#cawis commentary

So! we've got she/her Sam, and Meg possessing her, and all the complicated stuff that goes on there. It's always fascinated me that Meg, when she's possessing Sam, says that she IS Sam. She's a gas she fills her containers. In this song, she resists that facet of possession, as the possessor. She asserts over and over that Sam is "dead", but she also "can't make the final incision":

Verse 1: Locked door. Locked diary. Locked out of this inquiry./Wrong choice. Wrong weapon. You barely left an impression./Wrong thoughts. Wrong memory. But you still see her inside of me. What you don't know will hurt you [with a crossed out, "but I don't care"] Wrong hands. Wrong body. It's not quite dead but it's rotting./Dull knife. Sharp apple. There's nothing played on this channel/I'm here. The new vision. But I can't make the final incision!"

She is trying to slip into Sam's life unobserved, but she keeps getting the performance wrong, and keeps having to lean on Sam's knowledge and memories of herself. This is an AU situation where Meg gets on the outs with Hell sooner, and is maybe on the run and trying to just live her new life as Sam, or may she took Sam as part of the YED plot, but is tripped up by her own unexpected feelings. She thought she could fool Jess with shutting down her concerns ("Locked out of this inquiry") and feels smug that Jess can't hurt her in an argument with what would have hurt Sam: "Wrong choice. Wrong weapon. You barely left an impression". That line is both to signify Meg as a threatening force, but also she's unknowingly expressing vulnerability - she is constantly expecting to be attacked. To me, this line is about a situation where Jess and her are fighting with normal relationship stuff and Jess says something really mean that would have probably hurt Sam's feelings, but Meg is like ha. you think that'll hurt me? idiot. i don't have feelings. which then becomes ironic when she catches feelings really hard lol. But that part isn't necessarily legible in the song. Maybe Jess whacked her with a shovel when she did something freaky and it broke around her. this is all just how I made the song and what I think about it :)

For the "What you don't know will hurt you", there was initially a resolving "but I don't care", but I wanted to keep up the tension in the verse so I removed it. That had the added bonus that, when it's used later, it can be read as Meg saying this to herself. What she doesn't know about herself, her feelings, about Sam that she can't emulate, will hurt her. It's how a lot of the demons who survive in the show operate, her and Crowley both know that information is power.

Then we have "Wrong hands. Wrong body. It's not quite dead but it's rotting." which I debated back and forth on being "Wrong touch. Wrong body." to signify Meg's horrible relationship with sexual assault, but it felt a little on the nose. I think "hands" still signifies that, as well as being such a fundamental part of someone's identity. They're what you look at ALL the time. If you feel like you've got the wrong hands, something very painful is going on with your identity. And I just like the image of demon possessed bodies rotting, to trigger a threatening disgust response.

After writing verse 1, not knowing what direction this was going to go, I wrote a start to the chorus that went unused:

"There is a link between us neither of us fully understands, when you reach out to touch her I'm the one who feels you hold my hand", which uses the chords from the verse but with a B flat major instead of minor. It's more straightforwardly speaking TO Jess there, and more straightforwardly romantic, and it's more like 'fate brought us together' which I don't subscribe to being romantic, so I didn't think it really fit. I did however repurpose the strongest idea in there, of Meg feeling it when Jess tries to touch Sam, in the bridge! Writing and thinking is never wasted :)

I also cut a potential line in the verse: "Romance. Is Lying. But you couldn't say I'm not trying." because it felt a little trite and wordy (although I probably should have said "can't" lol, but I didn't like the mouth feel of ro-mance over the two notes), and I wanted the first verse to be establishing unease more than speaking to the romance side of things. It felt a bit too vulnerable of an admission for the first verse.

Instrumentals

I'll talk about the instrumentals here because after the first chorus is when the strings really start happening. I wrote this playing on the ukulele, but doing SO many B flat minors and F sharps was so hard (they're both barre chords) and the quality of my playing kept degrading by the bridge which is ALL B flat minor and F sharp and that was really frustrating. So I decided to open my close personal friend Musescore (free music software) and through it I developed a new concept musically. It was obviously too flat with just computery dull piano chords over and over so I added strings, the violin and the cello. And then I thought: what if the strings! represent Sam's presence! Initially it was just the cello meaning her, because that kicks in during the instrumental between the chorus and verse two which is where Meg starts "unspooling", the firm line she thought was between her and Sam disintegrating. That's why after "Is that her or is that me?" we get a short cello solo. But I think, the main violin from the start is Meg, relatively reigned in, but the second violin and cello is Sam. She gets progressively louder and louder in Meg's head, more chaotic. When Meg in the end exclaims that "there's no voice/scream inside my head!" there's a little run on the violin and then on a cello, that's my friend Sammmm she's in there she's yelling!!

I love writing melodies and harmonies <3 actually no. I kind of hate transcribing them. but I love them coming to me. my beautiful little creatures.

Verse 2: Unspooled. Unsacred. But you still like the sight of us naked/Unkind. Unspecial. I'm just too small for this vessel./Wrong face. Wrong expression. Why's it so hard to learn this lesson? What you don't know will hurt you. Wrong voice. Wrong lipstick. I don't know how she existed./Unspooled. Unhappy? Is that her or is that me?

This second verse was tricky I didn't know what I wanted to say to start with. On my notes, both the verses have the second halves above the first because I got those lines quickest and then was like okay these are too powerful to begin with. I initially had the order of lines be "Unspooled...Wrong Face...Unkind...." but having the "uns" grouped together made more sense, and ending on the question "Why's it so hard to learn this lesson?" followed by "What you don't know will hurt you" makes that change in who it is aimed at mentioned above much clearer. I like "Wrong face. Wrong expression." because yes this is about the characters from the cws supernatural, but it's also about a feeling of alienation from your own body, and from the social world around you. Being told, or noticing, that you're having the "wrong" reactions to what's happening to you is painful and unsettling. You could easily read this song as Sam having a mental break down with genuinely no input from Meg like, the things Meg says about herself are things Sam thinks about herself sometimes. They're mirrors!

I had a few times with recording this where I tried out doing a more (faux) playful/flirty delivery, particularly on "but you still like the sight of us naked" but ultimately I decided on keeping it as a pretty flat delivery, because Meg doesn't fully know how to feel about that. Both from the above history with sexual violence, but also, when your partner is looking at you and seeing (kind of) her ex that she's still in love with. And that's all the time.

"I don't know how she existed" has a double meaning, both "I don't know how she was to accurately emulate her" and a somewhat awed "how was she a person who was real, she had so much to deal with and was still a Good PersonTM somehow...impressive...". I was potentially going to follow that up with "Right grip. Wrong Pressure. Was it really so hard to impress her? [or: why's it so hard to possess her?]", or with, "[she existed] too strongly. Too boldly. What kind of coward does that make me?". The first I dismissed for being kind of. Nonsense. Or too on the nose. And the second I crossed out for scanning horribly. No one wants to end a strong sentence fragment with "-ly" it just does not work it's a weak ending sound, and having to say "coward" as one syllable is also pretty weak sounding.

The "I don't know how she existed" could also have been changed to "I don't know how you have missed it" but I think "I'm an imposter!! be scared of me!!" had been established clearly enough by this point lol. And also, again, too wordy.

"Unspooled. Unhappy? Is that her or is that me?" I love a repetition yay yippee. Meg is scared of being unspooled it is ON her mind. And of course, who IS making this experience "unhappy", is it her, from her refusal to be vulnerable and stop hiding behind the Sam Mask that keeps slipping and her hideous demonic guilt, or is it Sam, from, you know, being possessed by a demon? No matter which answer, that's horrific isn't it? Either she's miserable all by herself and has no one else to blame for it and it might stay that way forever because the unhappiness is coming from inside of her spirit, or she's intermingling with Sam and would STILL have perpetual unhappiness because the unhappiness is stored in her body.

Here the chorus becomes potentially a little differently contextualized too: Meg doesn't just need Sam for her body, she needs her to consult her for the answers to all these things she's doing wrong, the "lesson"s that are so "hard to learn". I go back and forth on whether I'd say Meg and Sam have a real line of communication in the world of this song. Maybe she isn't getting answers at all, maybe she's also got a "locked door, locked diary" from Sam herself. Listener's choice I guess!

Bridge: Listen, this isn't my body, I know that's hard to hear/Listen, this isn't my body and it's been this way for years/Listen this isn't my body and I don't have a soul/Listen, this isn't my body but I think I make it whole. Listen, this isn't my body, I need you to understand/Listen, this isn't my body, but if you could...hold my hand.../Listen, this isn't my body and I don't have a soul/Listen, this isn't my body but I think I make it whole.

I was doing my best Tom Waits impression here, although maybe Nick Cave is closer to what actually comes out. When I hear Gods Away On Business I think of. well one the cookie monster and two an imagined Meg amv which would require scenes that don't exist, like of her digging a grave and spitting on the ground. I also have a dean poem that should be read in a Tom Waits voice. I love my voice and don't want it to change but it would be so awesome to be able to do a real Tom Waitsian voice...ah well....

Anyway, the bridge here is like, the big confessional moment. Meg sitting Jess down at a table and going "listen...I know that's hard to hear". She does now care about how Jess will take things, unlike the cut but I feel still discernible "I don't care" in the "what you don't know..." part. She is trying to be honest and raw. The "if you could...hold my hand..." came through, in place of a crossed out "but I love when you hold my hand" from just singing it over and over and over and over and over again, and finding the most powerful, hesitant version of it. There's no substitute in song writing to just doing it a bunch. Helpfully, when I write a new song I am always doing it a bunch because my brain is going oo yay new thing!!!!! New joy button!!! For me, after I feel like a song is Done it kinda feels like it's always been there. I have revealed the song that already existed inside me. Which is not how I feel with writing, even though the processes are so similar, where the meaning evolves through the act of writing. I guess a big part of it is that repetitive playing through! I like that even if I have fully established in my head what a song sounds like, every performance is still slightly different. I love music I love live music. Anyway that's a tangent.

