#csa implied

Dj plays out each scene in his head, tries to imagine what his namesake did to make their Sam smile like that. Practices in the mirror. Finds a dead man staring back. The dead man tells him, “It’ll never be enough.”

One day his Dad leaves on a short trip and Dj decides to dig a little deeper in the chest. He inspects the faded leather jacket that sits atop the pile of junk. It smells of gunpowder and whiskey. Under the jacket is a soft flannel, worn and fraying at the seams. It looks just like any of his father’s other flannels, but when he unfolds it at least 50 polaroids spill out. Curious, Dj picks one up. He expects to find yet another moment between two brothers frozen in time.

Instead he finds only one young boy. His face is cut off at the mouth so Dj can’t tell who it is, but he knows those aren’t his Dad’s lips. The boy’s neck is bared and his skin is naked save for a dark necklace. His arms are held behind his back and there’s one very clear bite mark bruising his collarbone. Dj’s not sheltered, he knows what this is. He swallows and flips the picture over. Dated 10.06.95. Definitely not his Dad then.

Dj picks up another one. It’s the same boy sat on his knees. All bare skin save for that necklace still, with his hands covering his crotch. There’s another hand in the photo, a much older hand, gripping the boy’s jaw. His face above the nose is cutoff again, but his lips are parted and wet. Dj can guess what happened.

He picks up a third. The boy looks younger, but he has some clothes on in this one. Small blue shorts that hug his limp body. He’s on a motel bed sprawled on his stomach, asleep by the looks of it.

Something hot and tight crawls up Dj’s chest. He picks up a new one from a different area in the pile. Same boy, older again. His eyes are green, Dj learns. Green and teary and so big. Those lips Dj is coming to recognize stretch over a hard cock, spit dripping from the corners. That gruff hand is back and holding tight in the boy’s hair. It’s a closeup but he’s in the backseat of a car, Dj can tell. It almost looks like…

Dj scrambles to pick up another photo. The boy is bent over the side of a car, back arched obscenely. His lower half is cutoff past the hand gripping his hip but Dj sees it. Sees the silver rims and mirror attached to an Impala he’d recognize anywhere. He flips the polaroid and finds another date. 11.07.96.

It was Dean. He’s the boy in the photos.

And the mystery hand.. Dj moves back to the chest and rifles through the family photos he had seen countless times, looking for one very specific man. As soon as he sees it he snatches the photo and brings it back to the polaroids with the mystery hand to compare.

There’s no doubt. It’s the same hand. Ring and all.

These photos are all of his young uncle Dean and his grandfather.

And his Dad had kept them.

so banana fish has this scene which obviously stuck out to me (that’s his adoptive father)

the focus is not on the opera itself, but the name of the composer. is the name amadeo/amadeus a reference to something else? the only thing i can think of is like… the relationship between mozart and salieri? the film amadeus came out in 1984, 1 year before bananafish began in 1985 (idk when these panels were drawn but i estimate around 1986-1990). but 1985 is the same year the vampire lestat was published, the book in which armand reveals his name was amadeo and provides most of the initial detail about his relationship with marius.

i feel like i’m missing some cultural information on why anne rice and akimi yoshida are making similar comparisons at similar times. i know wolfgang amadeus mozart was big in pop culture at the time, and maybe yoshida was just referencing salieri trying to destroy mozart out of jealousy, but the portrayal of “amadeo/amadeus” as a teenage sex worker in an unbalanced and harmful relationship with his wealthy and all-powerful adoptive father (who saw him as already “damaged” due to his history of abuse and then turns him into a literal killing machine) seems REALLY specific and completely unrelated to mozart.

it’s possible it’s totally a random parallel, and a throwaway scene, but given the timeline i feel like it’s also possible yoshida read the vampire lestat and is referencing the character armand.

I jotted down a few brief notes in my phone about that and then shortly after felt thrust into an inexplicable emotional flashback. I was clutching an armful of plushies and rocking back and forth on my bed, trapped in a distraught emotional state that felt like some combination of despair and terror and shock and horror.

I felt really confused about what was happening to me at first because the feelings felt like they came out of nowhere and felt completely disconnected from anything that I could put my finger on, and then I was like oh wait. Is this how it felt afterwards? After my dad did unspeakable things to me and my mom physically attacked me for it and then I was left alone in my room, on my bed in the dark trapped in silent anguish as my little child brain tried to make sense of absolutely senseless things?

No one to call out to, no sound could safely be made, just stuck in a noiseless wail as I frantically rocked and clung to my plushies, my only safe source of comfort in that moment.

