i will take ox king being actually non-human to my grave so like, chichi has horns and a very short ox tail! gohan and goten both have horns, but they're hidden by hair. goten's horns are bigger than gohans.

goten also has a more ox-like tail, with a little puff of fur at the end. generally, gohan looks more saiyan-like and goten looks more ox/human-like.

although he keeps up his cheery demeanor very well, goku is still haunted pretty badly by like... everything that’s happened in his life. he still has frequent nightmares about cell & buu specifically.

gohan will freak out at worse, zone out at best, if he's even tapped on the neck. it reminds him of the whole 'getting his neck snapped on namek' so that area is pretty off limits to everyone

goten gets along really well with android 17. they both have a love for nature and 17s kind of like his chill uncle, so whenever he gets too stressed out or just needs a break you can find him face down on the ground outside of 17's place on monster island.

goku is really really good at remembering completely random shit. bulma uses this to her advantage whenever she's working and has him memorize random technology stuff. a week later goku can not remember what he had for breakfast that morning but as soon as bulma asks "hey do you remember what i told you last week" hes like "oh yeah sure i have no idea what it means but [blurts out three hours worth of technical garble]"

oh boy is this a headcanon that has a lot more depth to it than just a bullet on a tumblr post, but gohan has DID!

goku, like vegeta, doesnt get labels either, and does not even Try, ask him about any of it and hes like "i dont get the gender thing but i think lots of people look nice :)" gohan is gay and like vegeta, "debatably a man", goten + chichi are both bi nonbinary, & pan is a lesbian trans woman.

both:

bulla and pan are both into music! i think theyd mess around making their own stuff w/ launchpads

i have a general hc of ki mixing or shielding, essentially, if youre close enough to someone people wont be able to tell apart your ki and you can also 'shield' someone with your ki for a small amount of time. if vegeta has his energy low, his and bulma's energy are the same. same thing with goku and chichi! goten and trunks are near impossible to tell apart, and same thing with gohan and videl.

though goten and trunks are both protective over their younger siblings, gotenks is that protectiveness times a thousand. look at bulla or pan wrong for 2 seconds and you're going to have an angry gotenks in your face asking if you have any last words. i like to think that trunks and goten fused casually a lot, especially around the time where bulla and pan were young, so its basically goten and trunks own attachment to them PLUS gotenks' attachment to them as his own person combined.

i like to pretend end of z did not happen the way it did so uub, using nimbus, travels back and forth a lot. goku isn’t the only one who teaches him how to fight as goten, gohan and trunks all think of him like a little brother and love training with him!

fuck you letters to toriyama/toyotaro hot takes:

cell, as cool of a villian as he is, definitely should have had a creepier final form. or multiple- just something that really drives in the fact that he's made up of other's dna & fuckin ABSORBS people. also his first two forms should have had a different absorbtion method other than the tail thing (not the drinking thing thats fine) it just feels. Weird. not good

it would have been far more interesting to keep the bitter attitude towards vegeta that future trunks had imo... in super trunks was going through a Lot granted but the fact tht he wasnt more confrontational to vegeta being a dick to him seemed kind of off considering his attitude in z i just.. think it would be interesting and far better if they had more of a back and forth 'family but lowkey hate each other' relationship

i dont want to rant about super so heres some super condensed takes, goku black arc specific because thats 90% of what ive seen of super:

mai is a fucking freak ass weirdo, why did they not just make another character to pair with trunks

trunks not flipping the fuck out at his timeline being erased feels... out of character. also trunks deserved the win against zamasu

future bulma did NOT need to die

trunks should have just stayed in the current timeline

please fucking let trunks and goten grow up. we SAW a version of trunks who looked 14 (history of trunks....) and the versions of goten & trunks we have r/n in super do not look 13/14 respectively what in the goddamn hell is going on in the character design department

super definitely should have taken place later down the line

supers version of bulma and videl look awful. why are they That stick like.

vegeta needs to kill frieza. just once.

fu has enough potential to be a very interesting mainline character and i am so sad he's not

i would actively enjoy a sdbh anime with more budget that isnt just a promo anime and has a plot that makes sense... i think db should have more wild spinoffs

xenoverse deserved a better story that went FULL in on the 'what if' type of timelines- like they did in raging blast which is a FUCKING GREAT GAME

straight up lies:

dragon ball z is a good series

#yes db is my hyperfix. that doesnt mean its good <3 but its mine now and i make whatever i want canon #long post #fleetinginterest

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popculturebuffet · 4 years

Text

Toons for Our Times: Ducktales: They Put a Moonlander on the Earth!

At Glomglast, Glomgold Glomturns! Flintheart Hero of Earth Glomgold continues riding his wave of good PR from helping save the earth in the manner you’d expect: With a dangerous attention seeking pr stunt/ferris wheel/half-ased plan to murder scrooge. Naturally Dewey is first in line for it. Meanwhile Webby tries to convince a wound up Penumbra to stay and enjoy earth so she can get a new alien friend who she relates to and her brothers can get a new step mom, while Launchpad is awkward because his coffee with Pennumbra went worse than the one he had with the gas cloud. The Glom Knight Glomturns under the cut.

This one is late for both good reason, I didn’t want to hog the wifi while my nieces were trying to remote school, and not so good I.e.... I entirely forgot an episode was today because I’m not used to the new schedule, as in the past the show’s either aired on saturday like usual for a disney show, or as a cluster of episodes throughout one week, so even if it wasn’t something I was used to, I was tuned to stay in. The new schedule is weird and my brain is stupid is what i’m saying. Now i’ve covered my butt on with the review! This week focuses on Penumbra, and explains exactly what happened to the Moonlanders after Moonvasion. For Penny at least she’s apparently been living in the McDuck hangar, or somewhere near it, and working on rebuilding one of the bigger ships to get her people home. Della, while not missing the opprotunity to point out now Penny’s the one living in HER garage buliding a rocket home, pitches in and we see things have clearly changed. At least with Della, Penny’s let down her guard and now openly considers her her best friend.. and perhaps more because the romantic tension is so thick here you could cut it with a sword. Granted I may have swords on the brain because of this.

Which if your not up to date on your x-men comics, is an event where our Uncanny X-Men, now having their own nation of krakoa where all mutants are welcome, which includes apocalypse so he’s on THEIR SIDE in that shot, must fight ten other mutants in a ritual sword duel with some of the strongest swords in the mighty marvel canon, and loosing means the other mutants, many of whom are the CHILDREN of apocalyspe from centuries ago he thought lost, get to invade earth with a demonic horde. And if NONE of that made you curious, let alone want to read that, I just.. don’t get you.

Back to the gays, yeah the ten sword thick sexual tension is broken by the fact that Penumbra reveals she tried SOME earth culture and did get that coffee with Launchpad, with Della baffled.. I mean look at those abs. Though it’s probably less “Launchpad really?” and more “Why not me first? Is he sexier? Dammit he is. “ It went about as well as you’d expect.. with Penny storming out suddenly saying this is terrible and running off. Eh not the worst first date i’ve seen in animation this year. I’ve seen a woman go on a date with a man conjoined to his ex.. and not like their siblings it’s a medical procedure. Because close enough is pretty fucking insane and let’s keep it that way.

But yeah so Penumbra’s not sold on earth and Della’s attempts to get her to go with the kids, get to that in a minute, fall on deaf ears. But the thing is. her people are. When meeting with gibious and zenith, if you don’t remember the married moon couple we saw back in “The Golden Spear”, Penumbra finds out she’s the only one who wants to go home. Her people like it here...the happy couple even got adorable new outfits, a job with Glomgold in Gibbious’ case, and an adorable new dog named good boy. Look at them.

I would die for either of them. I hope we see Good Boy again. And that the show introduces Bolivar, donald’s dog at some point. Or even his ostrich hortense. I just want the duck to have a pet dammit.

Point is their happy here and while Penny wants to go back to the old routine of them all on the moon and her saving them.. their fine if she wants to go home but.. their staying here. And it’s easy to see WHY they want to: The moon was harsh, filled with monsters and much like us humans right now with earth, they only stayed in their clusterfuck of a home world because they had no way out. It’s probably why Lunaris sold hte invasion so easily: With his pitch they were just taking a nicer world from a bunch of mean asssholes who refused to share it and whose sole representative had seemingly betrayed them. Without any reason to hate the earthlings and, outside of once incident later in the episode, the earthlings accepting them with open arms and forgiveness, why wouldn’t they stay on a nice, sunny world, in a large city willing to house them and give them jobs, with delicious foods and all sorts of fun shit to distract you from the bad parts of living here that the moon lacked.

Penny’s issue is while THEIR lives were miserable.. her’s wasn’t. She was a hero, a super hero really.. I mean she’s dressed like a kree sentry, she protects the helpless and she’s a fearless warrior whose now a fish out of water on a world she never could’ve expected but grows to love. Martian Manhunter, Captain Marvel, the Mar Vell one, Warlock, Adam Warlock and yes their separate characters, Supergirl, not superman because while he is an alien he grew up here.. all aliens who immigrated here and grew to love and protect it and see it as their home. Penny just hasn’t got to the “love and protect it” part yet and while the rest of her people have new purpose, new homes and new lives and still meet once a week to party she finds herself, theri greatest champion an outsider, desperately wanting her old life back but not accepting it’s gone. She can go home but she’d be the one person on a desolate moon clinging to the past. Penny here honestly reminds me of jasper in steven unvierse future: Both are old soldiers who find their empire gone, their entire way of life uprooted and have no way to cope and desperately hoping things will collapse back to THEIR normal, not realizing the new one isn’t going anywhere and is better for their people. They need to move on but their too proud and too scared to try.

However Penny refuses to admit defeat to her people and that she can’t have “earth fun”, and left with no other choices, decides to take the kids up on their offer after all. To explain that we quickly wrap to the top of the episode, where Webby, bored and having trouble finding anyone, finds Penny and after Penny dosen’t want to hang out finds Dewey and Louie. I assume since their absent this episode, Huey is introducing Violet to Gyro, Fenton and Boyd, Beakly is buying groceries, Donald is courting Daisy and Scrooge.. is trying to get fethry’s hands, feet and head out of pickle jars because he thought they’d preserve him and Donald is busy for once so he’s the only one left to do it. Louie and Dewey plan on just laying around and biinging old ottoman empires, I can relate, but the news gives them a better option. A GLOMGOLD OPTION. Oh me mow how i’ve missed this big beautiful man. Seriously Glomgold is easily one of the best parts of the reboot and Keith Fergeuson brings an utterly delightful manic glee to the guy any time he shows up to eat the scenery whole. While I get holding back on him since he had an arc last season, it’s still nice to have him back in all his hammy glory. And naturally being glomgold he has a scheme going: After gifting a rolelrcoaster previously, over water and with sharks because his brand’s nothing if not consistent, he’s now offering the flintferris glomwheel, which is shoddy, dangerous, secretly a plot to kill scrooge, and is very likely to kill a child.. so in other words it’s Glomgold himself roleld into a ferris wheel. Dewey is psyched to go because he let another kid go first for Glomgold’s last PR Stunt/Nightmare and that kid got all the glory and as such is now Dewey’s new nemisis. So after asking his mom “If we can go ride a death wheel so I can get famous’, which of course Della says yes to, our heroes end up taking Penny along. Launchpad drives and gets his subplot for the episode, being awkard around Penny because the date went bad and not sure if this makes then enimies and avoiding her. He tries going to dewey for help, and while Dewey is out of his element, he does actually give good advice to just talk to her.. Launchpad just takes it while he’s driving because it’s launchpad. Thankfully webby can drive. He spends the rest of hte episode getting into shenanigans before, after helping her with the climax, phrasing, being honest and apologizing. And i’m also covering the plot to get her answer out of the way now: Penny admits he’s fine, thery can be fight buds, he’s a good warrior sh’es just “Not interested in an earth..male” her exact words.