Must be pretty insulting to Sam stuck in there to hear Meg insist that she makes her whole lmaooo. This song is in conversation with this Meg poem I wrote (the title is in reference to it!) where there she says: "People try to tell me/'You think, therefore you are.'/But I think, therefore she isn't/so what use is ruminating now?" with the "she" there meaning the person she's possessing. And here she says "I make [this body] whole!", even though Sam is "screaming" in her head. She's trying to be vulnerable about it but she also still has to lie, possibly even to herself, because if Jess knew that Sam was alive she'd have a bigger problem with Meg staying in it. This part is of course inspired by the "have more people than there are bodies to go around" prompt. Meg's been compromised by falling for Jess for real, by taking over Sam's life for too long, by dropping the causes she was affixing her whole existence to, and can no longer claim to "[n]ever pretend to myself" as per the poem.

And then the final chorus! When doing my singing over and over thing I had to sing it down the octave lol but it's so funnnn. The "I wish! - I wish she was dead." Was also an addition that came from repeatedly performing it. Before that it was "Oh god! She's dead!" as more like a, "what have I done, she's really gone forever oh no" type thing, but with the addition of the strings denoting Sam's presence it no longer felt true. But possibly if I perform it live I'd still do "Oh god!" Because it's fun to sing haha.

Meg wishes Sam was dead both from the whole above Jess would be upset thing, but taking the song more metaphorically, she wishes the part of her that cares about the ways she is different to how she used to be/wants to be was gone. She wishes her conscience was dead, so she wouldn't have to live with the guilt of what she has done as a demon, to Jess and to Sam.

The end! Happy birthday @autisticandroids !!! I hope you got a lot of strange and bizarre relationship drama <3

The Only Three That Don't Feature Sex

I was going to say 'aren't horny' but that's simply not true. lol.

a ghost (still seen) (Mary/Billie)

This one was TOUGH to figure out the ending to, because of course having a romance with Death has Symbolic Implications of suicide which I got around by having the characters actively talk about that. The ending is a little rushed, perhaps, but that's alright!!! It's all for fun here!! I started off writing this with the general "you" in the first sentence and then I just kept going. I honestly don't know if I'd read a fic this long that is in second person so shout out to everyone who has <3

i pulled the butterfly apart (thank god, thank god!) (oc) If there was a shifter-only society in Supernatural, what might that be like? And what if someone was trans in it?

I love sci-fi, especially the star trek style alien culture of the week stuff! it was very fun to try and figure out how the culture would be different for a species that can't retain its shape, and that takes in other people's memories when they shift into them, AND then what nonconformity would look like in a society where there isn't an obvious in-group way of looking. I decided to operate under the assumption that the shifters we see in spn are all not doing so hot, which is why they shapeshift much more frequently, because the rate of change with all your flesh flying off every day or two seems completely unsustainable lol.

I like to think about memory and how/whether it maketh man, it's a theme I also explore in the sampreg abortion fic of last year. Our MC brings with them the fears, memories and expectations of a heavily gendered (I felt that I needed to stay delicate, ephemeral, pretty to have any hope in hell of being wanted by anyone) and human-centric (a hawk eating a baby rabbit is still bad even if it’s natural) world, as well as the fears of not being able to fit in here without the shared, linked memory of Mercy. I called the memory-store Mercy to demonstrate (1) it is the culture's way of fighting back against its own short lifespan, showing mercy to themselves and each other (2) it has religious connotations for this group (3) it is a (usually) gendered name, and our MC's aversion to it implicitly signals trangenderism. My interpretation of this MC is transmasc, as they opted for and raise courage from a body that has had breast removal top surgery but there's nothing in this that really precludes a different reading. I wanted to leave things ambiguous. I was even hesitant in these notes to refer to them as "they" because idk what pronouns they'd use!! They're not at that stage yet, they're the caterpillar!

Writing this was definitely partly inspired by reading Hell Followed With Us btw.

Dean Winchester Is Saved (destiel pre-slash, gen) Pulling yourself out of the grave is exhausting. Hauling another guy out after you is madness.

An episode rewrite! Based on this post by @howsdeanshole. I wanted to try and capture some of the vibes of 4.01, particularly the opening with just Dean, thirsty and alone and disoriented. I think I caught it with "The sky above is a flat, pale blue, the sun shot through it like a bullet hole." Maybe Dean was a little too trusting of Cas too quick, but this is my united states of whatever lol. I had jokes to tell!

Rarepairs

Oh these pairs? You won't find them on your average ao3 page 💅 Technically all femslash is rarepairs here but I'm going by if they wouldn't immediately come to mind

Touch Me Baby (touch me touch me touch me touch me!) (Jo/Pamela, omegaverse) Jo's tired of the alpha guys who hang around the bar all day. That's why, when Pamela Barnes, cool, raunchy and (Jo's sure) another omega, comes into the Roadhouse, Jo hangs off her every word, and invites her back to her room to show her her knife collection. (Pamela isn't an omega). (Pamela did not come to her room to see Jo's knife collection). (Jo might just be a raging fucking lesbian).

The start of dykesexweek 1 <3 I don't remember exactly how I landed on Jo/Pamela as a pairing...I think I was running through the roster of women who could meet omega!Jo as an alpha and have casual sex without having to get into all sorts of complicated emotional stuff lol. I love youuuu non-traditional dynamics. Which this one technically isn't if we're just going from this being Alpha/Omega penetration ft knotting lol but I think I conveyed that Pamela is a Samantha and that they could be doing whatever. Jo's got sort of a Man! I Feel Like A Woman! awakening in this. Good for her!!!!!!!

My Sweet Little Kitty (Sarah Blake/Bela) Catgirl!Bela gets Sarah a collar, and overstimulates her in it.

yayyyy advanced catgirl features!!! A rough tongue, nose twitching, extreme flexibility. Getting overstimmed by your catgirl we love to see it. It's a little annoying that adding this explicit extra to the closed-door romcom of the first part marks the whole series as explicit but c'est la vie. I'd rather have you (catgirl porn) cursed (with an explicit tag) or not.

Death by... (Billie/Tessa/Lily Baker) Lily the lesbian who kills people when she touches them can have a hot exhibitionist threesome. As a treat!!!!

This one has the beginnings of the idea I expand on in the above MaryBillie fic, of spirits sharing memories with reapers and with Death. Billie does a job with a huge burden of emotional labour, so I make sure in my fics starring her as a femslash icon to have at least one scene where she is given the opportunity to put that weight down, be cared for herself, be it emotionally or sexually. You don't have to be the strong one or the empathetic one all the time you can get cherished sometimes!!!!

Blood. Face. Concrete. (Jo/Meg) Jo just has to say one little word, and Meg will stop humiliating her. She refuses to say it. Embarrassment has its own joys.

For this one I will simply say. shrug emoji. Shout out to humiliation kink!!!!!!

Devout (Layla Rourke/Ruby) Layla found a new church through her friend Ruby. The membership ceremony is…unusual.

Yayyy yippie! cults!! This was for sure influenced by having started a Dexter rewatch where Julie Benz plays Rita. God she's hot in that show. I'll look after you, sweet, scared milf. Anyway, the prompt was Sacrilegious because I was initially planning to do an Anna/Ruby in the same universe as There's A Devil In Me (which I will talk about later) with the whole evil weird nunnery/monastery but I found myself getting tied up in knots about having to define things more clearly and I couldn't be arsed!!! but the image of getting fucked with stained glass painting an image onto you on an altar remained firm in my mind so Layla can have that <3 as a treat <3 I also wanted to have a terminally ill character with more agency and prominence after having a flyby from that one lesbian in Death By who dies. Being terminally ill =/= becoming unimportant or undesirable.

Pretty Girls Drink Free (Linda/Ellen) Linda comes to the Roadhouse as neutral ground to meet a witch. Ellen is very glad she came.

Linda finally gets her day in the sun after I swapped her out for her daughter (in yet another Rowena story vfsjvbhfs). I killed off Jo in this one. The sacrifices we make for yuri. Don't fixate on that detail it's a cute one!!!

Platinum Card (f!Uriel/Jody)

See I had my prompt list ending in Sugar Baby but then I wrote a Bela performing femininity in Untouched (In A Good Way) [which I will discuss later] in ways that I felt I would be repeating so I got quite stuck. I also found that having prewritten the fics to release two days after, while it did give me a 'having a job' buffer, it meant I didn't get the same dopamine blast that I did from writing-releasing the pervious dykesexweek works on the same day. You live and you learn! Both of which had this one be a bit of a difficult write. I was also stuck for a long while between f!Uriel and f!Raphael, because I think either of them acting as sugarmommy to mom-Jody would make for some interesting conversations. Shout out to @ragdollysammy for talking that choice through with me!! and also for recommending I swap it to a drabble so I didn't actually end up doing any of those conversations lmaooo. I was getting too caught on the meet cute and plot stuff and couldn't get my way forward to sex until I took that 100 word limit to make it just be sex. Which is necessary for dykesexweek. Clue's in the name innit.

The Empirical Gentleman (f!Ketch/f!Cuthbert) Cuthberta wants to show off her collection of creatures. Butch!Ketch is very pleased to be invited.