I still remember when I was younger, I can't remember how old though I estimate somewhere between fifth and seventh grade, coming home from school after having the everloving hell beaten out of me in the locker room and just staring at myself in the mirror. It felt like I didn't even see the bruises, I just saw everything wrong. I didn't know what was wrong, why it was wrong, didn't really know anything because no one had told me what dysphoria or being intersex was. No one told me I was intersex, thought it better I just thought something was wrong with me, no one told me what I was feeling was... Well, not normal, but not abnormal either. How am I even supposed to word that? Dysphoria is awful but it's not in itself ??? I have no idea so I'm just going to leave it like that.

Anywho. I just remember wondering if they'd hit me hard enough if it could have forced my body into proper shape. Not fitness, but as in if they kicked and punched, smacked me with their shoes hard enough if it would be like those cartoons where they get hit and shake and then they're magically fine. But, I'd look like I wanted to... And then I realized what I was thinking, didn't know what it meant but it felt like an alarm bell, and then I just got more upset and started punching myself as hard as I could everywhere I hated where I looked until I cried. No one cared, not that I can remember, no one had even checked up on me when I got home despite knowing I was beaten. No one checked to see why I was in the bathroom for so long. Nothing.

I never got my sex reassigned, or hell, maybe it was and I just don't know because no one will tell me anything (given the CIMI? Highly possible. Also highly possible I just don't remember a la cdd) but they kept switching which locker rooms I was allowed to go in. Over and over, multiple times until finally they told me to just go to the nurse's office because I refused to change around anyone in either locker room unless I was able to use a stall. I often couldn't, so I'd miss class waiting until after gym to change in the ball bathrooms, or just wear my dirty clothes all day if that wasn't an option. I got points docked and didn't care.

Sometimes I still want to do that, I hate this body and I hate that I'll never be safe in it, especially not anytime soon where I'm stuck. I don't even really want a body at all. Or, I want to be able to choose when I do, or when it's touchable and not just going to be phased through like a ghost. I want to look how I do in my head. Body and face wise, I look in the mirror and obviously know that that is my face, but it looks nothing like me. Seeing myself there can be anything from mildly unsettling to fully devastating and distressing, changing day to day or throughout each day. And I wonder if being allowed to know I was intersex from the get go would have changed anything, made it better or not. It certainly couldn't make it worse.

And in hindsight, now that I know and am able to learn more about my variations and presentations, some things from back then that I can recall or at least have been told about make much more sense for better or for worse. And some intersexist peritrans bozo will read this post and still think I'm privileged for it all... Obligatory I know not all peritrans people are intersexist, but if you read that line and started fuming maybe you are even if you try to act like you aren't. Even if you've gaslit yourself to believe you aren't. Why so angry if it not about you, eh? Now moving on.

The frequent UTIs (though this one also was likely worsened by other awful things which I think you can infer from the tags... That probably plays a lot into, intertwines with a lot more as well than I realize or want to think about), MRI scans they put me under for most of the time, the time when I was little and had to take a bath at my friend's house and I was too little to be left alone to it so she had to help. The horror on her face looking at my little body, and further horror when I started to panic. My sex ed questions in school never answered when we went over it in school, I was scolded for being inappropriate or ignored entirely, or some took it as me trying to be a class clown despite never being the type.

I'm just sort of looking at my life tonight, how little of it I've actually gotten to live not just survive, things I missed out on and was denied be it to do with being intersex or not. To do with being trans or not and am just really, really sad. I said this was half a vent half not but I supposed it just is a vent after all. I see the holes, some will always be gone I think, some though it's just blank I can connect dots. And then with those realizations pop in ones that make me think of other issues, more dots connected, and then before I know it I am thought spiraling about other aspects of my situation that are just awful. The fact it's likely never going to get better for me. I'm not going to make it to another birthday and I've never been able to go to pride, never had love (or at least not love that wasn't abusive or manipulative), never made a family, never truly got away from my abusers, never got to do pretty much anything I planned to do with my life, never amounted to anything.

YESSS IM GLAD YOURE EXCITED i am ALSO excited and i'm thrilled to bring you the same brand (gav fic) in an exciting new box (the pitt)

preview here!! most of it under the cut. this is the opening for my first fic for the pitt, a santos-centric fic called touch the world in which i ruminate on the continuing ramifications of abuse (so cw for that being referenced below), force my girl here into a situation of vulnerability and Experiencing Care, and crib a two-part episode of grey's anatomy for my dastardly h/c fic purposes :)

Some days start off already fucked before they’ve barely had time to be anything at all, which is one of the more unfair things that can happen in the ordinary course of a life. Days shouldn’t have the ability to be ruined before a person’s even had their morning coffee.

It probably (definitely, absolutely) starts because of the phone call from her mother. Trinity avoids those as often as she possibly can most of the time, but eventually it goes on a little too long and it becomes unavoidable and she has to answer. If she wants to keep the peace, and she does, because the alternative is even worse, then she has to pick up every now and then and make enough stupid small-talk that her mom doesn’t feel like her only child has completely abandoned the family, despite the fact that Trinity absolutely did do that, as soon as she was old enough to do it.