I mean.. there’s no real subtly here. Even if she’s not into Della, which all evidence suggests is the case, Penumbra is CLEARLY into women. I mean Frank is basically saying as loudly as his mousey overlords will allow “SHE’S GAY FOR DELLA”. Wether this goes anywhere, I dunno. While Lumity started ramping up this year, that property’s not based on Disney’s classic canon and STILL had to fight tooth and claw to make Luz bisexual and her love intrested a girl. Disney won’t even let this show use Mickey and almost didn’t let them use the rescue rangers, the odds are against them.. but I also never thoguht we’d see violet’s gay dads on screen, or so many previously comics only characters, so frank’s said screw the impossible before. Now probably is no different.

Back to the main plot, and to the return of Glomgold whose great as ever. Glomgold made the moonlanders and some of duckberg think he was soley responsible for saving the world.. how many people besides the non-penny moonlanders think he actually did it is up for debate but he DID genuinely help save the world. Also his scheme to get his company back somehow WORKED despite not being legally binding, as he’s now back in his tower, back to scheming and has an actual assitant instead of a professional career woman he treats like one in a bit that didn’t age all that well even a year later. Gibious is now Glomgold’s sidekick and in a nice contrast to Owlson instead of being fed up with his crap Gibious, buying into Glomgold’s own ego, lavishes praise on his new boss, treats him like the god he thinks he is, and is genuinely sweet and helpful. It’s a nice dynamic giving Glomgold someone who ACTUALLY and genuinely likes him as a person and wants him to suceed and trusts in his insane schemes and leads to some great bits like Gib genuinely calling the safety inspector when Glomgold makes an airquotes remark about it and at the end Glomgold admitting “I can’t stay mad at you” to his new lackey/Best friend. Frankly Glomgold needed a 21 to his Monarch, and i’ts a delight to see it and Paulson and Ferguson have real chemistry. Meanwhile in the A-Plot, Webby tries to get Penny to enjoy earth, first with a street performer she tosses in the water ,as you should, then with a shooting range which ends with her massacering a clownhead to the children minus webby’s horror and tears. We were one more frame away from this really.

Also we get the ducks feeding.. ducks, a gag Frank’s apparently wanted to do for three seasons now, and with Penny being as confused as the audeince. but non of this, including roller skates really works. So while Dewey goes off to get in line to one up his rival, Webby gets honest with Penny about why she’s so invested and this episode goes from good.. to truly fantastic. While webby fangirling over a mighty and gay space warrior makes sense, there’s a personal reason she wants to help here that really tugs at the heart strings: Webby was like her once. Like Penny she spent her whole life honing herself into a weapon, sealed in her own tiny world, For Penny it was her moon village for Webby it was the mansion. And being thrust out into it was .. frightening. We saw webby struggle to adjust in “Daytrip of Doom!” and part of her wanted to plunge back into the mansion and her saftey net at times. But she didn’t.. with the help of her family, and her friends, she found out just how wonderful the world is and how as scary as the world is.. it opened up new parts of her. Duckberg webby was just as great as mansion webby if not better. So Webby wants to do the same for penny and what really clinches the scene is how she does it: a Hamburger, the symbol from the pilot of what webby was deprived of all her life, given to a new friend as a symbol of what the world offers. And it works at first, even without cheese. But then Penny gets a brain freeze, and Glomgold, needing a distraction from the saftey inspector rames her as going beserk because he’s an asshat in every other way let’s add racisim to it.

A chase insues, Penny’s determined to flee.. but she gets a second wind when Dewey, who rushed in to get the first ride and webby get trapped. Sadly dewey’s new enemy gets all the attention, and as we find out is aware he one upped Dewey and brags over it, but Penny has now gone from fish out of water to shark on the hunt, and with Launchpad’s help to get past Glom and Gib, and the roller skates from earlier finally has some earth fun by skating into the air, climbing the Ferris wheel and saving the kids. Penny FINALLY found something she likes about earth; That she can Still protect people, including her people and do what she loved there and the danger here is WAY more intresting.. I mean on hte moon itw as just the usual monsters she was used to. Here she had to rocket into the air, and climb an megalomainics cannon armed ferris wheel to save two adorable children. In short she’s become a super hero and like those I mentioned, has grown to care about earth. So basically this is like captain marvel was an episode of Steven Universe. I likes it. But it’s a nice character arc, as Penny realizes the outside world, and her new friends/future stepchildren, have b eauty and worth. And she will protect their kind, she will protect them. I mean duckberg already has about 4 other superheroes if you count lena, which with that outfit last time I dooo, but frankly with how much disaster it faces on a daily basis, and how much Fenton needed a goddamn break, and with Darkwing leaving for st canard soon, they could probably use her.

So the day is saved, Glomgold is buired in fines but has a new minon, Dewey is dewfeated and Penny is happy again. We end on Penny recounting everything to Gibious and wife, and Good Boy obviously, along with Della who casually admits she really shoduln’t of let her child go but sooths him anyway over his loss. Penny is happy and deciding to stay, and her and her new best buddy laucnhpad are going to go tear the ship apart with her carrying della along. I swear when they finally do do it she’s just going to.. carry a willing della to her bedroom and throw her down on that thing.. everything after is up to you Id ont’ write porn here. Nothing wrong with it just not my bidness. So with a hopeful new future and a neat t-shirt, Penny finally finds her place in the world.

Final Thoughts: A very good, very gay episode that’s just as good as last weeks and gives penumbra a hell of a character arc, while also being an utterly hilaroius episode, from penumbra’s destruction, to glomgold’s hilarious as always antics to dewey’s attention whoring reaching self endagering heights of stupidity and ego, this was a great one and keeps up Season 3′s quality streak. While the plot progression may be slow for now, everything else is at an alltime goddamn high.

Next week, it’s the HALLOWEEN EPISODE BITCHES. Nuff Said. Until then you can check my blog for more reviews, as we have some halloween stuff coming up. Sadly with Loud House going silent, it seems this is our only weekly coverage but expect more reviews of various shows, and some very spooky ooky ones coming very soon including some brucie bonus episodes and until we meet again, go team venture! Play us out glomgold....

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#ducktales #they put a moonlander on the earth!#penumbra #della duck #dellumbra #webby vanderquack #dewey duck #louie duck #Flintheart Glomgold #gibious #reviews #ducktales spoilers

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queerlyhalloween · 4 years

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Not to sound like the joker™️ but i hate western society. I know that hair and clothes aren't gendered, so do most of my mates, ive been working hard at unlearning the internalized transphobia that's just a part of being trans in the UK and actually ALLOWING myself to think about going on hormones and dressing in ways other than "ambigious as possible" despite the fact im non-binary

i grew myself a little mullet because ive not been working in the pub and wanted solid snake hair, ive allowed myself to look at my face and the long hair around it and not despair because i know that longer hair doesn't make me a woman, but the moment you go into a shop, or get takeaway or pass by people in the street its all "move out the way of this lady!" and "thank you, ma'am"

i dont want the gender option of 'other' on my ID i want to know 1 good reason why gender should be listed on an ID in the 1st place

ive just come back from the range and i had my hair up like some e-thot fuckboy, i had to go BACK to the range because they got my click and collect order wrong so ive got two members of staff looking over my order, im dressed in black jeans and a black masc-looking ripped shirt, mask covering half my face and as the manager's showing the kid who served me the receipt they go "oh I served that guy earlier" and the manager corrects them "its a lady". I say "im niether" and they both just stare at me like im a toddler. Im already panicking because the air feels the same way it did when some cunt came after me in the pub toliets. "dont worry about it :)" i say, they both turn back to the tills and completely ignore me.

Anyway, micro-aggressions, ive experienced a lot of them for many reasons over the course of my life and today ive decided to snap.

Not at the people in the range like, just in general.

I will never pass. That's just an element of trans euphoria i will never get to experience. Not right off the bat, anyway. Not where i live, and most likely not in my lifetime. Maybe for kids in LA or Brighton, and hey power to you guys man im happy for you, but people assume or guess m/f when they look at me and they will never get it right.

So when i see people on this site try and twitter etc rank "who's the most oppressed"™️ like a godamn smash bros tier list it blows my mind because of all the things you could spend your days doing thats what youre expending energy on?!

You could be the exact same age, race, sex, gender, sexuality, you could have the exact same disabilities, mental health conditions and money in your bank as another person on this site and you'd still never understand what they've been through. Our experiences, our families, our morals and lives are always gonna be different and the moment you try to write definitive rules on whose got it worse you've already lost and you're already wrong. Oppressed classes are not a fucking hivemind and pretending they are is only going to cause you more problems. I get the strong sense that some of you looked at the word intersectionality, went "ah yeah, i know what that means" having never read up on the matter, then proceeded to play the pain olympics.

And its creating a culture where kids feel the need to spills their souls online to justify living their lives!

You've not listed your disabilites in your bio so you're able-bodied. You're Irish but haven't listed your race so you're white. You're cis man so you've never played with gender and suffered as a result. You're asexual so clearly you're a cringeworthy baby who's never experienced a wrong-doing in their life.

The reverse is true too, if you list every aspect of yourself then you're automatically honest. The more opressed you are the less likely you are of causing harm to others. Psht, don't have a carrd in this day and age? What are you, a fraud? cishet white man playing make believe? Post a selfie or face the wrath of ozymandaus. What's privacy? It takes me 3 minutes to read the bio on this discourse side-blog so clearly they're an angel.

my mam abused me for years, she did the same to my brother when i left home at 18 and my dad drank himself to death. My nan, his mother, never believed me because my mam's a disabled woman with a lot of trauma, and at 14 how do you explain to the woman who takes you to the beach that it's WORSE because as she's beckoning you to the side of her bed so she can scream point blank in your face, or hit you, you're never truely sure, you're thinking about running away because of course she physically can't chase you but she can throw. And then where would you go if you did buggar off?

"You have to sleep sometimes" she used to say to me when I'd piss her off. Other days she told me horror stories about kids in care, and disabled people having their kids taken away, made me promise that I'd always love her and always be her baby, and I'd do that for her because she's my mam, she'd be satisfied then ignore me for a while. I grew up thinking that was entirely normal until i'd tell funny family stories at school and nobody would laugh. The closest I got to truely running away was when I changed my name and pronouns and her rejection, turned to vitriol one night and I so, so, nearly held a knife to my throat and simply fell forwards in the uni showers. Obviously I didn't do that.

But she's had a shitter life than me thus far so she's in the right, as the online black/white dichotomy states. I keep her at arm's length but I'm unable to cut her away without losing the rest of my family because I dared defy the role of eldest child and care for her as I've done my whole life, as is expected.

we need to take things on a case by case basis, and learn when stuff is none of our business.