I think this is my rarest pair. Even rarer than Castiel/VCR machine. Lol. SO self indulgent and excellent fun. You don't understand he literally wants her to call him my good man. Looking back, I don't know why I tagged this as LIGHT sadism. The sadism is the whole thing, just (mostly) not directed at the POV character lol. Cuthberta literally pulls a vampire's teeth out and gifts them to Ketch. gone sexual!!!!!!!!

Ketch's character just works so so so much better if you picture him as a he/him butch. At least for me. As a she/him butch. lnsfjvkjs. I keep wanting to write more of these two but not quite grasping a scenario...if you have any concepts....tell me them....what if we get Dean involved...does Ketch lure Dean in to join Cuthberta's collection with his masculine wiles...

Rowena time!!

Everybody clap for my pathetic and extremely powerful girlfriend.

It's Good To Be Queen (Mary/Rowena) Rowena has Mary cockwarming her strap while she's sat on her throne in Hell, and flustered demon lackies to tease as she does so. It's good to be queen.

Really in the spirit of dykesexweek. Just good old fashioned femme cock. My favourite line of this one is "[Mary]’s like a little doll, one you can bash against the wall."

Sammy's Big Mommy Milkers (Sam/Rowena) Rowena's been milking Sam for a spell. Sam decides he wants to give her a taste.

Whenever I get to see this description it tickles me. Rowena's been milking Sam for a spell. just so matter of fact. you're on board with it. lmao. What I like about Samwena is that. Well for one thing Rowena is there and so is post-s11 Sam and I love them both. But it's that they're soooo comfortable being themselves around each other. Sam KNOWS Rowena isn't to be trusted, which lets him relax and get a bit silly and horny. Shout out to Rowena's inhospitable womb <3

two wrongs make a wrong (and there's nothing wrong with that!) (Charlie/Rowena) Charlie needs to dig out a piece of Rowena's liver by hand for a spell while they're working together. She gets a bit too into how painful it is to Rowena.

We love sadism!!!!!!!! In this house!!! Big year for sadism in fics for me. Which could mean nothing.

Getting her with my estrogen beam!!!

Transing genders and taking names.

Veiled in Flesh (Kelly Kline/Duma/Naomi) Kelly Kline has a dream about two kind, gentle angels coming to her and asking her to bear a child for Heaven. It's a beautiful dream. When she wakes, it's a nightmare.

I can't believe my first Kelly impregnation fetish fic isn't a DagonKelly lmao. She's so weird <3 I do feel for her though...her biggest want is to feel "so, so safe" but she can't let go of her bigotry and fear enough to recognise that the goals she is working towards politically can only harm her and other women. Her politics are wrapped up in her faith and both of them are wrong!! As I say in a comment response: I don't say so explicitly in the fic but it's not even true that God chose her, this is s12/14, God's out of the game. THEY chose her and are calling it God's Will bc they know it's an effective manipulation technique.

Anyway I think we should have more unhinged femslash with Duma I LOVED her freaky performance. She wanted to impregnate Jack with nephilm like. hello. like that's not exactly what she says but that's basically what she says. She's kind of shivery and as The Empty she's almost drooling. More Duma in 2026 please and thank you.

Also the title is of course from the narsty line "veiled in flesh the godhead be" from Hark The Herald Angels Sing, which is arguably not about being veiled in the flesh of Mary's body via her pregnancy but I always read it that way. gross!!! haha

I think we're beautiful (f!dean/cassie) Cassie knows her and Dean are moving too fast, but he's sweet, and he's earnest, and he's beautiful. When she shows him her strap on, she doesn't expect it to turn into something so tender.

God this one. gets me every time. Tenderness and uncertainty wrapped up together, on both sides. Literally Cassie's only dated girls before....Dean's the aberration...

The “[Cassie's ex] owed [her] for all those movie dates where she wouldn’t shut the fuck up" is based on a horrible experience I had where I went to the cinema with an acquaintance for one of the opening nights of one of the big marvel movies (so the cinema was packed) and he was reacting at normal volume to literally everything happening onscreen and wouldn't shut up despite my whispered requests until a guy a few rows down told him to shut the fuck up. Rude dude!!! Mortifying!! Be considerate of the people around you!!

Through the looking glass, I see you (f!Midam) Out of the Cage, Mye [formerly, Michael] is able to give Alice [formerly, Adam] the body she always wanted. It's a better fit for both of them.

It's about! Self love!! An irl friend of mine who has my ao3 bc im shameless said this one inspired them to write some porn based on their dnd character. my influence <3 To the fic itself, I am always a big masturbation fan (lol) and it was also delightful to write Mye controlling their body (socially awkward) vs Alice controlling their words (chipper!). I will probably write a more serious piece on them in the cage but for now :3 they love each other and love themselves more through who they become together (a woman!!)

I'm British (you can tell because I said "innit" earlier)

There was other place to put my very british-reference omegaverse fic lmao. Arguably I could have also put my butch!Ketch fic in here.

You're Going To Have To Explain (oc) Heather, a fairly reserved radio DJ omega, has been in love with her best friend Honey, a chronic oversharer, scientist and beta, for four and a half years. She's been pretty good at keeping it under wraps. Until her heat triggers with Honey literally sat in her lap. That's one problem. Another is that Honey seems determined to help her through it, but omega physiology isn't covered in school sex ed, and Heather really, really needs a knot. Looks like she's going to have to explain…

I liked coming up with their romance backstoryyyy and I love going "people with large scarring and facial burns are beautiful and hot as fuck and I hope you know it!!!!". This year was my first time properly writing omegaverse outside of jokes and I can see why people get addicted. It's such a wild and free space. A new frontier of strange erotica. And by new I mean about 15 years old.

My top three!

My darlings at the moment from this year. I love all my fics (and on another day I might put I think we're beautiful in here...) but these are the ones I'm returning to the most. I like what I did here!!

When I was someone else (f!dean) (dean/charlie)(dean/crowley)(dean/castiel) Dean's known that she's a woman for a long time. She wasn't planning on acting on it. Then, in what should be a miracle, she wakes up spelled into a body everyone can recognise as a woman without a second thought. Dean should be grateful. She should be happy with it. But there's one big problem: it doesn't look like her.

I wrote this one for @autisticandroids spn genderbend week (which the Shifters one was also for!). This one I have a lot of love for, although I am still a little nervous of how it might read to a transfem audience, I don't know if any of the positive comments on it were from transfem/trans women readers...I hope it comes across as intended. The sexism that permeates the world Dean lives in, that she knows is going to happen to her if she starts moving towards an outside that matches herself more closely is a real and valid concern which will only get more potent and dangerous if she's recognised as trans, but also, she is still always going to be happier to be herself openly rather than pretend to be a guy. She needed a kick start to the process. I was definitely influenced in recounting the smaller moments of societal sexism by reading Invisible Women (highly recommend the audiobook in particular, which I found through Libby) and getting really, really angry haha.

Also it was so fun to write the Crowley dialogue in this one. I had initially pictured this as a straightforwardly destiel fic but as I was writing that I was like wait...maybe I do want a drowley endgame in this...and then I circled back to add more to the DeanCharlie scene and was like OKAY we are DOING this. Three love interests. Get it girl!!!!

There's a devil in me (it's hot though) (dean/f!castiel) Sister Castiel is given the task of punishing "Sister" Dean with a paddling. She finds she enjoys it a lot more than she thought she would.

Someone made a post about me recently saying that they'd just found an author who only does guilty sadist povs and I was internally like that's NOT true but then I thought about my recent output and had to be like well. it's maybe a little true jsbvfjsb. I love you guilty sadist sister castiel you're so cute and bad at having desires. Guilt is intrinsic to a Castiel, warrented or otherwise, she needs it to thrive. What did she do that she doesn't want to confess to Dean which she has been punished for? Fuck knows. What are the beliefs of this bizarre christian-esque cult? FUCK knows!!

This fic was in my drafts for aaaaaaaaaaages having only the backstory paragraph and Cas hiding Dean's secret paper (what is on this paper? fuck knows!! if I knew that stuff I'd have written the whole story lol) having not actually gotten to them. doing it.

I tried looking up "nun underwear" for this fic to know what Castiel would really be wearing, other than a thong, but results were inconclusive. So I guess we are forced to imagine her airing her cheeks under there. We are simply FORCED.

Is it clear at the end that Dean thinks Cas wants him to go to her room to have anal sex. I hope so. And he's reading a porn mag <3 he really is a bad nun <3

Untouched (In A Good Way) (Mary/Bela) Bela and Mary have a standing appointment (for Mary to suck on Bela's strap, and for Bela to pretend she's not falling in love).

SO late in the year to have posted a big time fave and yet. Lol. It's about how much I love femmes!!! and how much I love butches!!! it's about acts of service and the privilege of being allowed to do that service. I want to be butch in part to be able to support a femme in her gender expression. But on to the fic, I doubled down on my "Bela doesn't like to be touched gently" headcanon from my JoBela heist fic but I pushed it further, Bela here doesn't want to be touched at all. And her butch takes care of her! by respecting her boundary! And Bela of course has her cat-like affection in return <3 Plus, Mary's love of sci-fi I pulled across from my what if mary was a nerd you don't know she could be i think it would be fun if she was fic. It's really nice to have built up a reserve of little details about various and assorted characters from so many fics! It's always easier to write what you know, and the more I create my own interpretations, the better I know them.

The End!!

I sure can talk about my own works lol. Which is good! I have a lot of thoughts about a lot of things which is how I was able to make these in the first place! 24 is so many. Literally double last year. Thank you to everyone who's left a comment, apart from Michelle Obama, who wanted to steal my credit card details. Girl you have enough money. Shaking my head.

