#what this story lacks in nuance it makes up for in descriptions of anakin's ass if he also had a cat tail

[ragnarlothcat]

My beloved!! Do I have to choose a WIP? Is 'everything' not a choice? 🥺 then I'll choose 'wedding' or 'out of the bag'! Whichever you want 💕

Beloved!!! 💙💙💙 It's been a month since you sent this and I have been negligent. I will share the little snippet I've written for the next chapter of Out of the Bag (for this wip game)

The story, such as it is, is that Anakin is still a catboy because they haven't found a cure yet and the council clears him for duty because the war is simply too important to be interrupted by Anakin's fluffiness.

Anakin is nervous and self-conscious at first because he thinks he looks ridiculous and no one will be able to take him seriously. But then he discovers that catlike reflexes have some benefits on the battlefield.

I struggle with action scenes so here's the bit I've got which is right after Anakin impresses everyone and right before gratuitous catboy smut.

Out of the Bag chapter 2

There’s a sort of incredulous joy in the air as the men make their way back to the ship. Fives is busily miming the end of the skirmish to a crowd of laughing shinies as Anakin stands behind him, grinning widely.

Anakin looks so beautiful now that he’s shed his prickly self-consciousness from this morning. His cloak has been discarded somewhere (much like Obi-Wan’s) so there’s nothing to shield him from Obi-Wan’s greedy eyes. Nothing to disguise the tangled curl of his hair, the flushed pink of his cheeks and the fluffy peaks of his ears.

He’s always been incredible, even as a boy. Anakin has long been capable of feats that would have taken other Jedi years, if not decades, to master. His power in the Force is incandescent and his bladework nearly rivals some of the most senior members of the order.

But today was something else. Something Obi-Wan’s never seen before. Anakin’s raw power is nothing new, but to see it combined with this agility, to see it honed by enhanced senses?

Anakin is nothing short of awe-inspiring.

He’s jerked from his musings by the appearance of Ahsoka and Rex and reluctantly tears himself out of his awestruck musings. “Hello, young one.”

“Hi Master Kenobi,” she says, smiling up at him. “I wish all missions were that easy, huh?”

If only. It’s an incredible relief to know not a single life was lost today. For once in this bloody, ceaseless war, Obi-Wan feels nothing but peace. Every man who left the ship today has come back with nothing more than a few scrapes and bruises.

And it’s all thanks to Anakin.

“Indeed,” Obi-Wan agrees. “We were very fortunate today.”

He’s fortunate, more than any of them, he thinks. For he alone has witnessed Anakin’s transformation from a nervous little boy to the incredible general, teacher and man he is now. And he alone is allowed to see Anakin at his most powerful, yes, but also his most vulnerable.

“I feel like I should be doing something else,” Ahsoka remarks, possibly to Rex, possibly to Obi-Wan. He is unwilling to look away from Anakin to check where her eyes are turned.

“Hmm,” Obi-Wan says, as he watches Anakin shake his head at Fives’ theatrics, “why don’t you go see if Kix needs any help?”

“He doesn’t,” Ahsoka replies, looking up at Obi-Wan blankly. “SkyGuy pretty much guaranteed that. Kix is probably sitting alone in the medbay counting the ceiling tiles.”

Across the room Anakin yawns widely, his ears twitching, and Obi-Wan’s heart stutters painfully his chest. Ahsoka’s right: they’re all perfectly healthy unless Kix considers Obi-Wan’s lovesickness a serious malady. “Right. You could help him with that.”

“What?”

Rex clears his throat. “I’m going to get something to eat,” he announces uncharacteristically, for Obi-Wan very rarely needs to be told when people are eating. “Before we run out of the good stuff.”

Obi-Wan nearly protests, for they have plenty of food and none of it is good. But then Anakin stretches sinuously and Obi-Wan’s power of speech is lost to him like so many cloaks before it.

Ahsoka makes a disbelieving noise but steps towards Rex, possibly because she’s a growing young woman and doesn’t want to miss out, and possibly because Obi-Wan is staring vacantly at her master and she’s beginning to grow uncomfortable. “Right, that’s smart,” she lies, and she and Rex make to leave. “We’ll save you something!”

Anakin meets his eyes from across the room and anticipation beats against Obi-Wan’s ribcage. His Anakin looks so at peace now, so comfortable with his men, so bright in the Force, tangling thoughtlessly with Obi-Wan from across the cargo hold.

It’s intoxicating.

Obi-Wan walks over like a sleepwalker, his feet pulling him towards his former Padawan without any input from his conscious mind. His Anakin laughs at something Fives says but he tracks Obi-Wan’s movements closely as he stumbles across the cargo hold. There’s something compelling in the glint of Anakin’s bright blue eyes. Something predatory.

And Obi-Wan is only too happy to be his prey.

Obi-Wan slips in between Echo and Jesse and Anakin's Force signature practically purrs at his arrival. Obi-Wan can’t spend another moment without Anakin in his arms, or in his bed. He needs him like he needs water, like he needs air—

“I’m afraid duty calls,” Obi-Wan says to the troopers, dishonest apology in his tone. “And by that I do mean the council.”

Anakin huffs and his exhalation makes his curls flutter and ruffles the fur at the tips of his ears. “Already?”

Echo nudges Anakin gently. “They probably want to congratulate you, sir. For the best damn mission any of us have ever been on.”