"Hey! :) I see you've reclaimed (X) slur, without submitting the proper paperwork. Real quick tell me every trauma you've ever experienced or I'll write a callout post :) delete this anonymous message (as is your right) and i'll assume you as sus ❤"

you can only call yourself a dyke if on your 13th birthday, the moon's tender rays struck you through your bedroom window and gave you your first wet dream about girls.

Great, cool. I have no interest in calling myself a dyke, i cant call myself a lesbian because it makes me dysphoric, thats why im queer, but i can assure you that when 3 kids from catholic school pinned me under the bridge and threatened to cut me open for being a "dirty dyke tramp" they didn't play 20Qs with me first to check that i was actually a lesbian.

if your first thought is "well thats just misdirected homophobia, so youre not ACTUALLY a victim" log the fuck off and consider what's wrong with you. Because all our oppressors care about is sniffing out the wrong on you and beating it out, they dont care what breed of wrong it is.

so you're going to spend your day, the enlightened adult that you are, frothing at the mouth because some 15yr old dared call themselves butch despite them being OnLY a BiSexUAl? You're gonna say that trans woman deserves to be suicidal because yes she may be trans BUT she's from the UK, so clearly she loves her horrid country and government. You're gonna say that black lad deserves racial abuse because he's trying to focus on his studies rather than go to protests. That 19yr old who's living in poverty deserves it because they work for Amazon. Texans deserve to freeze to death because there are republicans in Texas.

You're going to harass a complete stranger coming to terms with the parts of themselves society has taught them are worthless at best because they're not doing it the way YOU think is right.

This post has not ended where I started it but I really dont care:

Some of you are so fucking desperate to be the bullies you never got to be in secondary school and it shows. But you're cowards. You can't just admit you want to divide and concur so you do it in a new woke way and when your time on this earth is done, you'll have commited the same pain that's been dealt to you and wonder why you died miserable in a world thats more or less the same.

okay to reblog but dont @ me for a debate because i have, like, real problems and will just block you

#tw suicide mention #child abuse #homophobia #transphobia #ablesim #racism #*muffled screaming*#im shit at tagging sorry if i missed anything but im out i think

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nellie-elizabeth · 5 years

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Supernatural: Atomic Monsters (15x04)

I love it when Supernatural goes meta. Seriously, I don't think I've ever seen a show do it better. It's goofy and yet still thematically appropriate. And it's respectful of the once-in-a-lifetime fandom experience of being a person who watches Supernatural. Who grows up watching it. Let's talk about it.

Cons:

There is one thing that this show can't make its mind up about, and it's when it's cool to murder people. Like, yeah, the kid in this story was a vampire who had killed a young woman and was worried about losing control and killing again. But this episode also featured a (kind of) return of Benny, reminding us that vampires can be allies and friends, too. We've done this so many times over the years - Sam and Dean have had many debates about whether well-meaning monsters can control themselves enough to be left alive. And they've allied with people who under normal circumstances they might have just killed. Rowena. Crowley. Benny. Even Cas, if you want to get technical about it. It was painted as extremely tragic that the young man in this episode had to die. But I wanted there to be at least a conversation about it beforehand, where Sam and Dean said that yes, a normal life probably wasn't possible... but death wasn't the only option. If we can't live in the middle-ground, where exactly are we going with all of this?

I'm not surprised that Dean and Sam didn't talk about Cas in this episode. It makes sense because Misha can't be in the whole season, and Destiel just broke up in episode three. They're going to draw this sucker out just a little bit. But yeah, on a selfish note, I admit I was hoping for at least a mention. Maybe Sam could remark that Dean's good mood seems like a front, given how upset he's been about Cas. Oh well. I'm choosing to remain optimistic.

Pros:

The monster-of-the-week story was not one I'll be remembering as a favorite or anything, but it worked as a nice mirror to poor Sam's state of mind. Obviously he's sad about Jack, sad about Rowena, feeling really low about things in general... but he's also having terrible nightmares about turning evil and killing his brother. And now here we have a story about a monster who is afraid of hurting his loved ones, and who chooses to die to protect others. That's a very Sam-Winchester-y choice to make, and I know for a fact that Sam would rather die than hurt anyone, especially Dean. So the foreshadowing here was clear, even if the details of the case this week weren't especially memorable on their own merits.

And that dream at the beginning... I loved the cool lighting, the fight choreography, Dean's signature "cupping the face of my dying boyfriend loved one" move... all of it was wonderful. Jensen's directing really shone in that opening scene. And Jared played Evil!Sam so well. The fact that they brought back his psychic powers, the demon blood, and used it to frighten Sam about what he might become... all of that stuff was golden. Poor Sammy. There's a great moment before they leave for the case when Sam suggests that Dean call on another hunter, and Dean insists that Sam needs to come along. You just know that Sam is scared of hurting Dean, or of being off his A-game and causing problems. The poor darling!

The impala brotherly moment at the end was really powerful, and showcased to me how far these boys have actually come. Dean is open and honest, saying that he wants to help Sam out of his funk, that Sam helped him to believe that what they do still has a purpose, and still does some good. Sam is then honest about his own feelings right back, saying that he can't let the past go, that he still thinks about Jessica, that sometimes it all catches up to him and he feels like he can't breathe. And then, as if wanting to appease Dean and brush past the conversation, he says "maybe I'll feel better in the morning."

The Dean Winchester of earlier seasons would have let it go, stayed in a place of denial, and moved right on. But this Dean Winchester says to his little brother: "And what if you don't?"

Sam doesn't have a good answer for him, but just the fact that Dean asked shows huge character development. As far as the boys are concerned, Chuck is gone. They are free. Now they can work on their emotional well-being. They can decide what the rest of their lives look like. And as a start, Dean wants to help his little brother, and he doesn't want to shy away from the rough parts of that. I am enamored with the character development here.

But let's pivot and talk about that meta goodness. We see that in the years since we last checked in with her, Becky has gone through extensive counseling, and has gotten married and has kids. She is also still an active member of the Supernatural fandom, selling art on Etsy and writing fic. Let us just track the way that this show has talked about its fans over the seasons. In the beginning, Becky was a manic, obsessed, crazy fangirl who literally drugged Sam and forced him to marry her. Over the years, however, they have taken a different tack, treating the fandom with respect, especially in episodes like the 200th. And here, we circle back around. We have an acknowledgment that this show has been on for fifteen years, that some of the teenage girls who fell in love with it when it first started, are now grown adults with careers and families. And that these grown adults might still love the show as much as ever, might spend their time online chatting with other fans, working hard on fanfic, turning their passions into lucrative careers. And this is not mocked or derided in any way. I was gobsmacked by how respectful this interpretation of fandom was, and was so, so pleased to take a look at an old character and show real change and development.

This episode also firmly telegraphs something about the theme of this final season of Supernatural. The year 2019 has been rough for me, in terms of beloved franchises choosing to go the "dark" and "grim" and "realistic" route, what with your Game of Thrones and your Endgame and your killing off of beloved depressed bisexual characters (ahem Magicians ahem). There was a not-so-small part of me that feared that Supernatural was going to go the same direction, ending the story with some dark tragic ending, because it's the cool thing to do or whatever. But after this episode, I'm fairly confident that's not where we're headed. Chuck, our villain, wants to end the story as a tragedy. But Becky, the audience avatar, tells him exactly how much the fans will hate that. And Sam and Dean have always been about free will, in the face of insurmountable odds. So it's looking like the boys are going to earn their happiness this season. And I'm very much all about it.

I feel like there's a lot more I could say about Becky and Chuck, but I'll leave it at that. This episode had a lot of really great stuff going on in it. For once, the C-plot episodes make sense for Sam and Dean, because they truly don't know that the bigger threat is out there. We get the nostalgia factor with returning faces like Becky and Benny. We get meta-commentary on the nature of storytelling and endings. We get Sam having sinister dreams and actually confronting his own depression and trauma. I'm a pretty happy camper!

8.5/10

#review #supernatural #supernatural review #spn #spn 15x04

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girlobsessed21 · 5 years

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The 100 6x06 analysis: A night-without-blood, only tears

Loved this episode. We got a glimpse of the old Bellamy, albeit small, but he was there. The pacing was better. We finally got to meet Sheidheda. And, I called it in my predictions post last week, Clarke Griffin’s coming back.

Is it weird to watch this show knowing Bob and Eliza are married? Not for me, I separate the characters from the actors easily. Just once again, I’m thrilled they found their happily ever after. Please check out the wedding gift donation.

Madi crossing to the dark side

Obviously, this is the worse to come out of the whole body-snatching ordeal. Josephine couldn’t care less about her new daughter. Although Gaia is Madi’s teacher, she’s still her subordinate. Without any guidance, sweet little Heda falls straight into the exploiting claws of her evil predecessor.

I didn’t think this would rise so soon, but I fear we might have a new Bloodreina on our hands. The Sanctumites killed Madi’s mother, she will retaliate with full force and who could blame her. If you took mine for self-serving reasons, I’ll want vengeance too.

Somehow, I still think those machines strapped to her head is Josephine’s handiwork, wanting something from the flame. Or maybe it’s a way to pull Madi back from the dark hole she’s fallen into.

Either way, it looks like she’s becoming a villainous character who wants revenge and I hope she succeeds. Russel may have goodness inside, yet he still murdered an innocent person to bring his daughter back. Ryker, on the other hand, is a quizzical one.

The 100 episode 6 - Return of the cockroach

We all knew he would take that deal but, as expected, terms and conditions apply. Clarke’s dead, there’s nothing they can do about it. Teaming up with Josie means they get the Sanctumites’ help with survival and he earns eternal life.

It makes sense for him, Clarke wasn’t his favorite person and what’s done is done. Obviously, he knows convincing Bellamy will be a lot harder.

That was all of our reactions. And then he goes and spoils it all by saying some stupid like it’s what Monty would have wanted. Oomf the trump card. No violence, no eye-for-an-eye, just look forward and do better. Oh, and it’s what Clarke would have wanted too.

In some twisted way, he’s right. His way saves everyone else including Bellamy and the planet or moon or whatever. Both Murphy and Josephine’s manipulation this episode is vulgar yet brilliant. Richard and Eliza, you killed it.

Meanwhile, in the woods, the badass trio is being summoned

May I just highlight this line: “Forty vestil virgins and a side dish of none of your damn business.” Man, I love Diyoza too bits. And Xavier. And Octavia. And I hope Marie gets that Emmy nomination because she deserves the hell out of it.

So, Diyoza learns about Gabriel’s rebellion but refuses to join in order to save her daughter’s life. She’s not your conventional mother hen but the way she looks out for Octavia and her child is a clear depiction of her ability to care.

How did Xavier know Diyoza is expecting a girl???

There are tons of rumors that Xavier is Gabriel. I don’t think he is. Or rather, I hope he’s not. I want Gabriel to be an anomaly as much as he “lives” in one. Perhaps he can only exist inside it because of his age? But he’s calling them for a reason and I bet that reason is “death to primes” and Clarke’s resurrection.

I’m still sticking to my time travel theory of Diyoza meeting Hope and Octavia facing off with Bloodreina. I’d love to see what Xavier’s battles might be. Also, I’m pretty sure these three’s journey is the conclusion to all of their problems and the Blakes’ reconciliation. The villains of earth become the heroes of Sanctum was foreshadowing, I'm certain.

Abby, wtf is wrong with you?

How on earth does she not see through the inconsistencies in her daughter’s behavior? Echo figures it out before she does for heaven's sake. And after everything they’ve done in the past, she decides it’s alright to resurrect the man she loves at the cost of someone else.