To me, a poem is circling around an idea through building a structure, so:

1. Figure out a key idea that connects two things together("smoke is a metaphor for hidden places" + "Mary Supernatural's relationship to motherhood" = "Mary Supernatural's hidden feelings about motherhood explored through the metaphor of a house fire")

OR a scene where something very sensory is happening ("eating a live octopus", "running on a cold day")

2. Write a short paragraph of whatever comes into my head as I think about that. Connections to other works, random lines, images, concepts. The ideas can be cliché and shit and not be used in the final piece!!

I'll do one rn for the octopus concept:

"What could the octopus be a metaphor for? Struggling to create a piece of work? Like how I rotate pieces of media around in my head for a while sometimes without getting a clear thought on them, as I am with Mouthwashing right now. The struggling kick of life. A life without hands, only senses. A constant reaching forever. Maybe a squid would be better, it releases cloudy ink...? But it's not as big as an octopus. Poem speaker confused between squid and octopus. The sensation of being strangled from the inside by the octopus tentacles. Fighting against yourself and your own instincts to give up. Tears forming as ideas form. Salt and copper. The tongue is kind of like a tentacle in itself. 'I swallow it, until it becomes mine'."

^ this helps solidify the ideas of the poem without having to battle through 3 or 4 drafts while looking at a blank page willing ideas to come out. Sometimes I just do that part in my head but it can be helpful to refer back.

What I love about poetry is that you can just skip to the exciting bit! You don't need a bunch of characters or scene descriptions or dialogue. It can all be the bit that makes you go hell yeah cool cool cool!! (<- guy who finds literary analysis cool)

3. Whichever of those ideas speak to you, use some to write a first stanza. The rhythm can be whatever sounds good in your head:

"I'm eating an octopus

(Live)

With gusto,

It's fighting me back but I bite."

So now we have an established rhythm! For this one it's

7 syllables [no comma]

(a short aside)

3 syllables,

8 syllables.

Now for the rest of the poem I can use that same rhythm, which keeps me focused. If you don't want to come up with your own rhythm, there's plenty of established poetry rhythms and rhyme schemes, if you google "types of poem" they will appear as if by magic. And of course you don't have to use a pattern at all. Again, this is just what I do.

To be clear, I don't tend to literally count out the syllables, you can feel what the rhythm is by saying the poem out loud (which you should do FREQUENTLY as you write to make sure the emPHAsis doesn't go ON the WRONG word). There's poetry terms for emphasis but I don't know them because I only did up to AS level poetry 😉

If you ever find the rhythm isn't working, change it. It's your poem. Do whatever you want. Changing the rhythm can also be used to show "this is a change/escalation in idea". It's a song with a bridge.

4. Keep talking about different parts of the metaphor in that structure:

"The tentacles writhing

(I chew, I chew)

A battle,

A hunt for the truth.

The hinge of my jaw

(It hurts, it hurts)

Unkindly,

I stick in my tooth."

^ I often slip into rhyming, this also helps not get stuck thinking of literally any word from the english language that could be used. As Monica from FRIENDS says, "rules help control the fun!"

"The [something] of muscle,

(My tongue? Its leg?)

My burden,

My begging for proof."

^ my close personal friend square brakets when I can't think of a description this instant! Wooo!

"[Some sort of 5th stanza that has an end rhyme for proof, maybe with the "salt and copper" concept?]

I'm eating an octopus

(Live)

But I'm winning

It's hard, but it's worth it, the fight."

^As you can see I added an extra syllable for the second to last line, you gotta just listen to your heart sometimes. When ending things I like to harken back to the beginning! It can be a little cheesey sometimes but that's okay, poems are allowed to be cheesey!

That's my general approach. Something that really, really helps with writing poetry is also... reading poetry. You get to experience a lot of rhythms and rhyme schemes and ways of talking about ideas and how different poets use the foundation of a poem to express their meanings. Reading this poem back, I was writing spontaneously but I can very clearly see influences of A A Milne (my mum's favourite poet!), The Jellyfish by Marianne Moore and my dear friend @lesbianjoannaharvelle 's poem I wish I could draw for the theme of wrestling with creativity. Our works are in conversation! Isn't that cool!!

The Cave was dark, but for the blank white of the screen. A flash of green graced its top right corner intermittently: [INSERT TAPE] , and at the left, in black: [HDMI2]. Castiel had waited for this. The others were sleeping in their rooms. He prided himself on the excuse he’d given to Dean; “I will be communing with the slugs. I want to feel them lingering on my skin.” Dean, despite his profession, could be adorably squeamish about the strangest of things.

My dad always says "HDMI 12" to wind me up even though it's HDMI 2 lol. Anyway, a lot of this fic is (naturally) revelling in Cas’s weirdoness 💗 so maybe another day he does go and commune with the slugs

Cas felt only nominally guilty about his lie. He’d tried to be more honest in the past:

“I want to use the VCR.” // “Awesome, let’s all do a movie night!”

“I plan to learn about the inner workings of our entertainment modules.” // “Like a documentary? Hey, Sam, you ever seen one about that?”

“I wish to be consumed by the television.” // “Swing and a miss, buddy. You consume stuff, not the other way around. TV sounds good though, let’s do Kitchen Nightmares.”

Thus, the necessity of deception. Not joining Dean in bed required an explanation, and accurate explanation, Cas knew, would be impossible. Dean would be disconcerted. Quite possibly disgusted. He might, most importantly, have thrown the VCR away. Cas couldn’t abide that.

Hehehe justifying lies as per usual, never change cas!!!

He ran his thumbs around the opening flap to the VCR, feeling out its generous give. This machine was an object of power. It translated vision to vision, thought to thought, a brain-brain connection that slid daintily past the hard brick wall of imagination. The creation of worlds; no longer the arrogant privilege of a God. On the first day, the Director of Cinematography said Let There Be Light, and there was light. And it was Good.

I literally love television and movies so much and I WILL push that love into Castiel whenever I can!!! I saw him analysing Roadrunner he's just like me for real. I'm obviously less rapturous about it, no story is perfectly captured from someone's brain to another (those faults and work arounds and choices made to convery the things that can't be directly stated are part of what fascinates me!!) But mr godstiel believes that if there is a Creator they must be Omnipotent.

The repeated "on the x day, and it was good" is from the Bible story of the creation of the Earth. Now that I think about it, it's pretty interesting for Castiel to create his own mythos of the creation of movies while being desperately horny over the fact that humans create their own mythoses...! He's doing the thing he admires and he doesn't even realise it!

Another fascination; there is no lone creator. Sometimes, merely seeing the hundreds of credits scroll at the end of a movie had been enough to drive Castiel to distraction. Intricate, high effort collaboration, all for the relatively unimportant end of entertaining other humans for somewhere around an hour and a half. The entire enterprise amounts to making pleasing shapes and noises for each other. Fruitless. Pointless. A total and complete waste of time. A frisson of excitement crackles through Cas at the concept. Every second of time, in Heaven, was accounted for. It was expected that Heavenly Works were being completed at every moment. Idleness was not punished, because it did not happen. To spend months, years even, producing something, the only purpose of which is to waste more time…the decadence was astounding.

As you've likely noticed, the paragraphs in this are LONG, much longer paragraphs all in a row than I'd usually allow in editing. This was to give a sense of how Castiel feels overwhelmed with thought and feeling.

"no lone creator" <- Guy who named herself Kermit after Mr The Frog, the world famous creative director muppet "I think creative collaboration is fucking epic" lol. Of course, I don't think that the art of cinema is a waste of time, this was just to have it be a joke, Castiel getting horny not over the fanciness of artistic vision or the beauty of how it is communicated but over how it's a waste of time. He is crazy about something he doesn't fully respect.

Plus, it grants an extra layer of salaciousness to Castiel's VCR infatuation, which makes it sexier. It's soooo baaaaaad ;) naughty agel ;) haha

That’s not even mentioning the avatars of creative vision. Puppeteering another, willing, human soul to have their actions reflect a world that is not their reality. The closest humans can get to tapping into the kind of power Castiel once swallowed, an act with defiance and vulnerability tied so tightly together that they are inextricable from each other. The unwavering, daring passion of humanity, made transferable by one small gray box with buttons on it. Cas chewed on his own finger to keep himself quiet. He hadn’t even done anything yet, just the thoughts were getting him hot under the collar.

Me, throwing philosophical spaghetti at the wall: is this a pwp crack fic?

Haha, but I do genuinely think that if one can drill down to WHY someone finds something hot (this is fiction, no one irl needs to have a reason for liking stuff but characters should) and communicate that to the audience, it makes the sex hotter. To give an example of this not working: in Bride by Ali Hazelwood (which I very much enjoyed until the last 5 chapters :$), the protagonist, Misery the vampire (LOVE HER) falls in love with Lowe Moorland the werewolf (his name also cracks me up, is he The Fens?). Misery is very forthright and frank with her thoughts and feelings when she feels able to trust him, she's very active when she wants something, she is willing to fight at the drop of a hat. And then in every sex scene she effectively turns into a little sex doll that Lowe Does Sex To rather than an active participant. The favoured position is her pressed against the wall with her back to him, even though part of the vampire mating sequence is drinking each other's blood. She thinks about what she might like but never reaches for them or is blocked when she tries them. And their sex life is presented as very positive, this isn't a deliberate relationship flaw. It's so strange! I have no idea why Misery would want to be lifted around like a dolly and I was literally in her head. Reportedly, these positions happen in every book of hers and like :/ it's FINE she finds it hot and I don't it's FINE but like. Maybe try. Thinking about the character's specificity while doing the sex scene....I fell in love with Misery not the cut out of a woman...