“I doubt it, Echo.” And Anakin probably does doubt it. He has long insisted that the council doesn’t care for him or that they don’t have faith in him when the reality is nothing of the sort. The poor thing has always been so sensitive to censure, to criticism.

“Well, we’re thankful for you,” Fives says. “Remember when you cut that clanker in half lengthwise? Incredible.”

Anakin flushes pink and his tail smacks against Obi-Wan’s thigh.

Sensitive to criticism, yes.

And to praise.

[aeondeug]

I think I am finally able to better articulate why the current thing with vampireapologist and antis has hit so hard. It’s the sheer lack of compassion. There’s a lot of concern for children, but there’s an uncompromising lack of nuance. A refusal to have it. A line has been drawn in the sand and they openly looked in the eyes of people like me and told us that we were just making excuses. That we’re also just abusers.

And you know? That really fucking hurts. Really bad. In a not fucking useful ass way.

Kencyrath involves canonical incest. It involves canonical incest that is not condemned by nature of it being incest. Indeed, the thing we could call the canon main ship of the series is incestuous and not condemned on account of that. What problems Jame and Tori have aren’t ‘Wow that’s my twin! I guess that means we’re inherently incapable of consenting to anything with one another.’

And that’s uncomfortable for a lot of people. Lots of people can’t read these books and I get that. I feel that the bare baseline for recommendation etiquette with these novels is that you got to bring up the incest and you got to bring up that Jame/Tori is a repeated thing that shows up and is not shown to be unhealthy because they’re twins but because of personal abuse history shit and what reads like fantasy BPD. And that’s fine. It’s fine not to be comfortable with it.

I get that.

But these books are also honestly probably some of the most important books I have ever read. They are some of the only books that have ever looked at someone with my sort of abuse history and who have ever looked at the ways I’ve ended up acting because of that and gone ‘Yeah, no, you still get to be a magical good boy hero with a cool sword! It’s just going to be a bitch to unlearn your unhealthy coping mechanisms and that’s ok so long as you’re getting there.’ Exceedingly few things do that. I never get to be the hero of fantasy novels. At best I get to see characters that have my problems but have the roughness filed off. Or which don’t treat us like human beings. Or which feel kind of like us but always feel like the author writing the story doesn’t actually understand what living through this is like, so that the roughness of the character feels flat and fake. Like it’s an approximation someone made of one of us out of clay based off descriptions they read on wikipedia.

These are helping me.

They’re not the sole thing in my recovery process, of course. They can’t be. But they do help a lot. Because I get to see someone like me. I get to see someone like me treated with compassion and told that they can be a cool hero dude too. I get to see things like the one character realizing that her abusive father wasn’t actually an unstoppable monster but just some...person. Like he was still a dick, but fundamentally he was just a person with an understandable reason as to why he was the way he was. And the father doesn’t get redeemed by any stretch. But she is kind of able to let go of the seemingly all encompassing fear of she had what seemed more like a monster than a man.

Or, you know, something that comes up in my fucking therapy sessions and which is part of the fucking process of healing from abuse. Something that I’m still having to work on and which I was so fucking not about initially that I actually yelled at my therapist one day and declared that I would never, ever do it. Even though we’ve started to do just that and it’s actually fucking helping.

And now I have some fuck on tumblr just coming in and refusing to have any degree of compassion for people like me. They see our hard edges and say that none of that matters. That everything is just forever bad without exception and that there can be no nuance. Your books and your fanfictions involve The Naughty Bad Incest Times so they’re just bad and probably abusing children right now.

And you know what that feels like? It feels like I am being pointed at and told that it’s something I deserved. Like I fucking deserved what’s happened to me. That the sexual abuse from family members is my fucking fault and that I’m just as fucking bad as they are because I happen to like this fucking book series where a pair of twins kiss and I write lots of fanfictions about it and other equally weird or fucked up shit.

I get that that’s probably not the intent but that’s how it ends up coming across to the trauma brain. I get that. Especially with how so much of the concern is regarding fandoms with like wider pulls. But I dunno I’ve fucking seen the Rose/Dave homestuck fandom (I am part of it, though a quiet part, after all) and honestly they seem to stay in their own fucking lane and tag their fucking shit and don’t really seem about going ‘YOU MUST READ MY THING OR YOU ARE A BAD PERSON’. And I’m not really sure I can see what the fucking issue is so long as everything is properly tagged and kept in its proper location. 

And like that’s bad but still the thing that bothers me most is how little feeling vampireapologist appears to have for people like me. And how little the people reblogging that followup post about how even people like me have no excuse or whatever the fuck have.

There was not a single lick of compassion in that entire fucking spiel and I read the whole damned thing. The only thing there was malice and puritanical panic. And you know what? We’re fucking people too. We exist, we matter. “I’m a person and my name’s Anakin.”

This isn’t even about my stupid fucking fanfiction shit, I just don’t want some fucking asshole to just take my shit and throw it on the ground and then fucking blame me for what’s happened to me before telling me that I’m just as bad as they are.

You know when I’ve been making some progress on the whole not being a raging dickhead thing. And now some of that seems to be backsliding because ‘What if I actually am a monster?’ and ‘What’s the point in bothering if I am one...I might as well just be one...’

That’s why people don’t fucking trust antis. There’s a lot of reasons why but that’s one of them. It’s because they don’t actually care. They don’t actually try to sympathize. They don’t actually view us as human beings. We’re just pawns to knock over in some stupid fucking morality game. And that’s fucking bullshit. We’re people. Why don’t you fucking care?