maybe several things

I was thinking the other day what The Killing Type must look like from Bastiaan’s old captain’s point of view. Bastiaan specifically doesn’t mention his relationship with Lennart when it first happens, and then I thought…when does he mention this? Does he bring it up before the wedding invitation or???

Because I did establish that Bastiaan’s captain has basically been looking out for him since he was a kid. Imagine being like a grizzled mid-30s mercenary and suddenly you accidentally adopt a traumatized autistic kid. And then 10 years later he gets a job offer to teach and is like “yeah okay” and like. What are you going to say? Teaching teenagers how to defend themselves is definitely safer than merc work. But also aaaaaa that weird kid is so important to you and he has no idea how to live around other people aaaaaaa

Anyway, here’s a set of letters exchanged between Bastiaan’s bosses.

—-

Dear Headmistress Agatha Maartens,

We spoke briefly last autumn, upon the occasion of you hiring one of my best mercenaries to teach at your Academy. I’m sorry to bother you, as you no doubt have many demands on your time, but I can think of no one else who might be able to help me in this situation.
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The Killing Type extra, because I am incapable of not thinking about these things even if they don't fit in the story proper: Bastiaan and Lennart try more traditionally penetrative sex.

----

"If you don't want to," Bastiaan began, but Lennart cut him off.

"I didn't say that," Lennart said. "I think it would feel very good for me. I don't see what you'd get out of it, though."

"I think it'd feel pretty good for me as well," Bastiaan said. "But even if it doesn't, that's its own kind of enjoyable."

"I suppose," Lennart said doubtfully, as though he hadn't gotten off on Bastiaan tying him up and stabbing him. Or as though he considered the two types of discomfort completely different. Maybe they were, for him. Bastiaan found he quite liked the idea of not physically enjoying something, but letting Lennart do it to him anyway, just because Lennart liked it.

"We don't have to do it again if we don't want to," Bastiaan said. "But I would like to at least try it."

"Then we'll try it," Lennart said.

( Read more... )

moving my transition blogging over from tumblr bc. let's face it dreamwidth has had a much more stable history than tumblr.

extremely long compilation of text posts under the cut!

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posting fic on dw like it's 2005 (i cannot remember if i ever actually posted fic on lj)

uh ethan of athos fic? twenty years later? about elli quinn? it is my firm belief you get the children you deserve

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the thing that really gets me is people talking about the bisexual community and pointing to years-old (sometimes decades-old) evidence of trans-inclusivity and being like “see, we’ve always included trans and/or nonbinary folks in the definition of bi”

and here’s the thing

someone was. y’all weren’t.

i feel very confident saying this as someone who has identified as bisexual for most of their life, and who is also nonbinary. trying to act like the entire bisexual community has been welcoming and inclusive of trans folks since the 70s is a literal lie. if folks meant to be welcoming and inclusive of trans folks in the early 2000s and 2010s, they did a shitty job. if queer teens are not getting that message from you, then you are not putting that message out there enough. a 17 year old bisexual who is just realizing they might have some gender shit going on isn’t doing the fucking reading on queer history, they’re absorbing the most accessible messages

and the most accessible messages when i was a teen and a young adult were literally binaristic and often explicitly transphobic. they were always implicitly binary and transphobic.

and to say, ah no, look at these bisexuals from before you were born, being inclusive! that’s disingenuous. i am here, a nonbinary bisexual, telling you i have experienced transphobia and binarism from other bisexuals, and acting like anyone who’s ever identified with a related but distinct label (pansexuality, polysexuality, etc) is making up a distinction that doesn’t/shouldn’t exist is

literally erasing the experiences of other bisexuals. like me. who were told, well no that’s not really what bisexuality is about. that’s not really who bisexuality is for.

and no, i’m sorry, i can’t pull out receipts on this, because lots of it happened in the years before 2010, when i was a baby gay trying to convince myself i was hetero, or looking to media primarily made by cis gays in an attempt to find something even remotely recognizable

but i have been hearing this messaging for years now that no, bisexuality has always been inclusive, was always meant to be inclusive, pansexuals (or whoever) are making up a distinction that doesn’t need to exist, and it’s. so fucking annoying. y'all, i did not hallucinate all the weird transphobic shit i heard from other bisexuals, about bisexuals. i did not somehow misinterpret all the biological essentialism and fixation on genitals. i didn’t invent the idea of not being welcome or wanted under the bisexual label.

and it’s one thing to be like “we are trying to do better now” and another thing entirely to be like “that never happened”. there’s a world of difference between “that shouldn’t have happened” and “that didn’t happen”. one of them is acknowledgement, and one of them is fucking gaslighting.

anyway the first time i was explicitly told by a sexuality label that people like me existed and people could be attracted to them was someone explaining what pansexuality was, so sorry for not reading minds and somehow intuiting that i was supposed to ignore the transphobes and gender essentialists and that, in five to ten years, bisexuals would largely agree that i existed and was capable of being attractive

i've been thinking a bit more about my tabris and what makes her, you know, different or special to me, why bother writing about her in my alistair/warden/zevran fic instead of another warden (though she's the only alistair-mancer i have so that's the doylist explanation).