Anyway. I think allowing myself to think of this as a silly piece helped me not worry too much about whether I was being too pretentious or using the perfect character voice just to get these thoughts down. I can wax poetic about things I genuinely love about television and movies in the less vulnerable space of "this is jokes it's just what Castiel thinks when he's getting randy". It's not me getting overly emotional about it, it's Castiel!

He dipped his fingertips into the flap. It opened a little way for him, ready and willing, a faint, creaking, whine escaping from it when it found no videotape to swallow. He shushed it and spread his other hand soothingly over the box. A little glisten of saliva transferred from his knuckle to its top, incontrovertible proof of his sensual intentions. He wiped it away with his thumb.

He pressed further in. At a certain threshold, the VCR rejoiced at finding its fleshy tape, and it thrummed excitedly around his fingers. Small wheels encouraged Castiel deeper, and who is he to deny its request? He only got as far as the third segment of his middle finger when he encountered resistance for the first time. The back wall of the tape compartment. He could sense the mechanisms behind it quivering and spinning, but the restraints of the physical plane prevented him from going any further. Or, they would have. If he was human.

Now here is where the true eroticism begins! Now. I didn't feel any particular way about machines being hot or sexual before writing this fic. And I'm still not into vore. But. Well. The thing is sometimes I see a car getting its innards revealed by a delicate yet massive crane or a machine made of lego with its wheels spinning perfectly and I do sometimes get a little flustered. And since writing my deancaspala I've definitely been thinking a lot about the impala as a sex object. So. Writers beware lmao. Although, I think it's a good thing to find more things hot, so 😜

Anyway - with the actual writing. A VCR machine is a little flat box with wheels in it. It's not sexy to most people. I made it more clearly a sexual object by a) Cas believing it has agency (it opened for him, it wants a tape) b) describing it as a body (it whines, it swallows, it quivers) and c) adding fluids (cas's saliva). I feel that these steps could likely be used to make any object sexual. Try it and see! While heeding my warning lol.

Arm set sideways, Castiel glided his hand flat so that his pinkie finger was brushing that back wall and his thumb and index hung garishly out of the front. He paused there for a time, stroking the sides of the opening carefully, reassuring the open mouth that he planned to be gentle when he breached its precious interior. Then he slid through. The plastic wall became permeable under his will, and it sucked at his fingers like a departing wave. There were mechanisms back there, wires, sensors, circuit boards. Cas shivered. It was hot. More than erotic - although that was a factor - the caged off fans did little to cool off this backstage area. The things there were not meant to be touched while they were on. Not permissible. Indecent. His elbow knocked the side of the entertainment unit in his eagerness to press in, making the VCR shiver in kind. He stretched space with half a thought to delve deeper into the machine’s guts.

I took some care with the pacing of how things went. I described every movement of Castiel’s hand going into the flap, making the pace very slow, and then he thinks about how it's "not permissible. Indecent." and this excites him, so he speeds up and we get less detail - the action is zoomed out suddenly from his fingers to his elbow. This, naturally, has some unintended consequences:

He stretched, perhaps, a little too far. A segment of his consciousness slipped into the HDMI access point by accident, and suddenly he had double vision. He shut his eyes tight against the dizziness, and found he could still see. His view was of himself, from the front, lit by a bright, neon pink glow. He was the very picture of debauched; head cast back, eyes shut, gasps catching at every breath. He hadn’t even realized he had been biting his bottom lip until he saw it from the outside. The sting was present, but felt abstracted, as if through a thick coat.

He's so voyeuristic he's getting off on watching himself from an abstracted distance. 🥳. I like this image I'm very pleased with it.

Focusing on that point of pain brought it closer, along with his other humanoid senses, and, with caution, Cas opened his eyes again. He stared. There, on the television screen, was an eye, flat and searching, looking rapidly in every direction it could. Despite being surrounded by dazzling pink light, the pupil is dilated, lustful. Not just an eye, Cas realized with a gasp, tapping into the other image to compare, his own eye. He was transformed. A construct of pure entertainment.

I like calling Cas "humanoid" lol. He is! He's a being in the shape of a human but he is not human. "Scully you're not going to believe this!"

Also, coming back to my earlier realisation, I did put in the fic that he makes himself become televison but I think that is distinct from becoming a creator of stories as he's praising. Like, I can have my photo taken and that doesn't make me a photographer.

Cas can have some self objectification. As a treat.

Castiel’s breathing took on a distinct heaviness, and he watched a line of drool run loose from his own slack mouth. On the last day, the VCR machine said Let There Be Castiel, and there was Castiel. And it was Good.

Almost too good. A crackle of electricity skittered across Cas’s hand and then across his brain, sending a fuzz of blue static across both sets of his vision. He saw himself moan but didn’t hear it, so moaned again, watching the stretch of his own mouth with interest. All he could hear was the embracing sound of white noise. His senses were restricted by attaching himself to the TV.

He had to push deeper.

Sunk cost fallacy more like. Sunk. Cock. Phallus-y. Not that this is a sunk cost fallacy moment, he isn't having any negative side effects it's just a pun I thought of just now. Because he had to push deeper.

Oh, I wanted to talk about! I don't often write in the past tense, I usually write in present tense. Well, more accurately, I write in a mix of past and present and it's all fucked to hell and then I fix it in editing and/or my beta readers catch it for me, haha. But usually the end result is present. I like the immediacy. This one is past tense for a greater level of gravitas, again mimicking the Bible, and to have another level of that juicy distancing. Cas finds it hot to be distanced from himself and you the reader are distanced from him. I use past tense for the first reason in Saint of the Smallest Sun, and the second in ghost!Dean's parts of I Sing The Body Electric (although for sad dissociation reasons not horny dissociation reasons lol).

His wrist got through the slot, then he twisted it sideways slowly, pressuring the VCR’s opening to widen for him. He splayed out his other hand on the edge of the hole, spreading without mercy, and the hole opened for him just as he wished. It was still a tight squeeze to fit his head through it, but once the plastic was forced over the shells of his ears, the rest went easier, as if the machine then understood what he wanted. His entire body was soon completely ensconced in the whirring, cozy darkness of the tape compartment.

I watched videodrome for this fic (and after reading @explainslowly 's cronunbussy destiel fic) and recently described it as "haunted tv show gone wrong gone sexual???!" while recommending it to my friends after my PowerPoint presentation on how depictions of ghosts have changed through new technologies! I actually don't remember if I watched it before or after writing this fic? But they share the idea of hard plastic becoming stretchy and maliable as part of sex acts. It's a good weird movie I enjoyed it!

Once the toe of his final shoe was through, there was a wonderful sensation of intense compression, like being squeezed very tightly all over his body. A VCR machine wants above all to be the shape of a VCR machine and without Castiel’s deliberate stretching it had reverted, with him secreted inside. He was made small by it, protected in a way he’d never experienced before.

"A VCR machine wants above all to be a VCR machine" very Parchett-inian line if I do say so myself. I love dyskworld I love how it's 80% jokes AND 80% thoughtful characterisations and actions with consequences. You can do both, and at the same time!! I don't think my writing is stylistically similar at all, but we do both enjoy silliness, punes (or, playses on wordsies) and character work. Yippee!

It was too hot in there for a mammal. The VCR was overheating, pushed past its means, letting out long bleeps of complaint that Cas felt pulsing pleasurably through brain as the electricity had. If it weren’t for his powers, Cas would be panting and writhing with the heat of it. As it was, he panted and writhed for entirely different reasons.

In complete darkness, Cas found it easier to keep his total focus inside the television. He tried pushing his gaze all the way to the left, trying to see inside the box of the TV rather than out of the screen, but he was stuck within its four edges, which was exhilarating in its own way. He couldn’t hear, couldn’t speak, couldn’t touch, only watch, a sensory reconstruction of his time as an angel. Upholding those rules through his own choice, rather than in fear of Heaven, felt intensely erotic.

I just put as many kinks into this experience as possible, huh? Lol. He's objectuming, he's overstimulated, he's sensorarily deprived, he's restrained, he's compressed, he's objectified, he's voyeur, he's exhibitionist, he's degraded (he has become what he was earlier calling a waste of time), he's empowered (making the choice, and reminded of his angelhood), he's penetrating the VCR and will later be penetrated in a sense ("dean stick your dick in the vcr machine"). I don't fully understand the appeal of vore, but I do understand the appeal of all of these (not saying one way or the other if I have these as kinks), and so can

He stared at the dark edge of his recliner - stained a dark, shiny pink by the light around his eye - and his sense of time slowly fogged over through the lack of sensation. He’s surprised, therefore, when Dean steps into view. First his legs, clad in his hotdog pajama bottoms, then his face when he crouched to squint into the screen. His eyes screwed up at the brightness, but he didn’t back away from it. Cas couldn’t hear him when he spoke, but Cas knew what his own name looked like on Dean’s mouth.

Isn't that last line so cute....he love him...ehehe

Unable to communicate with his human voice, Cas tried his true one for a few seconds, but from Dean curling in on himself and the furniture bouncing behind him it’s clear that it didn’t come through. Dean said something else, rolling his eyes, then his hand landed on the remote that had fallen off the side table in the rumble of Castiel’s speech. He picked it up, looked at it for a moment, then clicked it at the screen with a half-shrug. A black line appeared at the bottom of Cas’s vision. When he looked back at Dean, he mouthed, “Say something.”