Will she resort back to drugs after this too? Clearly, she can’t deal with the thing’s she’s done. Turning Jake in. Becca’s lab. The dark year. And now she’s doing it again. All because her daughter tends to think it’s okay and doesn’t want to lose her. Open your damn eyes, Clarke would never ask you to do something that selfish.

Raven and Ryker

Can someone please shut Raven up. Her self-righteous attitude this season is sickening. She did bad things too. Asking Clarke to kill Lexa. Sacrificing Murphy so Finn could live. Refusing to give Abby medicine for radiation poisoning. Has she forgotten? But worst of all, she left the hard decisions up to Bellamy and Clarke and now she’s mad because they made them.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the piece of her mind she gave Ryker. But the condescending way in which it’s done is annoying. He clearly needs to hear it and she touched where it hurts. Is it wrong to like him and hope he survives? Out of all the primes, it seems like he and Gabriel are the only ones with a conscience. Russel’s is debatable.

They are not gods. What makes them so special? Knowledge? Intellect? Wisdom? And creating a realm of worship so people would sacrifice themselves for you is revolting and everything but divine or remarkable.

Yes, Echo gets a narrative!

The woman is smart, dangerous and loyal. So far, she’s been nothing but Bellamy’s girlfriend and subject, so I’m glad she finally got a storyline of her own. I’m sure the mercy kill of the guard was used purely to show her compassion, which her boyfriend questioned a few episodes ago. Many people still do not like her.

Being an amazing spy, she extorts Jade for information and figures out that Clarke’s gone. Her natural inclination is to attack which Bellamy, to my surprise, shoots down. That look in her eye suggests she’s not done though. She’ll probably save Jade’s life in exchange for being a double agent. Which could be a great asset to our heroes.

Tasya Teles said that her favorite dynamic of the show is yet to come and that Echo is bisexual. I can see the two of them partnering up and that’s a team I both route for and ship. They’re equals, they have similar backgrounds, they’re caring in a complex way. Why not be those things for each other?

In the end, it all boils down to Bellamy and Clarke

Bellamy’s tears, tears, and more tears this episode was heartbreaking. Don’t hate me, it wasn’t as convincing as, “We can’t lose Clarke, we can’t lose her!” or “I left her to die and we all die anyway!” though. Why is his mourning stressed this way? Maybe because he lost someone he loves like Russel suggested.

Acting out of anger, he tried to choke Russel for killing her and I imagine the following stopped him: “You have such a big heart Bellamy... but to make sure we survive, you have to use this too.” Especially because he later states that we survive, it’s what Clarke would have wanted.

Tears welled in my eyes when he told Madi. And that hug gave me painful father-daughter feels. At least he’ll try to keep his promise to Clarke and take care of her. Bellamy, you better, that girl is taking a wrong turn. Even if I agree with her cause, following a venomous lead will land her in scorching hot water.

I really would have loved to see Miller, Jackson and Jordan's grief too. And it looked like Spacekru didn't care much after she saved their lives countless times. That scene was underwhelming, truly.

Now, as I predicted, Clarke appears in Josephine’s dreams when she finally sleeps. Which images haunt her? Roan, Abby, Madi, Lexa, Bellamy. I saw tweets of other’s but those were clear to me. Accompanied by Abby, Bellamy and her own words to Lexa. The most important people in her life, right?

I knew this would happen, something obviously went wrong with the insertion or Clarke is just a fighter. I don’t think it has anything to do with synthetic nightblood. Josephine, honey, you’re in for the wildest and scariest rollercoaster ride of your life. Clarke Griffin is a force to be reckoned with and she won’t stop until her prison break is successful.

I cannot imagine the experience of living in your own mind to be pleasant. Especially not while fighting Josephine Lightbourne for power. Poor, poor, Clarke.

Bellamy was the first to notice Josephine isn’t Clarke and I’m sure he’s gonna realize that she still exists too. The devil will let something slip or act weird and he’ll pick up on it. Either that or Jade informs Echo. Once he solves that puzzle, he will stop at nothing until she returns to him. But Bellamy, please keep your eye on Madi throughout, do not follow in Abby’s footsteps.

Will Clarke’s dreams hold a confession of feelings? Will Bellamy confess to Josephine? Will there be any sort of confession?

Last week someone called my Becho theories typical. Fine, I may be biased but I only write what I see on my screen and if you disagree, I’d love to know why.

#the100 #the100 season 6 #the100 s6 #the100 spoilers #the 100 season six #the100 6x06 #memento mori #the100 season 6 spoilers #bellamy blake #clarke griffin #madi griffin #john murphy #echo #raven reyes #josephine lightbourne #abby griffin #octavia blake #octavia x diyoza #charmaine diyoza

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fernwehbookworm · 5 years

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Woke The F*ck Up- Chapter 11

November 30th, 2017

Of course, it couldn’t last. Cadmus seemed to be everywhere. Now it wasn’t just drugs and guns. They were now spreading propaganda. Hate speech against anything and everything. Immigrants to minority citizens to the LGBT community. The city was being whipped into a fury. Protesters took to the streets as elected officials debated equal housing rights which lead to a riot as the right-winged conservatives started throwing bottles and rotting food at the rainbow-colored crowd sitting in the park across the street from city hall with colorful signs held up to display their thoughts.

Shootings were occurring more frequently in the Hispanic neighborhoods, bullets being traced to high-end weapons that were similar to weapons Kara had turned over to the police from various busted Cadmus warehouses. Cadmus was the embodiment of the ‘Ideal Conservative American’ to the point where Kara was sure they were killing and driving away anyone who didn’t fit into their mold. As a bisexual woman, and James as a black man, Team Superfriends was starting to take this personally. Kara even had Winn sew a pride flag onto her sleeve. When someone got a picture of that during a daytime bank robbery, Power Girl was plastered on protest signs and became the main target of hate speech. Kara felt like she was living in a war zone, trying to find terrorists who want to build a wall and keep everyone out. Kara was growing more and more frustrated at the stupidity of people. They were no longer debating laws, they were debating whether humans should be treated like humans. It made Kara sick. She had to stop Cadmus, it wouldn’t solve everything but it would stop the fan from stoking the fire.

Kara was so busy that she had to hire contractors to do most the renovating when she had planned on doing some of it herself. Winn did manage to install a secret door from the first floor to the basement where their operations were held. He kept the men from even thinking of looking down there.

Days ticked by as Kara spent more and more time in the city, helping the police contain the violence as well as trying to find the source of everything Cadmus. She even skipped on going back to Midvale for Thanksgiving with Eliza and Alex, Eliza still not knowing how Kara really spent her time. Kara just told her foster mother that the gym was taking up a lot more time than she thought. Alex was furious. Her and Eliza had had a strained relationship ever since Kara was adopted. They moved past most of it but the Jeremiah died and Alex fell into drinking, which caused new issues to open old wounds. Kara always acted as a buffer. Alex made sure Kara knew of every awkward detail. Kara was too focused to care too much. She still couldn’t figure out who was in charge of the seemingly ever-expanding group. Only that it was a woman. One that no one ever saw up close. A woman who had an extensive chain of command and rarely got her hands dirty. Always a woman, never a name.

Lena’s tour had four weeks left and Kara’s heart ached to see her. Phone calls and video chatting didn’t help. Kara wanted to hold Lena again. She wanted to paint her. Well, Kara was painting her, and sketching her, and doodling her, any chance she could. Sometimes Kara didn’t even realize it was happening, she would be talking to Winn about something and all of the sudden Lena’s likeness would be on the paper below her pencil. Kara had it bad. She thinks she may love Lena but something was stopping her. That’s a lie. She knows what it is. Kara is a vigilante, who risks her life and jail time daily, and is still keeping it a secret. No, Lena knows she is going to tell her in just a matter of weeks. It's not really a secret then.

Despite Kara’s aching heart, she still missed phone calls and flights, every time she seemed to be caught up in one mission or another, or helping to stop riots before escaping with Guardian from the police. The cops weren't really trying to arrest the two people making a difference but the police chief was determined to bring down all criminals. Lena seemed to be understanding but even Kara was growing frustrated with not seeing her girlfriend and she was surrounded by friends. Kara texted Jess daily to really know what was happening with Lena, she was lonely. When not performing, Lena locked herself away to work on her music. She almost had a whole album recorded, ahead of schedule.

“Damn it, Kara. Again? How hard is it to be on time to the airport?”

“I am so sorry Lena. National City is in an uproar. Whole streets are closed to contain the protests and riots. James wanted an extra set of hands to take pictures and I got caught in the middle of it.” A couple of beats of silence.

“James… You are spending a lot of time with him lately.” It took a second for Kara to comprehend the jealousy underlining Lena’s neutral tone.

“No Lena, god, no. James is just a friend. Even less, he is my cousin’s friend and I do stuff like this for him and he will help with advertising for the gym.”

“Okay.”

“Lena, please believe me. I know you, I know you are thinking that of course, you won't be good enough. Damn it, I hate that’s the first place your thoughts go. But it isn’t true. Lena, I am so sorry this is my fault for not planning ahead. I miss you so much. I hate breaking promises but I am trying...”

“Kara-”

“I was looking forward to seeing you and meeting Sam and Ruby because you always sound so excited when you talk about dinner with them or teaching Ruby to play the piano and-”

“Kara! Shut up! All I said was okay. Yes, I feel a little insecure because this is the fifth flight you missed but also I know I ask a lot of you to put your life on hold there. Just try and make the next one. Now, I have to go tell a preteen that her new idol won’t be joining us tonight.”

“New idol? What do you mean?” Lena laughs

“Ever since she found out I was dating you, she has found every little bit of information on you. Including pirated videos of most of your fights. You should have seen Sam when Ruby told her she wanted to start taking boxing lessons. She literally had no words. It was quite hilarious.”

“And now I feel even worse for missing my flight. I hope she isn’t too disappointed. But please, have fun with them. When I meet Ruby, I will give her a few lessons, with her mother’s permission, of course.” Lena laughs through the line.

“I will let Sam know. And Kara? Please, stay safe. It sounds dangerous there and I worry about you being in the middle of all that.” Guilt washes over Kara. She swallows past the lump in her throat.

“I will. Goodbye, Lena.”

“Bye Kara,” Lena says softly. The line goes dead and Kara sighs as she returns to gazing over the crowd below in the park. She was perched on top of city halls roof. James stood next to her as they watched for signs of trouble.

“Still haven't told her, huh?”

“It's none of your business.” Kara snaps at the man in metal armor.

“I think it is when you go galavanting to another country every other weekend and take phone calls on the job. You are distracted and it's going to get you hurt.”

“Don’t act like some wise sage James. I have been doing this much longer. Hell, the only reason you are here with me is so you wouldn’t die trying to do this yourself. So don’t talk down to me James. Don’t forget, I never wanted you here. You forced your way into this. I was fine with just Winn and I. So stay out of my relationship.” Kara can see James’ eyes tighten in anger behind his helmet.

“Fine. Just, I think there may be a real reason you haven't told her, more than she would be mad. I’m going to the other side of the park. We should probably spread out anyway, there are a lot of people here and that threat wasn’t very specific.” He leaves without another word. Kara keeps her eyes below.