mehren sometimes comes across as unsympathetic to other people's problems. as warden, she's more eager to fight, as a way to take out her feelings/revenge on the world. in my warden-as-inquisitor au, where mehren doesn't get rescued by duncan but effectively gets a stay of execution from uldred's whole mess, and ends up just sent to ostwick, she discovers that same martial prowess and thrill from a fight, but she's not allowed to just, go off the rails the way warden surana is. this is probably healthier for her in the long run, but it also means she gets an additional ten years to stew in her resentment until the circle rebels. she has very little patience for anyone involved in the templars or the chantry, though she's much more willing to at least not snap at circle apologist mages than at non-mages. she's grimly determined to fix things, and she does enjoy the fighting, but when people (especially templars or chantry folk) are like "woe is me" she's like "what about my woe. when were y'all going to address that." she can be a little callous, like "look, everyone suffers, it's part of life, stop whining about it and pick yourself up."

kallian, whose name is absolutely going to change bc that is the default ftabris name lmao, might also initially come across as callous, or even flippant. but that's because she has decided, if the world is going to be shit, and she's going to be responsible for part of it, then dammit she is going to be responsible for all of it. she will shoulder every burden she can to spare the people around her. it's a little bit "i'm already broken, so what's this burden to me; if i can spare my friends/this stranger/anyone the pain i've been through then what's a little more". idk if she would say it like that, or even talk about it at all, but even when she was trying to be as practical and pragmatic as possible, she didn't harden alistair or leliana, and she didn't make alistair be king, even though it was the better decision politically. if kallian ended up inquisitor somehow, she would gladly make every hard decision and take as much weight of the whole fucking south of thedas as possible. she wears the wedding ring of the man she didn't get to marry through the whole fifth blight, partially because she made a promise, partially because she couldn't save him, and partially to remind herself that she can't rely on other people to solve her problems. it doesn't work.

she's trying to be pragmatic and practical, but underneath it, she's an idealist. which is part of why i think it charms her when alistair is like "you're so pretty and competent", especially since he initially was like "haha what kind of warrior could you even be". she's made a difference with him, to him, and he noticed and appreciated her.

i also, in her playthrough, which was my first, avoided denerim until the very end, because i didn't know she could go back without like...repercussions, but also, i think it reads very well as, she's scared to go back. what if all this new warden stuff, all this responsibility and companionship, what if it just...goes away. what if she can't do it in her old home. what if they see where she came from and are like "oh haha nvm". she tries to keep everyone else's spirits up, and takes on too much herself.

she was also absolutely prepared to die to defeat the archdemon. i the player was about to lose my fucking mind to keep that from happening, but she would never have allowed alistair to do it. the relief, when morrigan offered an alternative, was overwhelming, but she definitely had decided that was just one more burden for her to take on, to prevent other people from hurting themselves.

(if she ever saw the leliana from the inquisition alternate future, she would have absolutely broken. she did all that work and she still couldn't even save her dear friend from the bitterness of the world. it didn't even matter.)

she asked about all her companions' lives and stories, and when they asked about her, she deflected or lied. she downplayed things. i think over that year her friends picked up on it, zevran and leliana right away since they were doing the same thing, and morrigan and wynne, and maybe even oghren and sten a little bit (though i have no idea if sten would have read anything more into it than her being a good leader), but alistair was the only one she ever like...told things to in detail. he was the only one who ever got to see her panic or break, and that was mostly accidental, since they were the two wardens and spent the most time together. regardless of their relationship, she would have been so so hesitant to show that to him.

okay, i think writing all that shit out helped me remember why i love her so much and why she is the only other warden besides mehren i can like...remember. even though i'm so attached to all my inquisitors.

(mehren as inquisitor, or even just as lived-through-the-blight, fucking idolizes [kallian]. she's like DID YOU SEE THAT BADASS LITTLE ELF WOMAN. DID YOU KNOW SHE SINGLE-HANDEDLY SAVED THE WORLD. DID YOU KNOW ABOUT HER DETERMINATION IN THE FACE OF ADVERSITY SHE'S SO COOL. which is funny, bc if they were fellow warden recruits, mehren would think kallian was boring and holding everyone back lmao)

I hate knowing I only feel like this when my medication isn't right

but I hate feeling like that makes it a less valid thing to feel

I hate spending all my time trying to accommodate other people's needs and not a getting a damn second spent on mine

I hate thinking that I let myself mind it less when I'm medicated as like a backslide into old behaviors

I hate always apologizing like my feelings don't matter just as much, like I don't deserve an apology, like there was literally anything I could have done past a certain point

I hate constantly worrying that even wanting my own needs to be met is abusive

I hate pretending I'm not fucking bleeding because what if saying I'm hurting is manipulative

I hate it I hate it I hate it

So this has been The Worst Year (tm). Things had been rough since we moved from Phoenix to Minneapolis, just because, well, they were. Turns out I get the SAD pretty bad when I live somewhere with a real winter, and so does Grem. But Glo and Grem both went back to school, and I was getting occasional union jobs, ie jobs that actually pay enough to live on for a few weeks afterward, and we were figuring things out, right.