[DEAN], Cas said, and it appeared in the box, written backwards in a vivid light blue. Subtitles.

a) I love finding new ways for people to communicate when they're not in their bodies!! It's so fun!! I do it a lot in The Body Electric (Dean can't speak as a ghost) but I also have that in a late chapter of A Light Above Descending where an angel talks via the weather. I'm an active listener* and very patient, and it always makes me a little smug when I've figured out what someone is trying to communicate while others are confused by it. Seems I win at being considerate and thoughful and understanding, eh? >:^]

*this includes body language and tone. I will say I am not good at picking up if people are being passive aggressive to ME (usually from mangers lol) but that only annoys them and doesnt affect me bc I don't know and they're the one not being a grown up and a professional and talking to me clearly about it so it's not a skill I care to learn lol

ANYWAY. Isn't deanie weanie such a smart boy 1000 kisses for him.

Dean clapped and raised his hands over his head to celebrate his own cleverness, which Cas waited out indulgently, appreciating the silent film he was presented with. As soon as he was done, Cas instructs him:

[DEAN, PUT YOUR DICK IN THE VCR MACHINE]

An all time classic! DEAN PUT YOUR DICK IN THE VCR MACHINE. 🥳🥳🥳 I had gone back and forth on whether or not to include Dean at all but then this line came to me and I knew I shrimply must.

Dean’s hands dropped instantly to cover his face, which had turned a darker pink even under Cas's pink light. He said something behind his hands, then peaked out at Cas, clearly waiting for his reaction.

Cas's light is pink because it's like. You know. Like the inside of your. Baby. Pynk behind all of the doors. Crazy. Pynk like the tongue that goes down. Maybe. Pynk like the paradise found.

And because pink is a warmer colour than light blue (the other colour I was considering) and works well as a contrast to his blue iris AND I was planning to make the accompanying image the whole time and I had a good neon pink highlighter <3

[I CAN’T HEAR YOU]

A huff and an eye roll, then Dean put up his arms in a big X, which Cas knew meant 'no way, man!!' It was often pulled out when Dean heard about Cas’s more out there ideas for the bedroom, but also often recanted after a little more explanation of what Cas actually meant. Squeamish, he was, but typically his curiosity and abiding horniness won out.

[WHY NOT?] Cas asked, but he couldn’t follow Dean’s subsequent rant, despite the frequent and wild arm movements. [IT’S WARM], Cas tempted, [IT’S VERY COZY IN HERE]

The tempterrrrrrr.

Dean’s mouth dropped open, and it took a few goes but Cas eventually understood Dean asking, “You’re in there?”

[YES.]

It was deeply entertaining to see Dean’s face go on 10 different journeys, and better when Dean finally tugged at the elastic of his pajama pants. Flashes of yellow burst through the pink of the screen, an apparent manifestation of Castiel’s excitement, which embarrassed him somewhat, until Dean put his hand to the edge of the screen and brushed his thumb on it with a fond smile. Cas couldn’t feel it, of course, but the gesture was appreciated.

GAY. GAY. HOMOSEXUAL. GAY.

Cas didn’t know what their Godless, collaborative, frivolous love-making was going to end up looking like, but he did know this: It was going to be Good

And it was.

The room is cold. Freezing, even. Sam’s breath is misting even without the ghost being present. He rubs his sleeve over the misted window and peers out, catching the double flash of Dean’s light from the opposite building and sending his own signal back. Some time over the next two hours the restless spirit of Providence Carter is going to manifest in one of these buildings and try to reach down one of their throats to stop one of their hearts with her brittle, icy fingers. Revenge for being locked out in the snow 200 years ago, or at least that’s the theory.

Turning from the window, Sam surveys the small room. Thin plaster walls painted with a faded pale sun over the door frame. Exposed wood floor with visible splinters striking up from the planks. One table, one chair, one well-made bed, and one demon-turned-situational-ally. No places to hide.

This is going to sound like I'm lying but this opening was genuinely the hardest thing to write lmao. I kept changing my mind about the setting, even after discussing with @autisticandroids when to place it in the season (thank you for that, by the way!!). I was stuck between a stake-out and them getting locked in adjacent cells during the episode Unforgiven. Here's some excerpts from that original beginning:

Sam watched the sheriff walk away from his cell and clenched his jaw. How was he supposed to make up for whatever his body did here when he's locked up? Hell, how is he supposed to make up for it when he doesn't know what he did? He cuffs the bars lightly to let off some frustration. It doesn't help. It just makes his knuckles cold. "Aw, keep pawing at them, kitty cat, I'm sure you'll get through eventually."

... "Meg?" When he turned, he saw the demon stretch against the bars of the cell next to his, showing off her stolen body and giving a teasing wiggle of her fingers. "What the hell are you doing here? "Oh, you know, living my life, running from Crowley. Hiding out in the last place he'd look for any self-respecting demon. I'd feel better with my knife back, by the way. Thought we'd worked out that it was a loaner." "Your knife - Ruby's knife?" Sam's mind raced. He must have seen Meg some time when his soul was missing. He doesn't know what happened, but he does know when to call a bluff: "I think we worked out that it's mine."

I was getting too much in the weeds of the facts of the episode, and I knew it would hold me back if I couldn't have them touch other than through the bars, and it didn't really make sense for Meg to hide out from Crowley's remaining loyal demons in a prison cell.

Through talking it through with my bff, I settled on doing the old "this ghost is going through something similar to their conflict". As Meg verbalises later, Sam is worried about being upstaged by a baby if he tells Dean about the pregnancy as well as being "locked out" of the decision on whether or not he is allowed his memories (which suggests he would similarly be locked out of a decision on keeping the baby).

“I’m thinking of making an offer,” Meg says, leaning her elbow on the table and airily gesturing around the room, “It’s really got that home-y feel.”

Sam rolls his eyes without replying and leans back against the window, keeping an eye on the street. He doesn’t want to miss it if Providence tries for someone else, if they’re wrong about her range of power.

While part of this fic is exploring how Meg and Sam are similar, Meg and Dean are also very similar, so Sam is very good at brushing off her attempts at being annoying, lol

“Thank you, you’ve been a great audience,” Meg quips. “You know Sam, when you want someone to do you a favour, it’s polite to talk back to them.”

“You’re not doing me a favour, you’re here for the knife. Which you’ll never get if you let me die.”

As you can see, I retained Meg's motivation of wanting to get the knife from the alternative setting, so it wasn't a complete waste of time!

“Pity. Say, why do you think Dean took the angel? Do you think he was jealous? He was in a pretty big hurry to get him out of my sight.”

“Sure, Meg, all of our decisions revolve around you.”

Sam actually isn’t sure why Dean was in such a rush to claim Cas in their ‘split-up-and-look-for-clues’ meeting, but he has his suspicions. Dean’s been twitchy lately, getting Sam to repeat plans back to him multiple times, warning him not to ‘get carried away’, whatever that meant. Whatever the other Sam had done, it’d made Dean lose trust in both of them. Which isn’t fair, but when has life ever been fair?

Neither of them are completely right about Dean's decision here: Dean DOES want to stop Cas and Meg being alone together (because of the kiss. If they kiss again he'd want to be present for it lol); but his actual motivation is that Cas has been acting weird lately and even though Dean is doing his best to trust him, he is taking the opportunity to ask Cas if he's okay, without the risk of scratching Sam's wall by bringing up memories of the times they've seen Cas recently; but also, he doesn't fully trust Sam still, so 🤷‍♂️. Absolutely none of this is in-text this is just what I was thinking with these lines lol. Sam is being so insular right now that he couldn't figure out an explanation that isn't centered on him.

He wishes Dean would just tell him everything that happened, but he’s always hit by Dean’s fear of “The Wall”. Don’t scratch it, Death had said, but how can he not? He wakes from hazy dreams with his hands strangling the air, his aim is sharper and he’s started getting nauseous at the sight of blood, but fine, sure, he’s not allowed to know. There’s a kicking under his stomach sometimes, and a tiny whimpering cry in his ears in the early mornings, but he’s not allowed to know.

“So, what are you going to do with it?”

This is the first line I thought of when I first saw the prompt :3 I knew immediately it should be Sam and Meg talking through his options. Meg actually didn't seem to know Sam was missing a soul in Caged Heat, just that he was acting weird, so I had a cut line of her getting her information from higher sources, aka Balthazaar. I just think they'd be a fun pair.

Sam’s gaze snaps to Meg, and she nods casually at where his hand had come up to his stomach. He slices it away quickly, having not even realised he’d moved it.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he says, but the words catch on the way out, unconvincing. Meg’s flat look is both unimpressed and amused.

Sam in canon isn't often scared while talking to demons, he is very good at putting up a brave face. Here, though, he's a raw edge after Hell and it's the first time he's talking about this to anyone.

“Uh huh. How far along are you? Five weeks? Six? When do you think it’s going to start growing fingernails?”

I hope everyone read the mpreg tag before getting this far because this would be baffling to just stumble into lmao.

The blood starts rushing in Sam’s ears, and he swallows hard against the burst of saliva in his mouth. He stares hard at a whorl on the floor, trying to count the rings, trying to block out Meg’s mocking confirmation of what he’s been afraid of ever since he came back to his body.

“I think it might try to scratch its way through your guts, if it gets big enough. Like a DIY C-section, only the surgeon’s an idiot. Do you think you’d choke on your own blood first, or would you feel it busting out, for every excruciating second?”

“Shut up. Shut up. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Pregnancy horrorrrrr! Do you think this is something Meg has experienced in Hell. Morbid thought.

Meg laughs, rough, and it’s like a chainsaw through the neck, like an industrial sander forced into your face, like- like nothing.