Lena hangs up and sighs. Kara knew her too well. That was exactly where her thoughts went. And still were. Her brain knew that Kara wouldn’t lie to her about this. Kara liked her and would be faithful. But missing flight after flight and then it took three phone calls just to get a hold of Kara today alone. It was chipping away at Lena’s barely pieced together heart. She hadn’t told Jess or Sam yet, but she lost her momentum in her music. Her worry no longer allowed the happier music she had been writing to flow out. Each chord felt like a dead end. She walked back into the studio and found Sam at the soundboard. The tall woman spun in her seat to face Lena, her smile faded quickly at the frown on Lena’s face.

“Kara missed her flight. It's just the three of us for dinner.” Lena plops down next to her friend/ producer. Sam scowls.

“Look, I know you like her, but I like her less and less every time this happens. Are you sure she is worth it.”

“She really is Sam. I know how this looks since you never met her.”

“It looks like a pretty girl weaseled her way into your life, received free trips around the world and the fame of dating Lena Luthor and now she is ghosting you because she is over it and got what she wanted.”

Tears prick Lena’s eyes. That is exactly her worst fear with Kara. Sam picked it right up and said it out loud. Lena tried to blink the offending liquid back but it just made it worse. The hot tears escaped. Sam looked over and noticed. She pulled Lena in for a hug.

“Oh geez Lena, I am so sorry. I don’t know why I said that. I mean I do but I know you like her I should have kept it to myself.”

“I-it’s just t-that that is exactly wh-what I have been th-thinking this whole time. I mean, it was so small at first but now, now it feels like it’s shouting in my h-head and I-I don’t know what to do. God, everything was s-so great until she left in Munich.” Lena is actually sobbing. She hasn’t felt like this since college. She feels ridiculous, but Sam is soothingly rubbing her back and she feels safe. After a while, Lena manages to catch her breath again and pulls away, but Sam firmly holds on to her hand still.

“I’m sorry, I haven't cried in… years. I don’t know where that came from.”

“Lena, this is completely normal. Crying is good because it helps you process emotions. If this is a fear you have then you definitely need to talk to Kara about it.” Sam says seriously. Lena barks a watery laugh.

“And if it's true, do you think she would just come out and say it? And if it's not true I’ll just hurt her with my doubt.”

“I just hate seeing you like this. I didn’t really know you before Kara but this Lena Luthor has been great and happy and Ruby loves you. By the way, she asked if she could start calling you Aunt Lena.”

“Really? God, I am going to cry again. Tell her yes I would love that. God, what is happening to me? I used to not have feelings.”

“It’s called being human, Lena. And having a family. Sometimes feelings suck, sometimes they are the best thing in the world.”

“I hate feelings.” Lena mopes. Sam laughs.

“Well too bad. Now, let's get back to work.”

December 5th, 2017

They finally had what they needed. The Cadmus Leader would be in National City organizing their next plan. Kara learned this from a scared new recruit as she transported him to police custody in a less than ideal manner. Winn was busy figuring out which warehouse she was actually going to be in while James and Kara suited up. And then they were on the move, Winn directing them through the still bustling nightlife of National City.

Warehouse was a loose term. It looked to be converted into a compound. High fencing with barbed wire. Shipping containers stacked high to serve as watchtowers. Armed men patrolling around the building. Everything was brightly lit and made it hard to find a dark corner to slip in. Winn's newest toy hovered silently by Kara's head. A small drone capable of x-raying through walls and tracing heat signatures. It would relay those back to Winn so he could better direct the vigilantes. With the extra eye in the sky, Kara and James carefully circumvented each prowling, trigger-happy, guard and made it to the roof of the warehouse. Skylights peppered the roof to let in light during the day. Now they shone brightly as the occupants worked to spread terror to the outside world. Kara crouched over one near the center and peered through.

Down below was everything. Tables of what Kara assumed were kidnapped women in their underwear as they bagged drugs for distribution. More men circled them along with the rest of the warehouse. Weapons caches were well guarded. Men and women were training in hand to hand combat and on a shooting range. There were even tables set up to act like an eating area and bunks in rows in a darker corner. In the middle, separated with fencing, and heavily guarded, was a bomb.

“Winn, are you seeing this?” Kara whispers.

“Oh yeah. Scanning now. Give me a second.”

Kara waits and takes deep steadying breaths while James shifts beside her. Part of her wishes she had left the man behind But also she knows she could never handle this alone. Whatever becomes of this she is glad to have back up, even if it is as inexperienced as James. The pair on the roof watches the work below in silence.

“Yup, that’s a bomb. When that is complete it can level at least ten city blocks.”

“Well shit.”

“Kara, if that goes off where it is, most of the surrounding community is Latino or African American. It will kill most of those populations in National City.”

Kara pauses. Thinking. Cadmus was bringing everything to a head. Hate was spreading like a virus and this was literally going to blow it into a nationwide problem.

“Winn, you said when this is complete. So it's not right now.”

“Correct. If it blows right now it should just take down the warehouse. But it will kill almost everyone inside.”

Kara watches the rounds of men. She watches the women working and a man entering the fencing around the bomb. He sets to work. Kara sighs.

“Winn, call Alex. We are in over our heads. Patch her through.” A pause then a beep.

“Kara? This better be good. Do you know what hour it is?”

“Alex, I need you. Actually the whole FBI. Cadmus has officially turned terrorist and I am in over my head.” Rustling through the line indicates Alex probably getting out of bed and dressing.

“What the hell am I supposed to do with that. How am I supposed to get a unit out because my sister the gym trainer told me to.”

“I don’t know Alex! Say it was an anonymous tip or something. Alex, They are building a bomb. One to level several blocks of National City. Men are heavily armed. Captured women are sorting drugs. This is it. Winn, send Alex the address. Get here.” Kara tapes her earpiece and ends the call.

“So, we are just going to wait?” James asks, voice oddly echoey in the helmet.

“Yup. Might as well get comfy.”

After a few minutes, something begins to happen below. Almost everything seems to halt. Doors Kara previously missed, opens. Out of the darkness and into the center of the warehouse, walks Lillian Luthor. Kara recognizes her from an old photo Lena had shown her. The woman is tall and proud. Commanding a room without speaking. A leader. It sends chills through Kara. Lillian says something and then listens to the response from the man working on the bomb. She nods approvingly, then strides towards the front of the warehouse, flanked by much more seasoned looking men. Men who do this for a living, for a life. Kara hears engines approaching and she knows in her gut that it isn't Alex. Lillian is going to escape.

Kara stands suddenly, starling James who had reclined against the slightly sloped roof.

“We can’t let her get away.”

��Let who?”

“Lillian Luthor, the Leader of Cadmus.”

James looks through the window.

“Kara, we can’t take them on our own.”

“We just have to stall until they get here.”

Kara crouches to keep her center of gravity low and strides towards the front of the building. There will definitely be too many guards out front to deal with if she doesn't take a few out before Lillian gets there. A glance in the next window shows that Lillian has stopped to talk to someone else.

At the edge of the roof, just out of the flood of light, Kara peers down. She unholsters the Night-Night gun and aims for the closets man perched on shipping containers. She silently prays the hours Alex spent drilling her on various weapons pays off. Once Alex joined the FBI she wanted to make sure Kara could protect herself, then it became a way for them to bond and spend time together. It slowly escalated over the years to more advanced weapons and targets. Kara had put it on hold though when she started her vigilantism. She takes a deep breath, slowly releases it, and pulls the trigger. A small clicking sound and a small flash of blue in the darkness, the silhouette drops to the ground.

“Way to go, Winn,” Kara whispers.

“Thank you.” He says cheekily. Kara just rolls her eyes and aims for her next target. She empties the clip, making one guard drop after another, before popping in another. Soon no one remains outside the front and not a sound has risen to raise the suspicion of those inside.

Until of course the front doors open and Lillian Luthor begins to make her way to the front entrance and where three heavily armored transport vehicles wait for her. She pauses a few feet out the front door when she sees a man slumped against the wall. The men flanking her draw their weapons. Kara drops behind them and knocks the knee out from one. The other turns and fires but Kara has already rolled away. Shouts from inside. Lillian holds a hand to stop the man from firing again. James drops next to her and holds up his shield.

“Oh good, both of my favorite vigilantes. This will make getting rid of you two so much easier. You have made my life more than difficult.”

“You have been causing panic through the city,” Kara says, the voice modulator changing her voice.

“Oh my dear, we have been restoring order to the city. And soon the country.”

“Order never follows bombs. They just cause death and destruction.”

“It will be a new beginning. A fresh start to build on.”

“You are insane.”

“I am right.” Lillian Looks to the door behind the heroes.

“Kill them.”

The woman turns away and Kara’s attention is diverted to the mass of men. All were armed and armored. Kara and James stand back to back.

“There is too many.” He says through there comms.”

“We just have to stall. Alex will be here.”

A man breaks the standoff and the first punch is thrown. They are too tightly packed for weapons or risk shooting each other. At first, everything goes well. James uses his shield to protect most of his body while smashing the others. Kara drops man after man. But soon their overwhelming numbers separate the pair. Kara is being attacked from all sides, slowly being forced from her partner. One punch hits, then another. A kick throws her off balance. Someone throws her over.r third shoulder and she is outside the ring of bodies. From the ground, she can see Lillian's retreating form. She pushes from the ground to chase the woman down. Mere feet from her, Kara is stopped by a grip of iron pulling her back to the ground. The man stands over her, he looks vaguely familiar but it escapes her how. Kara's vision is blurry from her head hitting the ground.

“You can't stop this Power Girl. Actually, how pretentious is that? What do you say I know who you really are?” Lillian appears over Kara, Kara tries to sit up but a heavy boot is planted in her chest. Lillian reaches down to pull back the hood and remove the mask. She frowns, almost like she ate something distasteful.

“Why if it isn't the little blonde who has been running around with my daughter. Another way for her to disappoint me. I wonder, does she know about your evening activities?”

“She isn't your fucking daughter. And she is not a disappointment.”

Lillian looks amused.

“Oh, so she doesn't know. How wonderful. Kill her, make it hurt.” The last part directed to the man above Kara.

Sirens in the distance cause Lillian to hurry away but Kara can no longer worry about that. The boot over her is gone, just long enough to swing back and hit her ribs. Kara has no advantage. She can't get her feet, can't get away. Kick after kick lands to her sides and stomach. A high kick brings the man's hell down and she hears the snap of her collarbone breaking. He straddles her and brings his hands to her neck. She tries to throw him off but he just headbutts her eye and slams her head back down. Everything is going dark, whether from head trauma or lack of oxygen, Kara isn't sure. Gunfire. Shouting. The night from her chest is gone, but the darkness is still coming.

“...ara!” A muffled yell. It's familiar.

“Kara, please…” it begs.

“Kara you are going to be fine you big idiot.” It's Alex standing over her, but her mouth isn't working. Then there is nothing as Alex’s tear-stained face fades away.

December 9th, 2017

An annoying beeping invades the darkness. It becomes insistent, begging to be noticed. Kara tries to open her eyes and winces. She tries to rub at then but her hand is trapped by something, a desperate grip. Kara blinks and looks down. Alex is asleep in a chair with her head on the bed, fingers tightly gripping Alex’s. Her other arm is in a sling. Kara's movements must have roused her because Alex is sitting up a blinking sleep away.

“Kara!” She exclaims.

“Hey…” Kara's voice is hoarse and gravely.