And then my family members started dying.

First, while I was working a fairly long term job that paid real well but also had me working under the Draper From Hell, one of my uncles died. And not one of the crappy ones, one of the two good ones, that wasn't an alcoholic or a jerk. He also happened to be my mom's youngest brother, and the first one in her family since her dad to die. She kinda lost it, so I was obliged to keep it together, while also being the only one in the family doing a full time job thing. I missed the funeral stuff because of work, and Glo made multiple trips to Milwaukee on her own (which is like a 6 hour drive). Fun times.

Then it got worse! During the summer we all basically had no source of income, and eked out a continued existence by taking turns paying bills so nothing got shut off, and going hungry instead of eating, so we would have enough money to pay rent for the slum we were living in.

Then Glo got a nice job, and I was offered a place for the season at the Opera, and my father died. Literally the day after I signed the contract, my first day off, I got woken up at two a.m. and then again at six by different phone calls about my dad being first in the hospital, then not going to make it.

I think it was the next week that we had to go to eviction court, because the slumlords were/presumably still are scum, and again I had to hold it together more than I cared to because mom started crying about the last time she did this my dad was there with her. We ended up paying an obnoxious amount of money to settle, because we had already decided with both of us employed and our lease up at the end of the next month, there was no point in putting ourselves through more missed work and court hassle. So the month after my dad died, we spent house hunting.

We found a place, we moved, it was stressful but not horrible, we both missed the funeral because we couldn't really afford to move and fly to Phoenix, and also, I didn't want to go, because I could not stand the thought of so many people being fake as hell about my dad. I didn't want to deal with all these people acting sad when they didn't do a damn thing for him when he was alive. I also didn't really want to deal with people other than like. My mom acting like their pain was equivalent to mine, which is a shitty thing, but like, he was my fucking dad and I can be ugly and petty in grief if I need to be.

Then I had a six-week layoff over the holidays, which was awful, because when my mental health is already taking a hit, unemployment is basically the worst thing ever for me. It was bad enough to the point that I struggled with getting to work on time/at all, which of course only made the problem worse. I had to talk to my supervisor and try to figure out accommodations and it was really hard and awful and I spent like an entire day crying and having a panic attack about it.

Then my grandma died. Again, not the shitty one, but the one I liked and had been writing letters and thank you cards to, in probably the most effort to stay in touch with someone I have ever made.

The rest of this horribleness is too recent for me to have much coherent to say about it. Just as I was getting my feet under me after the third death in my family in like nine months, I slipped outside and cracked my ribs, which basically made me physically unable to work. I had to quit my job, because it became clear that the universe wanted me to take a fucking break. I'm still in enough pain from my ribs and the funeral last weekend (and the flights, which are so amazingly not fun when you have broken bones) that I haven't really started feeling hopelessly useless from unemployment. The funeral weekend was a disaster, with the awkward funeral mass and subsequent reception being kind of the high point. People got disowned, people moved out, people turned out to be secret transmisogynists, it was a trainwreck. Today was the first day since we flew back that I didn't sleep at least twelve hours.

Having all this down in one place as a narrative really helps me convince myself that I'm not overreacting. It's really hard to be like "I'm just too crazy to be a real adult" when like. The entire world has been non-stop awful to me and my family.

Maybe if I make myself post on Dreamwidth, I will remember it exists and check it on a regular basis. Maybe.

So I wasn't aware this was going to happen, but this has apparently turned into the summer of concerts for me. I think the biggest factor in this was the fact that I was in Milwaukee for Summerfest, could get to Summerfest, and cared about music, things that have never managed to overlap before in my life.

( The concerts: Cage the Elephant, Weird Al, B-52s, Joan Jett, Three Beers 'Til Dubuque, An Awful Band Of Which I Will Not Speak, Katzenjammer, DEVO )

Also this summer: books. I've read so many books this summer. It's very nice. I went through Sophie's whole Neil Gaiman collection (two books were short story collections, which make me happier than most things), all of Transmetropolitan, the Ocarina of Time manga, the comic adaption of Neverwhere, the Zombie Survival Guide, the Illustrated Outbreaks comic, several Georgia Nicholson books, The Giver, a short book of captioned illustrations by Edward Gorey, and am currently working my way through Pretty in Punk, about girls' gender resistance in the punk movement.

Also also this summer: markers. Sophie's mom had a bunch of old Prismacolor markers from her school days, and gifted them to Sophie, who has allowed me to use them while I'm here. Most of my Prismacolors are skin tones, and none of hers were, so our two collections combined are very effective for arting, and we have been doing a lot of it.

And finally this summer, video games. I replayed Wind Waker and Twilight Princess (both depressing beyond all reason), Sophie just bought God of War, and I'm going to start in on Final Fantasy IX again (because I love it). This is not to mention our countless combined hours of the Sims 3.

In sum: it is muggy, and my feet have often hurt, but I am very happy and keeping busy. Also there is a cat, which never hurts.