Nothing.

He can’t remember what he’d just been thinking about. This has been happening to him since he got back. The blank flashes. He knows that a memory of the Cage is there, that the memory is happening to him, but not the content of it. It’s different from memories of the other him. It’s like memories of being soulless are hidden in a folder somewhere in his mind, but the memories of the cage are being manually deleted every time they pop up.

Where does memory live, he wonders, in the body or in the soul? Are those his memories, or are they someone else’s? Can he really call himself the real Sam if he’s missing the last year of his life, on Earth as it was in Hell?

Now we're getting into it!!! Thesis questions of the fic! Who IS Sam in season 7? My interpretation is actually that ensoulled!sam isn't fully "the real sam" either, since he needs to re-intergrate Soulless and Cage Memories Sam in a later episode. If Soulles Sam is all Id, then Ensoulled Sam is unchecked Superego, which is why he is consumed with worry about what is true and what is moral and what is socially acceptable which prevents him from being able to take the necessary survival action of abortion without being given an ethical "out" by Meg.

I don't think that interpretation fully checks out with how ensoulled sam acts for his part of the season but that's what I've done for this fic!

“Guess it doesn’t matter,” Meg muses, cutting into Sam’s rising panic, “it’s not going to get that far.”

“What do you mean?”

“I know what you’re going to do. You’re going to get rid of it.”

This was the second half of the first line I thought of for the fic. Meg knows that Sam is going to get rid of it. A demon should be used to voice what people don't want to know about themselves, and Sam right now does not want to accept that he'd already made a decision that could be considered selfish when he is trying to prove himself moral. Abortion is not selfish, of course, but it can be perceived as such by others, and frankly likely would be by Dean. Dean is not anti-choice in general but he is pro-Dean's-choice-of-what-happens-to-their-family. I think if Dean did find out about the pregnancy and that it'd kill Sam he would be team abortion but he'd view it as a "necessary evil" of "killing a baby". He'd be saying things like "how many chances are we gonna have to be fathers" and "you were marked by the devil and you still turned out alright" in an ironic reversal of how he felt about Jack.

She scratches a fingernail over the surface of the table, a thin, rude sound in the silence that follows her pronouncement. Sam listens to it, though he doesn’t want to.

"Why do you- why do you think that?” He hates that he stumbles halfway through. If his dad was here he’d - well. If his dad was here he’d have a whole host of other problems.

This was a small flashback in an early draft:

Sam flinches. He doesn't mean to. It was the first thing Dad had trained out of him, banging surfaces at random and firing his gun by Sam's face and barking Sam to attention when he was engrossed in his studying. "Don't give it away," Dad had always said, "Only thing you've got against these things is your gun and your wits, and half the time you aint got your gun. Don't give them a free look inside your head. You have to stay in control." Control. Sure. Like that's not a pipe dream built on a pipe dream. He hugs further into the window.

But I already have interruptions of Hell memories, and I wanted to keep the fic within this room otherwise. If Sam could 'escape' to his other memories, and we had voices other than Meg and Sam's in the main fic, it would feel less like he's trapped in here and being forced to confront uncomfortable truthes.

“Hm. Could be I’m psychic,” Meg bounces her eyebrows playfully, “That was a fun year, right? You ever miss it? Being star of the show?”

(I actually disagree with the idea that Sam was "the main character" at the start of the show. There are two main characters and they have always shared screentime and balanced their -centric episodes)

“Meg, if you know something, I swear to god I’ll-”

“You’ll what? I can smoke out of this body before you can even blink, baby-boy, and then you’ll be choked out by the undead Puritan all by your lonesome, so, please, tell me what you think you’re going to do to me. And make sure to say it real slow for me, handsome, I think it could really get my motor running.”

Sam squeezes his hands into fists, then lets them drop. There’s no point rising to these little mind games. He looks out of the window again, watching a snowflake dissolve against the pane. A hot poker sizzling against flayed flesh. Nothing. Nothing. He sighs, and turns back towards Meg.

I made the room they're in cold as a counterpoint to Hell and the feotus which are increasingly very hot.

“What’s it like?”

“Honey, if you don’t know what getting turned on feels like, I’m sure we can-”

“Not that,” Sam cuts her off quickly, from years of experience with Dean’s stupid jokes, “Smoking out. Diving into someone else’s body. How do you know what’s you and what’s them? How do you keep track?”

“Aw, are you feeling all shook up? Poor baby. Well - I guess you won’t be the baby much longer, after you start showing.”

“Too scared to give me a real answer, huh?”

Haha, get her Sammy!

That gets her, her hand clawing on the table and her shoulders tensing. Sam’s not going to pretend it isn’t satisfying to see her on the back foot. Meg might raise her chin and sit back in her chair, but her eyes flick over black, which always happens when demons are feeling threatened.

Demons in my fics only try to look demon-y when they're feeling insecure 😈 and it's always cute to me! Very tsundere. Sam learned this demon factoid from observing Ruby, despite her treachery. I have a lot of thoughts about the day-to-day of samruby which will eventually come up in my megrubyava fic if I ever get these middle chapters done!

“Fine. Since you asked so nicely. I don’t bother with all that shit.” Sam’s brow furrows, and Meg laughs at him again, meanly. “Not what you wanted to hear, huh? Well it’s the truth. Every jump I’m a new Meg. You’ve seen me: I’m a gas. I fill my containers. If there’s something in there that gets mixed in, then it gets mixed in. I take them with me. Ms Masters gave me her name. This one gave me her sparkling personality.”

This concept is from Meg saying, in born under a bad sign, that she IS Sam now while she was possessing him. Classic episode for possession enjoyers, so much barely covered on the subject of personhood.

Meg winks, and runs her tongue over her bottom lip, to which Sam rolls his eyes again. How do demons not get bored of the sexual harassment routine?

Lampshading her sexual harassment and having Sam not feel any fear from it is key to making his interactions with her not intensely horrible. I use the same technique in A Light Above Descending: to make Dean's violence against Sam not appear as Factual Domestic Violence I had Sam not act afraid of him and laugh when Dean suggests he would be. Meg needs to do and say awful things, but I need this fic not to be derailed into a different story.

“And me?”

“Dull as a pile of rocks, but what can you do?”

“No, what did you find in me, when you possessed me? What makes me?”

Sam expects other people to have a better read on him and his actions than he does himself. He knows, as shown later, that he is good at convincing himself he is doing the right thing and then it has dire consequences (as with the demon blood) as a result of being made constantly guilty and wrong, shown in the Amy Pond episode flashbacks of being harassed on the phone by John to research faster or people will die and it's on you if they do. At first he copes with this by rebelling and leaving, but by now he has taken hunting as the right thing to do even as his conscience struggles with it. Dean appears to instinctively "know" right from wrong and who to trust and Sam feels that he needs him as a moral guide.

Meg shakes her head. “I’m disappointed in you, Sam. Thought you were supposed to be a good listener. Let’s say it again for the people at the back: I don’t know. I don’t care what’s me and what isn’t. I’m never going to know, so why waste my time worrying about it?”

“So, what, you don’t try to figure it out because you’re too lazy?”

“Pretty much,” Meg stretches her arms out and slouches artfully, “I’m kind of a free spirit.”

Sam folds his arms. "That's bullshit."

“Is it?” The sarcasm is acerbic. “I’d love to know how you got to that one.”

“Because it is! I’ve seen how you think, Meg. I might not remember myself very well right now, but I remember you. Possession is a two-way street, you know? Where did my compassion go, if we got so linked? Where was my love for my family? You put it on lock-down. Because you were afraid. You were afraid of being more than a body, you were afraid of caring about anything other than yourself, and I think you still are. What are you even doing here, Meg? Bargaining for a knife so you can kill more of your own kind? Are you going to keep hiding for the rest of your miserable little life? You might tell yourself otherwise to make yourself feel better, but I know, deep down, you’re a coward.”

Meg being confronted with her fear of connection as a lead in to getting closer to Cas in s7 🥳 everything is about herrrr. It may be a bit clunky for Sam to say outright that she's more than a body but whatever sometimes you gotta just say it. As per Caged Heat, Meg is thoroughly objectified and locked into her body, a deeply horny episode about fluids and sex and what it means to be "blood".

There would have been silence after this outburst, if not for the fact that Sam is panting from the force of it. Then, the sound of Meg’s chair scraping back across the floor. The plastic-y swish of her faux-leather jacket as she stalks across the room, then the click of Sam’s jawbone when she grips his face painfully one hand and pulls his face down to glare at him directly in the eye. An invisible demonic weight keeps his feet heavy on the floor and his hands to the wall, but he glares back with feeling.

Meg has a plastic faux leather jacket because she is wrapping herself in the façade of unaffectedness, she is not inviting any other flesh onto hers because she IS a little scared of what it means for her personhood to swap bodies. This is why she hangs onto them until they are broken beyond repair. Other demons like Ruby, Lilith, the one on the plane, hop around unless they have reason to stay but Meg literally came back to the 2.0 body after it had been stabbed through the hand with the demon blade. Crowley, I think, hangs on to his body because he's transgender and he likes the feeling of it, he has a body that, as a man, commands respect and is not expected to be objectified in ways that Meg's young women and Sam bodies don't.

“You know what’s worse than being a coward, Sam?” An unseen force pressing suddenly on his throat keeps him from responding. “Being a dead coward. Being so weighed down with feelings that you can’t move. That you can’t breathe. That you can’t go through with what you have to do to survive. You want to know how I know you’re going to get rid of it?”