“I ought to kill you but I'm too happy that you are okay.” Alex stands and kisses Kara's forehead. Kara leans into the affection from her sister.

“What happened?” Kara manages to get out. Her sister reaches for the pitcher of water and hands Kara a cup with a straw.

“You were almost killed, that's what happened.”

“Lillian… Did you catch her?”

“No,” Alex says solemnly.

“James is he…?”

“He's fine. That armor took the brunt of it. Although he isn't too happy with you I don't think.”

“So, I guess this means my identity is blown.”

“Yes, and no.”

Kara looks at her sister curiously.

“Kara, I don't work for the FBI. I work for a secret government organization inside the government looking to take down local terrorist groups and our main focus has been Cadmus. They haven't done enough to be classified for our intervention until you called with the bomb information. But since we were keeping tabs on Cadmus, we were also keeping tabs on you. I did not tell anyone, but someone else found out who you were. My director has made the decision to let you do what you are doing because of how you do it. You are now in one of our facilities and are getting the best care possible. So yes your identity is out, but only to those who already knew.”

Kara goes quiet and stares straight ahead while she processes. That was a lot of information to take in.

“Kara, say something. Please.” And Kara opens her mouth to do so when the television Alex must have been watching before falling asleep catches her attention. Lex Luthor arrested for conspiring with terrorists. Kara grabs the discarded remote off her bed and turns it up.

“Yesterday, with the aid of one Mr. Clark Kent. Another Luthor was put behind bars. Kent's investigation into the Luthor family in conjunction with the police and FBI…”

Yesterday he was arrested.

“Alex, how long have I been asleep?”

Alex winces.

“You had considerable head injuries and several broken bones and your lung even collapsed due to a broken rib…”

“Alex. How long?” Kara asks sternly.

“Four days.” Kara swallows hard, forcing back the continually rising panic.

“Where is my phone?” Kara says forceing calm in her voice.

“I brought it with a change of clothes that Winn packed for me.” Alex gets up and digs in the backpack sat in a table against the wall. She hands the phone to Kara.

Kara turns it on and waits. Two missed calls from Cat. Three from Eliza. A string of texts from Winn. A missed call from Clark. One last ding. A voicemail from Lena. Kara should have left to see her last night. With a shaking thumb, she hits play on the voice mail.

December 8th, 2017

Not even an apology this time from Kara. Lena just returned to the hotel from a fruitless trip to the airport when the news broke. Lex had been arrested. Jess was striding around her hotel room fielding calls from reporters as Lena stared out the window. Crowds were forming below in the street. Clark Kent had enough evidence to put away her brother and accuse her mother who had magically disappeared. Lena was the last Luthor standing. She was isolated at the top of her tower and sharks were circling below. She was alone. Lena remembers Kara mentioning that Clark was her cousin. Did Kara know this was coming? Is that why she didn't come? Is that why she began to pull away? The crushing weight of this spiral pressed down on her chest with each passing minute that she didn't hear from Kara.

Why was this so hard? It wasn't this hard when her father blew himself up. She got drunk, got high, fucked a girl, and moved on. Now her walls were gone and she felt each hard word thrown at her like a knife. Each Twitter comment chaffed like she had newborn skin. With her walls gone, her heart was unprotected because the person who protected it was half a world away and hadn't been heard from in three days. It was too much. Lena quickly crossed to the bed where she threw her phone. Jess gives her an odd look while still yelling at whoever is on the other end of her phone call. Lena waits with bated breath as the phone rings. And rings. And rings. Then Kara's sweet voice asking to her leave a message. That almost breaks Lena but then it beeps so she powers through.

“Kara, I just can't do this anymore. I can't have this hope. I needed you here and you weren't. You haven't been here and you won’t tell me the truth because I know you are lying. This was the last time I go to an Airport to pick up only find out you never boarded. I can't need anyone like this. As long as you give me hope then I won't be the person I need to be. I'm sorry to do this like this, but I am glad I got your voicemail because if I heard your voice I know you could convince me otherwise. But we can't Kara. I can't. This is over. Don’t try and come here, don’t try and change my mind. We are just too different, this never would have worked. Goodbye.” Lena hung up the phone in tears.

This whole thing was a mistake. From the moment she let Kara sit down at her cafe table. Kara had torn down all the walls Lena built up to protect herself and now with her brother in jail and her mother wanted, she had nothing to keep the pain out. Then Kara missed her flight again, off doing something with James probably. It was too hard. James was someone Kara should be with, someone good and who was making a difference in the world. Lena had let Kara build her up, love her, and rip her defenses down. Then Kara all but disappeared, leaving Lena raw and exposed. Lena needed to build back up her walls and she couldn’t do that with still having a possibility of Kara. Lena’s next phone call was to Sam.

“Do I need to get a babysitter?” She doesn't even say ‘hi.’ Damn that mother’s intuition. She already knew.

“Yes. I need a fucking drink. And I can’t go alone.”

“Okay, I’ll find someone for Ruby. Then I’ll pick you up and you can tell me everything.”

One good thing came out of this half of the tour, Sam. And a night at a Sinclair Club conveniently down the street from Lena’s hotel.

Sam quickly took up residence at the bar to keep her eye on Lena while letting her do what she needed to do. Lena lost herself in the crowd after two quick shots and a kiss on Sam's cheek. Quickly she is surrounded by hot bodies all looking for someone to dance with. A man saddles up behind her and with a quick glance, Lena decides to allow the attractive man to press to her back. Especially when an attractive blonde presses herself to Lena's front. Both are moving Lena in sync and Lena is suspicious of their intentions because there is no way this was an accident but then the blonde is playing with her hair and Lena doesn't care. It feels good to let go. To let someone make her feel wanted because she hadn't felt that way over the past few weeks. After the song, the guy offers to buy them both a drink and Lena allows the girl to lead her over to the bar. Flirtaive touching happens while they wait. After two more shots, Lena is significantly buzzed. Then more dancing. Another shot.

“Lena Luthor. What a surprise to see you here.” Veronica's silken voice comes from behind Lena. She turns to the woman.

“Well, sometimes you need a drink when your brother gets arrested for terrorism. And after you break up with your girlfriend.” Lena adds as an afterthought. A gleam lights Ronnie's eye and she flicks her gaze to the couple standing behind Lena. They were, in fact, a couple, trying to woo Lena into their bed. Lena had decided to break her rule about threesomes because she needed this.

“You two can go.” They start to protest Veronica’s dismissal but Lena waves them off.

“You know I don't like foreplay.” Veronica states.

“Meet me out front. My hotel is just down the street.”

Lena goes to find Sam and tells her she's leaving. Sam eyes Veronica making her way to the door.

“Your sure you want to do this? With her?”

“I'm sure the sooner I move on, the better.”

“The mom in me is screaming that this is a mistake and I should stop you. But I won't.” Sam looks at her conflicted.

“I'll call you in the morning. Thank you for coming with me. For being my friend.”

“Always,” Sam says. She hugs Lena and lets her go while she pays for her drink and heads home to her daughter.

December 9th, 2017

Silence fills the hospital room after Kara plays the message. It was left just hours before. Kara glances at the clock. It would only be seven right now in London. Alex had heard the whole thing.

“Kara, I'm so sorry.” Kara's head snaps up.

“Don't. This isn't over. How fast can you get me to London?”

“Me?”

“You and whatever organization you work for.”

“Kara we can’t…”

“You will. This is the biggest break you have had against Cadmus, you said so yourself. If you don't get me to London then I will have Winn broadcast my suits body camera footage all over the media. Yes, that's right. A camera. That I'm sure you didn't remove until after I was inside this secret government operation or before you said things you shouldn't over an unconscious vigilante.” Alex's eyes widen.

“Are you threatening the United States government.”

“Yes,” Kara says matter of factly. Alex sighs and stands. She leaves but Kara knows she has won. A jet is soon fueled up to fly her to her chosen destination and Winn turns over the video files of the fight and subsequent care afterward. It's faster than trying to fly on her own. But it still leaves too much time to think.

December 10th, 2017

Kara knocks on the door. Tears sting her good eye and makes the one swollen shut throb. Her body ached. But she had to come. Had to tell Lena everything. This wasn't what she had planned, nothing was as she had planned. Lena’s heartbroken message still rung in her ears. This wasn't how they were going to end, because they weren't going to. Kara was determined. If Lena knew the whole truth it would be fine. She was just scared and thought Kara didn't care enough. But once Kara showed her the suit in the duffle that was digging into her bruised shoulder, Lena would know that she does. That Kara cares too much.

Movement on the other side of the door pulls Kara from her thoughts and she fumbles in her bag to prepare to pull out her suit. She had rehearsed what she was going to say the whole red-eye flight. Then how she would beg for forgiveness because she lied to the woman she loved. All that dies in her throat as she sees a fading smile on Lena’s face. Her body wrapped in a hotel sheet and her hair a mess. It was obvious what had been happening behind the door and Kara feels a punch worse than the beating she received days before. Fear floods Lena’s eyes and she clutches her sheet closer.

“Kara,” she says softly, as if not meaning to at all.

“Lena, darling, who is that at this hour?” Kara recognizes the silky smooth voice without seeing her face. Veronica Sinclair. And it hurts all the more. Kara shoves the red and blue jacket in her bag and turns back down the hotel hallway.

“Kara!” Lena calls louder, but it doesn't stop her. Kara just turns the corner and finds the elevator still on the floor due to the late hour. She hears a door slam closed and hurried footsteps but the elevator is already closing. Tears stream down Kara’s cheeks and she hurries back down to hopefully catch the first flight back to anywhere in the United States and away from here.

Kara collapses on her couch numbly. She hasn't slept, really slept, in at least four days. Being unconscious doesn't count. She cried the whole flight back and numbly sat through a taxi ride from the airport. A quick text to Alex saying she home and didn't want to talk about it. She closes her eyes and falls quickly to sleep after being so emotionally drained.

Kara wakes to her sister shaking her shoulder and a concerned look.

“Hey,” Alex says softly.

“Hey.” Kara sits up and Alex sits next to her rubbing shoulders and pulling Kara's hand into her lap. Kara rests her head on her sister's shoulder.

“Want to talk about it?” Alex asks Kara shakes her head.

“No. I just… no. Can you tell me something good? Like you captured Lillian and stopped Cadmus.”

“Sorry no.”

“Okay, well then at least you and Maggie are completely happy?”

Alex stiffens and Kara feels her stop breathing. She looks at her sister.

“Can't tell you that either. We broke up.”

“Oh, Alex no. Why?”

“Umm… well, we started talking about what we want in the future. You know, like where we want to live, and family and stuff. Well, Maggie doesn't want kids. At all. And you know me, I've always wanted to be a mom. So, here we are.”

“When did this happen?” Kara says, putting an arm around Alex’s shoulders.

“The night you called me. We had a long conversation. This was a deal-breaker for both of us. So…” Alex shrugs. Kara squeezes her shoulder.

“How are you handling it?”

“Not well. But I'm glad we had this conversation before we got too serious. I mean, can you imagine the hell it would be if we didn't talk about it before we moved in together, or hell, got engaged. I love her, so this is going to take some time and a lot of tears but I think it was for the best, for both of us.”

“Guess it's time for a sister night then. You pick a movie, I'm ordering take out.”

“No superhero-ing tonight?” Alex teases.

“I couldn't even save my relationship, let alone anyone else.”

When Kara comes back Alex has picked some action movie and Kara plops the bottle of whiskey in front of her sister. Alex's eyebrows shoot up.

“Kara Danvers has alcohol?” Alex peers closer at the label.

“Expensive Alcohol.”

“I bought it for… her. It's her favorite. I was just going to pour it down the drain but I figured now was as good as time as any.”

“For what?” Alex thinks she knows but she wants Kara to say it.

“To get drunk with my sister because we both need this right now.” Alex smiles and pips it open. Kara fetches two glasses.

“Kara you may want a mixer of some kind. Straight whiskey is hard to handle sober.” Kara fetches some sodas before joining her sister.

By the time the food arrives Kara is at least three shots of whiskey in and feeling buzzed, Alex is still fine and pays for it. Kara doesn't even try to follow the plot of the movie, all she knows is that it is loud with lots of explosions and her and Alex can laugh at the cheesy fakeness of it all. This felt good. She hadn’t spent much time with Alex lately, both of them were at fault for it but right now that didn’t matter. Right now she was with her sister, and right now she was very drunk. Her mind was foggy and a warmness was settling over her. No that wasn’t right. She shouldn’t feel warm. Kara felt like she should still be upset. Upset about what? Sluggishly, memories rose to the surface. Lena wrapped up in a sheet, but not because of Kara. Veronica. She was there. Then Kara had left Lena, or Lena had left Kara. One thing was clear, they were over. Kara bursts into tears so suddenly her sister jumped. Alex quickly recovered and pulled Kara into a hug, then Alex pulled Kara on top of her as she eased them both into laying position on the couch. Eventually, Kara cried herself to sleep, cradled in her sister's protective arms Alex sang to her. Kara always wished Alex would sing more. She had a beautiful voice but maybe that's why it made it all the more special. The special lullaby about a red robin fades as the alcohol does its job of pulling Kara into unconsciousness.

#supergirl #supercorp #kara danvers #lena luthor #singer #Vigilante #au #WTFU #fanfiction

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radfem-moira · 6 years

Text

So recently I had the displeasure of finding this old article about political lesbianism again. I’m bored so I felt like I’d share some highlights with the tumblr crowd.

Also, the “you” in my comments does not target anyone in particular. It’s a general “you” aimed at this anonymous author and anyone who might think like her.

So let’s get started...

The writer just discovered female separatism. Congratulations! Now call it what it is, please.

I have news for you. About lesbianism.

Sorry if lesbians' distaste for your homophobic roleplay “disappoints” you.

That’s a legitimate point - a woman who suddenly comes out after years of being publicly het or bi will often encounter a heavy dose of suspicion in lesbian circles, and that’s not a good thing. Some lesbians were married to a man for decades before they were finally able to break free and come out, and those women need support, not hostility. But you know what caused that suspicion in the first place? Women claiming to be lesbians when they’re attracted to men.

The underlying assumption is that words mean things. Lesbian means female homosexual. It means “woman exclusively attracted to women”. If you experience any other type of sexual attraction, you are not a lesbian. Political celibacy and political female-exclusive bisexuality are perfectly valid concepts. A little bit of a mouthful, but at least you’re avoiding misunderstandings.

And let it be known that lesbians who criticize political lesbianism do not care about the “process” that leads to it. It’s not that we don’t understand. We’re women too. We’re victims of the heteropatriarchy just the same. Plenty of us have been in relationships with men, where desires were completely one-sided because we’re homosexuals. We get it. Lesbianism doesn’t preserve us from being women.

I didn’t come out as a lesbian because I wanted to be “counter-patriarchal”! No lesbian does! This sounds exactly like all these dudebros who are convinced that I “became” a lesbian because I hate men, or because I wanted to one-up them or something. jfc

Also, being celibate is not exactly a walk in the park for women! In some countries right now, it’s even unthinkable! And it was that way in the west for centuries as well! This statement downplays the strength and resolve of the women who make, or have made, the decision to stay celibate even in the face of massive economic and social backlash.

Sexual activity, maybe not. Sexual attraction? Desire? Even if it’s not to be acted upon? Sorry to break it to you, but that’s literally the core defining feature of a sexual orientation: it defines attraction. And to be called a lesbian, that attraction has to be exclusively directed towards females. Honestly, this sounds just like the million and a half 14-year-old MOGAI who try to lecture gay people about how “not all relationships need to involve sex!”

Oh God, where do I start with that out...

Yes, heterosexual women would likely choose celibacy on an all-female island, because they are... heterosexual. Yes, it is perfectly okay for them (or for anyone else) to assert that they would choose celibacy over gay sex, obviously! Women are allowed to say no! And I also dislike the implication that lesbians would have trouble understanding that concept. We are not men. The myth of the pushy, predatory lesbian who pursues a straight woman relentlessly with no regard for her refusals needs to die.

This is both infuriating and saddening. The first part - this idea that there is never any debate between radfems or other radicals about the origins of sexual orientation is ludicrous. Are we born gay? Or are we born with a predisposition? Or does it just stem from early life experiences? I have my theories, everyone does, but at the end of the day it doesn’t matter. All we know is that sexual orientation does not change. Your understanding of it might, your preferences might, but at the end of the day, it’s pretty much set.

The second part of this tells me that the writer here feels trapped by heterosexuality. And that’s understandable! But why straight women think that being a lesbian will in any way “liberate” them is beyond me. Maybe it’s because many of us talk about our coming out as a “freeing” experience? But the freedom comes with not having to pretend to be heterosexual anymore. It doesn’t come from being liberated from the patriarchy. We’re still trapped! One again, lesbians are still women!

Wait, where have I heard something like this before? Hmmm...

Imagine meeting a lesbian with some severe internalized misogyny and homophobia, and then turning that against her, from your mighty heterosexual (or is it bisexual?) high horse, and thinking that you’re better than her for choosing something that has only brought her hardships. Imagine being so ignorant, so contemptuous of those people that you also desperately wish to emulate. Does that remind you of anyone? Anyone at all?

The claim here is this: lesbianism refers to sexual orientation. It is synonymous with “female homosexual”. It is not a political statement, it is a reality. Claiming that we should value political moves above material reality is not just dubious, it’s extremely offensive.

In conclusion:

Political lesbianism is an inherently homophobic concept. The people who adopt this term as though it describes their orientation are often extremely contemptuous of actual lesbians, and incapable of wrapping their heads around our experiences of homophobia. They also do not believe that we are women just like heterosexual or bisexual women are, because they believe that lesbianism “liberates” us from the patriarchy all on its own.

#political lesbianism #homophobia #lesbophobia

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dreamingoffairys · 6 years

Text

Teardrops & Coffee Chapter 9

Hello hello everyone! Thank you so much for your positive feedback on Chapter 8! It made me feel great after that long hiatus, and I'm super inspired for continuing this fic now ;)

Sorry that I didn't get this chapter up as soon as I expected, I've been busy with school, my job, and with the WWTDP event (not to mention coordinating Stingue week!). So yeaah, I'm busy. Lmao. Thankfully, I've already begun working on Chapter 10, so hopefully that will be done by the end of the month!

I hope you enjoy this chapter, it's chalk full of new characters. Sting's finally going to make some more friends!

[Sidenote, kudos to @splendidlyimperfect for inspiring me to add genderfluid Freed to this fanfic!]

AO3 LINK HERE.

Sting felt like today was destined to be a shitfest no matter what actually happened.

He didn’t sleep at all the night before, so heartbroken from Rogue leaving that he couldn’t relax. It didn’t help that today was apparently club day, which meant that if you wanted to join a club, you had to go the main square on campus to check out all the booths.

Although Sting originally had been really excited for club day, now he was dreading it. Rogue would probably be there. Hell, Rogue might even be in a club he’s interested in. And if there’s one thing Sting does not want to do today, it’s talk to Rogue. In fact, he doesn’t even want to see Rogue. What the hell was that asshole’s problem anyways? Why had he took off so suddenly last night? It still infuriated him beyond belief.

In a moment of sobbing rage, Sting had blocked and deleted Rogue’s number last night. Looking back on it, that was one of the dumbest things he could’ve done, but it was too late to go back on it now. Sting is going to be Rogue free for the next few days, no matter what. He needs time to cool off at the very least before trying to confront Rogue about everything that happened.

Currently, Sting finds himself in the library after his English class, fuming over the required reading due next class. The words swim before his tired eyes, blurring together and becoming even more of a confusing mush than before. “Fucking dammit-!” Sting hisses, nearly knocking over his Cup Noodles sitting on the table beside him. “I fucking hate this! I fucking can’t-”

The sound of someone clearing his throat jolts him so much that this time, he actually does knock the noodles over. “Shit-!” Fortunately, he manages to grab them before it spills much, just splashing a bit of hot broth on his white sweatshirt. “Fucking-”

“Could you please keep it down the library, please?” the stranger says, and Sting looks up at him to send him give his best death glare. “Some of us are actually trying to study,” the guy scoffs. Sting gets a good look at him before saying anything. The man has long dirty blond hair, greenish brown eyes, a pair of thick red glasses, and is wearing a white button-down shirt.

Sting shoots him a nasty look. “Look, I was trying to study too. Mind your own business.”

The man raises an eyebrow at Sting. “You more looked like you were getting frustrated and swearing loudly. Oh, and spilling things.”

Sting fumes and slams the book shut. “I’m really not in the mood. I didn’t sleep at all last night, and I’m fighting with the person who usually helps me study.”

The man stands up and walks over to Sting’s table. “Oh. I’m sorry for being rude, then. I simply thought you were causing a disturbance.” He gestures to the book Sting’s reading. “Pride and Prejudice?”

“Unfortunately,” Sting grumbles, rolling up his sleeves to hide the yellow stain from the shitty processed broth of his early lunch. He keeps speaking without thinking, too annoyed and tired to process his thoughts before he voices them, “It’s a bunch of heterosexual nonsense.”

The man with glasses laughs and sinks into the seat besides Sting. “Slightly. But I quite enjoy it. I wrote a 10 page paper on it last semester.” He pushes his glasses up his nose. “What is your name? If I’m going to help you, we should at least be acquainted. I am Rufus Lore.”

Sting blinks, surprised by everything about this man’s reaction. “Uhhh...I’m Sting. Sting Eucliffe. I’m new here this semester, so...I’m kind of overwhelmed.”

Rufus nods and clicks his tongue, “I remember the feeling. I do not fault you for being frustrated, then. I’m assuming literature is not your strong suit?”

Sting shakes his head, “I’m majoring in Computer Sciences. Which is funny, actually, because I’m bad at math too.”

Rufus laughs softly, “A...friend of mine is majoring in Music, but his voice is terrible. No one has told him yet. I do not want to be the person to burst that bubble.”

Sting nods and sets Pride and Prejudice back down on the table. “I don’t blame you.” He cracks the book open, goes back to the page he was on, and starts to read aloud:

"His pride," said Miss Lucas, "does not offend me so much as pride often does, because there is an excuse for it. One cannot wonder that so very fine a young man…”

About an hour ticked by for Sting and Rufus, and by the end of the study session, Sting felt more level-headed and prepared for class than ever. He had two pages of notes in his composition notebook, as well as some annotations in the actual book itself. Before leaving, Rufus gave Sting his phone number so they could text back and forth if Sting had any questions. Rufus even promised that if they met up again, Rufus would bring his own, fully annotated copy with him and let Sting read through it.