Meg digs at Sam’s stomach with harsh fingers, and a thrashing starts up under his skin, the needy cry whining its way into his hearing. He shuts his eyes for a moment, but he can’t dispel it.

“I know, because that’s what you have to do. Even if it doesn’t kill you on exit, it’s going to take your spot, right? What’s Dean going to care about coddling you if there’s a baby on the scene? He’s already avoiding you. Poor little Sammy is going to be left out in the cold again.”

Dean loves babies sorry Sam. It's that tough point of being the babiest sibling (like me :3). You want to be respected and impressive and independent...but also it's nice to be the babiest one...it's nice to be looked after and being able to go 🥺 to people who love you and have them be nice to you. It's a selfish, childish point of view, but it can still surface.

Struggling against Meg’s hold is pointless, but Sam does it anyway. The force on his throat presses harder, and floating spots start to flash in his vision. Meg’s expression changes to a dark glee, and she digs towards the kicking again.

“How about I do you a real favour, huh? How about I reach in there and drag the thing out by the hair right now? One time offer, devil baby gone. Before it starts stealing from you too. How much more space do you even have in that head of yours? Maybe it'll cook your brain out before it even manages to kill you. And when there's no one there to snack on it, shame really.”

Head smashed open against a cold wall, steaming ropes of brain hanging down, trailing into the mouth of. Nothing. Of the devil. Nothing. Hands pressing onto his stomach. Into his stomach. Nothing. Nothing.

Lucifer just put the baby in there because frankly I didn't want to write a graphic rape scene. The violation is what matters more than the mechanics.

“Please,” Sam gasps as soon as she releases his throat, his voice rasping and painful, “Please, Meg.”

He could say he was trying to ask her to let him go. To save the baby, and his life. She lied to him. She tricked him. He had to do it. It was the only way out. He had always been good at justifying himself, after the fact.

Not to get personal but this is born of my own worries that in disagreements with friends I am just better at articulating an argument and less likely to apologise to end an argument rather than actually being right with what I'm saying and a fair friend. Maybe my justifications to myself for inaction on certain things are excuses. I don't know. It's a quandary.

Meg's hand plunges, burning hot, through his stomach and grips something close to his soul. She pulls slowly, and it feels like watching his own arm being ripped off, but he bites back his scream, not wanting to give her the satisfaction. A sickly, dim light comes out with her hand, and it dissipates in under a second, with a single, pathetic whimper. Meg flexes her hand, which is now covered in small needle-point pricks of blood.

Sam is gooooood at pain tolerance and keeping a straight face which I loooove. It's a bit of wish fulfilment that a (soul) pregancy can be so easily terminated without further physical detriment. The feotus is kind of an idea: the fear of looking too closely at his memories, and once it is pulled out into the light and examined, while it hurts at the time it is ultimately dissolved. Sam needs to confront what he's been through, he needs to re-unite with his other, hidden selves.

“Hungry little bastard,” Meg comments, dropping her hold on Sam and letting him crumple to the ground.

A little nod to demon blood sam, I did have a vague idea initially of Meg donating some of her blood so that Sam could use his psychic powers to abort it himself but it seemed kinda convoluted so I did Sam psychically does that in the accompanying poem instead

There's a cold emptiness inside him, but as he keeps breathing, it lessens. Filling my container, he thinks, woozily, tightening his arms around himself.

“Thanks,” he chokes out, to which Meg tuts and rolls her eyes.

“I hope you don't think I did that for you. I just didn't want the Antichrist 2.0 running around. It's hard enough dealing with normal demons out for my guts.”

Justifying herself. Avoiding an uncomfortable truth. Caring, despite herself. Sam laughs, and then he can't stop laughing, even as Meg asks him what his goddamn problem is.

“That's what you got from me,” is all he can say, until the hysterical relief takes him back to laughter, all the way until Cas and Dean show up, having fought off Providence while Meg and Sam, in Dean's words, had a nice little playdate.

Sam can have a little giggle!! As a treat!!!! He has recognised the self through the other, he is on the right track to actualization! Yippee!

“What's ticklin’ you, Elmo?” Dean demands, as Sam's laugh bubbles to a close.

“Don't worry about it,” Sam says, flashing a grin to Meg, who frowns in disgust, “just remembered something funny.”

Hehehe. Here I will talk about how I arrived at the direction of the fic:

Seeing the prompt of sam coming out of the cage pregnant + it being acceptable to end in any direction, I thought about how Sam making the CHOICE to end the pregnancy in a season where his capacity is questioned would be healing for him. Some other non meg ideas for who he could speak to about this were Gadreel (for some delicious dramatic irony) or Balthazaar (as their only non-Cas angel contact who has access to heavenly weapons) as Soulless!Sam. But I felt that a) the meat of the fic should be how Sam feels about this, and Soulless!Sam wouldn't be concerned b) it's weird to do a fic about prgnancy horror without a woman character even present and c) I love Meg and one of the other prompts was about sammeg as dark mirrors of each other.

Pregnancy brings up a lot of thoughts and fears about personhood. Your brain chemistry changes, your body changes, people treat you as a living incubator and put their hands on you without permission, and when you are percieved as a mother you are again treated as an extention of your children, even outside the perilous role of Mother in Supernatural. Having fairly recently read NIGHTBITCH, the idea of the monsterous pregnancy/motherhood was fresh in my mind.

Especially given the (horrific) Jack mind control angle of season 12, if this pregnancy doesn't kill Sam, it might kill Sam, if this antichrist has the same power level.

What's more important than the surface level character-isms, is that they have depth and are consistent. Does the content of what they're saying make sense with the life they've led. Like, I don't think that my take on Meg really sounds all that much like canon Meg for example. But she is consistent within the fics I put her in, and shares enough snark with canon Meg that it works, AND she has motivations, reactions and ideas that are different to the other characters in the fic. It's like a cheat code, if two characters have different reactions to one event, that makes it come off like they have different voices.

Some other cheat codes: have one of them make a ton of references, and the other speak plainly (dean and sam core! but you can do that for most duos); have them make references to different things (tv vs classic literature, sci-fi vs fantasy); have one of them tell sillyjokes and the other tell dry jokes (destiel core...). Contrasts makes characters seem more separate.

For voice, I'll only rewatch if I don't remember how they said anything at all or if I remember they had a particularly distinctive way of speaking. If I needed to put Gabriel in a scene, I'd probably watch his episodes again. I've found if I do watch an episode to remind myself it can psyche me out of actually writing anything for them—Ava for example, I'm intimidating myself out of writing her at the moment lol.

For establishing a (deeper) character, you first need the basics:

Ambriel, helpfully, fits some basic tropes. Office worker. Apathetic. Angel in the vein of Castiel, Hannah and Anna (which is to say, autistic). I have a LOT of practice writing Castiel, and Ambriel is like Castiel didn't have his drive to help people or love of humanity. She is therefore: straightforward (angel), mildly bored (office worker) and her biggest want is for nothing to change for her (apathetic).

It's then how you build on the collection of tropes that makes them a Character. You figure out how to explain some of the above traits/situations they're in. What is her history? (She went to earth and didn't like it) Who is around her? (Kaisiel, whom she resists making a real connection with due to her apathy) Why is she apathetic? (It's repressed fear of punishment).

Something that really, really helps with unique characterisation for me is a little silly. Give them a niche interest. Something not mentioned in the source material at all, or is only briefly mentioned. Castiel is into the same sitcoms as me (and taxidermy). Ambriel is into data storage. Ava is into collecting small furniture.

And then go, why are they into this?

Castiel bc he loves to experience hunanity at a safe distance (and he likes to rummage).

Ambriel because it's within the scope of her job so is 'safe', which she takes pride in (and which I advanced from "pushing a button" because I thought that was stupid and bad world building 💙).

Ava wants to feel a sense of control in a world that is very much out of her control.

This not only gives you better insight into them as a character, it also makes them YOURS. that's not the cw's Ambriel, that's mine, she's into data storage, so it doesn't matter if she's off-model because no one will know, because she's mine.

As with Castiel's love of tv, you can also do this with canon interests, just hone in on specifically what it is and specifically why they like it. Dean doesn't like "music" he likes rock because it makes him feel powerful and affirms his masculinity and has a connection to his family being together. Charlie doesn't like "fantasy" she likes Lord Of The Rings and The Wizard of Oz because she values escapism and rooting for the little guy (these are also interests of Sam's!).

Plus - making it more niche and specific makes it SEEM like they have this rich inner life and history even if you don't bother to figure out why.

1) "Geraldine sighed and took the dog for a walk" vs

2) "Geraldine sighed, saved her game and took the dog for a walk" vs

3) "Geraldine sighed, saved her game of Pokemon Mystery Dungeon X, and took the dog for a walk."

Now!! Actually! 2 and 3 are where "voice" can come in. Is the POV character someone who doesn't care or know much about video games? Then 2 is the one for them. Does the POV character care a lot about being accurate, know Geraldine well enough to know what she's playing, and/or are knowledgeable about video games? Option 3! Or, bonus option 4, perhaps they're disdainful of video games/annoyed with Geraldine: "Geraldine sighed, saved her little game with the pretend animals, and finally took our very real and very whiny dog for a walk".

So!! We have a character. How do we make her distinct from the other characters in the fic? Build them concurrently!

Ambriel is apathetic about community THEREFORE Becky is desperate for it (and can't hold onto it). Becky is over-verbose, so Ambriel keeps it short (and is misunderstood as a result). Ambriel believes deep down that she doesn't matter, so Becky deep down believes that she (both herself and Ambriel) is special and important and deserves worship.

So. I think you were expecting this but. think about their motivations and then just start writing them and it'll work out.