Sting left the library with a grin on his face, not caring that his sweater has a stain on it or that he and Rogue aren’t talking, because he’s prepared for the English discussion. This is probably the first time in his damn life he’s felt this confident about it! He’s going to strut in there and be the most educated motherfucker in the whole room. All the boys are gonna stare at him in awe, and all the girls are gonna be envious of his rad analyzing skills. Fuck yeah, he’s gonna show them!

That excellent mood is immediately shattered by the sight of far too many booths all spread out in front of the library. Shit. He’d almost forgotten about club day! Sting checks his reflection in his phone camera and grimaces. He looks like total shit, dark circles and all, with his hair an ungelled disaster crammed into a dirty beanie. Not only that, his sweater looks stupid rolled up at the sleeves like this, and the skinny jeans he’s wearing weren’t originally supposed to be ripped. Oh well. He was going to have to wing it.

He walks out into the crowd, having to push past quite a few overly enthusiastic sorority girls. One of them has long white hair and smiles at Sting kindly when he moves by, and she’s the only one who doesn’t make him extremely uncomfortable. The others stare at him as he passes, and he feels like he’s at high school all over again being ogled by the cheerleaders as a target either to flirt with or to criticize.

Once he manages to squeeze through, he takes a look around at the booths. He sees a sign reading “Improv Club” in sparkly letters with the two drama masks on it, and behind the booth is a familiar redhead and blue haired man with a tattoo on his face. Beside them stands an orange haired man with glasses, who is talking to a girl while clearly flirting with her. Nooo thanks.

Next he sees the Earth Club, a group of students with green t-shirts tending to little plants, talking passionately to bystanders about recycling, or handing out pamphlets about water conservation. Sting spots Yukino next to a girl in overalls with braided pigtails and smiles at her awkwardly. To his surprise, Yukino smiles and waves back, clearly unaware of the drama going on between Rogue and Sting.

Sting’s eyes skim over the signs for some other clubs...Dance Club, Chess Club (it’s there he spots Rufus), Debate Club, Video Game Club (where Natsu is hard to miss, screaming at some heavy-set man about cheating), and Acapella Club.

Finally, Sting spots the club he came here to join: the LGBT+ club. But before he can walk over there and introduce himself, a voice echoes through the speakers set up in the grass. “Hi everyone! My name is Jenny Realight, and I’m your Student Body President for this semester! And this here is Hibiki Lates, my amazing Vice President.”

Sting sighs with annoyance and glances up at where the two of them are standing. Jenny Realight looks like a stereotypical sorority girl like you see in the movies: sorority shirt, tight jean shorts that show off her legs, long blond hair curled perfectly, and makeup that’s visible from here. Beside her stands Hibiki Lates, a slender young man with “handsomely messy” hair and a dazzling smile. They both made Sting feel even more pissed off than he already was. They were the kind of people he’d prefer not to associate with.

And so, he walks across the way towards the people he did want to associate with. There are people behind the booth, all sporting various pride pins and sitting in folding chairs. On the far left is a brown-haired woman with a bisexual pin wearing a crop top and maroon jeans, her sandaled feet up on the table, drinking out of a matte dark blue water bottle. In the center is just an empty chair, but Sting sees a white jacket draped over the back. On the right is a person with long green hair wearing a red jacket with a genderfluid pin and a gay pin. Sting already felt very welcomed.

“Err...hi, my name’s Sting Eucliffe, I’m new here…” He bites his lip nervously, then carries on. “And I’m uhm, I’m gay, and I was wondering if I could join the club.”

“Obviously,” the brown-haired girl grins lazily and hiccups, and it’s then that Sting realizes that water bottle definitely contains something stronger than water. “I’m Cana, and this is Freed. Hold on one sec, I’ll call Lyon over to get you signed up.” She takes a huge swig from her water bottle, hiccups, then turns her head and shouts over her shoulder, “OI! LYON! GET YOUR GAY ASS OVER HERE, WE GOT SOMEONE WANTING TO JOIN!”

The green-haired person (Freed?) smiles kindly at Sting. “Thank you for considering joining. We’re always happy to have new members.”

Sting grins and rubs the back of his neck. “Thanks. Uhm...sorry, I don’t mean to be rude but ah...your pronouns?”

“Oh!” Freed sits up a little taller, looking proud, smiling wider. “That’s not rude at all! In fact, I appreciate your consideration. They/them, please.”

Sting nods, mentally filing that way. “Okay, gotcha. They/them. Easy enough to remember.” He flashes Freed a shy smile, and they beam back at him.

“Ahem!”

Sting’s head snaps up at the sound of someone clearing their throat, then does a double take. The man standing above him was perhaps one of the most...eccentric...people he’s met so far. His hair, dyed bright white, has so much gel in it Sting swears he can see it shine in the sunlight even from under the cover of the booth. The man’s eyes are lined with black eyeliner, and he has a bit of white glitter on his eyelids. The top he wears is a black cropped sweater with light blue writing on it that says DRAMA QUEEN in big bold letters with a crown on the “Q”. A pansexual pride pin sits right over his heart, attached to the “shirt” (if you could even call it that). His pants are tight light-washed skinny jeans, and he tops off the look with a white belt with a sparkly buckle. Sting feels like he’s just walked into a gay bar and met one of the strippers.

The man shoots Sting a smug smile, then extends a hand. “Hello! I’m Lyon Vastia, I’m the Vice President of the LGBT+ club. Oh, and I’m also a member of the Improv Club, which you should join as well, we could always use new members.” He eyes Sting for a moment, the smirk widening. “I have a feeling you’d fit right in.”

Is he...flirting with me?! Sting screams mentally, feeling like he’s falling into some alternate dimension. He’s too stunned to shake Lyon’s hand, simply staring at the man in front of him in embarrassment.

Cana rolls her eyes and leans back further in her chair. “Lyon, chill. You’re scaring the poor kid shitless.”

Lyon sighs and passes Sting a sign-up sheet on a clipboard. “I’m simply trying to be a good host, Cana, because one of us has to.” He quirks an eyebrow in the direction of Cana’s “water” bottle, then clears his throat again and turns back to Sting. “If you sign and put your phone number down here, we’ll contact you about all club events. We meet every Wednesday at 3pm in Professor Bob’s classroom, our first meeting is next week.”

Sting takes the clipboard and the pen. There are four columns on the page, each with a question. What is your name? What is your phone number? What are your preferred pronouns? Are you out or closeted?*

Sting follows the page to the asterisk, finding a small note that says We simply ask this because we may sometimes do on-campus events, and if you are not out yet or are uncomfortable in participating in pride events, we won’t put you on the sign up list for responsibilities for set-up, etc.

Sting smiles at how considerate this is, then scans the list of names. Is Rogue…?

Returning Members:

Lyon Vastia (he/him), out.

Cana Alberona (she/her), out.

Freed Justine (they/them), out.

Meredy Fernandez (she/her), out.

Juvia Lockser (she/her), kind of…

Hibiki Lates (he/him), out.

Sting pauses for a second, blinking at that last name. Wasn’t that the guy from Student Government? Sting suddenly felt bad for prejudging him.

New Members:

Lisanna Strauss (she/her or they/them), out.

Flare Corona (she/her), out.

Kagura Mikasuki (she/her), closeted.

Eve Tearm (he/him), closeted.

Sting lets out a sigh at the lack of Rogue’s name, then realizes he has no idea if it was a sigh of relief or a sigh of disappointment. Pushing away his confusing feelings, he answers the questions: Sting Eucliffe, his phone number, he/him, and I’m out & proud.

He hands the clipboard back to Lyon and finally manages a smile again. “Thank you. I can’t wait for the first meeting. I wish I’d had this opportunity back in high school, I haven’t had enough queer friends throughout my life.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” Cana tips back more liquid from her water bottle. “I’ll drink to that.”

Freed looks at Sting supportively. “Well, you’ve come to the right place. That’s why we’re here, to provide a safe space, spread awareness, and to help LGBT+ students meet other people like them.”

“All great goals.” Sting adjusts his beanie nervously, feeling his anxiety kick in just a bit. Do these people actually like me…? What if after the first meaning they decide they don’t want me there anymore…? “Well, um, thanks for helping me out...I should get going now, I’ve got homework to do.”

“Wait, Sting, before you leave,” Lyon holds out a hand, and Sting turns to look at him. “You’re a freshman, right?”

Sting nods, “Yeah, I’m totally new...only my second week here.”

Lyon shoots him a smile. “Then you probably haven’t been to a party yet, have you?”

“Oh shit!” Cana exclaims, her chair landing back on all fours with a thunk . “Yeah! This guy named Orga throws fucking awesome ragers, and most of the people at his parties are either queer or just hella chill with everything. If you wanna meet more LGBT+ people, you should totally come.”

Freed nods, “They are a great way to relieve some stress.”

“There’s one tomorrow night,” Lyon folds his arms across his chest. “Orga’s brother has a fairly big flat like 5 minutes from the campus, he lets everyone come over and party. If you want to come, we can meet out by the front sign?”

“Look,” Sting holds his hands up, “I appreciate the offer, but like, I’m not really interested in you-”

Lyon snorts. “I got that part. I was just teasing you. I’m inviting you as a friend. Think of me as your mentor in the college life of an LGBT+ person.” He moves his hands to his hips, smirking proudly. “I’m taking you under my wing.”

Cana laughs into her water bottle, “Pffft, please don’t. Remember what happened last time?”

Lyon sighs dramatically, “Oh, you bitch, it wasn’t even my fault. Why’d you have to bring that up?”

“Um-” Sting stammers out, starting to feel overwhelmed and anxious. “I’ll think about it! Um, you have my number on the sheet, ah, text me when you’re at the sign and...and I’ll let you know if I’m coming or not. Thanks!”

Not wanting to be there any longer, Sting takes off through the square towards the dorm rooms, wanting nothing more than to collapse into bed and watch Brooklyn Nine-Nine until he passed out. To his relief, he makes it there without running into anyone he knows, and immediately strips down to his boxers and socks and face-plants onto his bed. He jams his earbuds into his ears and pulls up Netflix, finally feeling relaxed with his stomach full of budget ramen and his body resting on the comfort of his favorite blankets.

He’s getting better, very slowly, day by day. His anxiety is something he pretends doesn’t exist, but the more it resurfaces, the more he realizes that repressing it only makes it worse. Now that he’s acknowledged it, he can tell when he needs a break from social interaction like this. The best thing to do is to detox by being naked (or mostly naked, since he had a roommate and he didn’t want Laxus to walk in and see his bare ass sticking out) and making himself laugh.

After a few episodes, his phone buzzes with a text message. For a split second Sting forgets that he blocked Rogue’s number and feels a spike of both anxiety and excitement, hurriedly clicking on the banner without even reading it. Instead, the message is a notification saying he’s been added to the group “Magnolia University LGBT+ Club”.

Both relieved and disappointed at the same time, Sting dumps his phone onto his nightstand amongst the food wrappers and Coke cans, and then buries his face into his pillow and lets sleep overtake him.

#my writing #stingue #ftlgbtales #ftfanfic #ftfanfics #sting x rogue #fairy tail fanfic #gaybertooth #teardrops & coffee #teardrops and coffee ch 9 #sting eucliffe #rogue cheney #fairy tail #sabertooth guild #stingue fanfic #lgbt+ fairy tail

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