#nonbinary gabriel

--

Sam Winchester is fifteen the first time he puts on a skirt. He’s with a different girl by now, but she must have a feminization kink or something (although he has a feeling she’s just a closeted lesbian) because something lights up in her expression when Sam asks if he can try on some of her clothes.

It’s a deep blue pencil skirt, and it doesn’t quite fit right around his hips and it hugs his thighs in a way he’s not used to but he doesn’t care because that feeling is back – that feeling of something fitting, like it’s right, it’s perfect, he’s suddenly free. And he allows himself to wonder for just a moment if-

He cuts that line of thought off instantly. There’s no point in thinking about what could be.

He takes off the skirt, gives it back to her, and goes home.

--

When Sam is 17, he kisses a boy for the first time. He’s never been fully straight, he was aware of that, but he’s never acted on it, either. But when a guy approaches him after school, midway into his senior year, he shrugs and agrees, on the condition that they go to his house, not Sam’s.

It’s roughly the same as kissing a girl, but Sam is acutely aware of the fact that it’s not a girl the whole time anyway. It feels a little drier, more experimental, but not bad. Sam enjoys it.

The guy confesses after that he’s straight and part of the reason he approached Sam for his sexual experimentation was because Sam has always struck him as somewhat of a feminine dude.

Sam has no idea what to do with that information. So he does what Dean would do; he packs up and goes home.

The guy doesn’t talk to him again.

--

Sam fights with his dad about whether or not he can go to Stanford. He wants to. His dad won’t pay for it. He doesn’t care. He just needs to get out of the house. He can earn a living on his own and he knows he can get scholarships.

The hardest part is when he gets his acceptance letter and finally has to tell Dean.

Dean doesn’t cry – Dean never cries – but he hugs Sam a little too tightly for a little too long and tells his shoulder, “I’m gonna miss you.” He doesn’t ask Sam not to go, which in some ways hurts worse.

Is he not even worth fighting for?

He and Dean share a bed that night, even though Sam’s 18 and Dean’s 22, because Sam knows he’s going to have nightmares, and Dean’s the only one who’s ever been able to fight them off. It doesn’t matter that Sam’s leaving and it doesn’t matter that they haven’t shared a bed in a decade. They cling to each other in their sleep and their dad doesn’t tell them to move.

Sam spends more time than he used to around his brother for the four or five weeks he has before he leaves. Dean hugs him again, a little too tight and a little too long, the morning he drives off to California.

“I love you, Dean,” are Sam’s last words to his brother for two years.

Dean screams and punches the wall when Sam pulls out of the parking lot. Sam watches it in his rearview.

--

He arrives at Stanford on August 29th, with two duffels of clothes and a separate one of toiletries and various entertainment items. He finds his dorm, drops off his stuff, and goes down to the commons to see if he can meet someone new.

People are milling around, most of them wearing little red-and-white ‘Hello, My Name Is’ identification stickers. Other people are walking around distributing them.

The person who walks over to him is barely chest-height on him, with short, golden-brown hair and equally golden eyes, and is wearing a cropped black jacket. There’s a nametag stuck to the jacket that says ‘Gabriel, they/them/theirs’. Sam smiles at them.

“Hi,” he says quietly. They smile back.

“What’s your name, sweetheart?” they ask him. He bites his lip, then tells them. They grin, writing it down on one of the blank nametags they’re holding, and hand it to Sam.

“Welcome to Stanford, Samantha.”

 (She writes her own pronouns on the nametag.

Sam stared at the cast list, where his name was printed in small letters next to the words Elliott Joyce (lead). He closed his eyes, pinched himself, and looked again. It was still there.

“No way,” he said out loud. “No way.”

No way had he, a complete novice at acting, gotten the lead role in the school play. He hadn’t even been serious about trying to get a part; he’d only auditioned because he’d lost a bet with Charlie.

He tapped the arm of a guy he remembered to be one of the people watching the auditions and holding a clipboard. “Excuse me. I think there’s been a mistake.”

“Huh?” The guy shouldered his way past the crowd of people trying to look at the cast list. “Where?”

Sam scratched his head. “It, um, it says I’m supposed to be the lead.”

“Well, you’re Sam Winchester, aren’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“Nope, no typos,” he said cheerfully. “Congrats, Sammy. You were awesome at the auditions.”

“But I’ve never acted before!”

That made the other guy stop and stare at him. “What, seriously? Never?”

Sam nodded. “That’s why I thought there was a mistake on the sheet.”

“You’re going to be a fucking prodigy by the time this play is over, then. See you at rehearsals later!”

Sam didn’t actually know what the play was about this semester. He knew it was an original screenplay by one of the drama students, and he thought it had something to do with transgender people. He hadn’t read the information packet very well.

Rehearsals started right after his English Lit class ended, so he didn’t have time to drop his stuff off in his dorm. He went straight to the arts building and went to the auditorium, where they’d done auditions.

There were already several people already there. The only one Sam recognized was Jess, who sat in front of him in his law class.

“Sam!”

Sam turned around and saw Charlie barrelling toward him at full speed. She caught him around the middle in a tight hug. Sam chuckled and hugged her back.

She let go of him. “I can’t believe you got the lead.”

“Me either,” he said. “I thought there was a typo at first.”

“Okay, everybody, come get in a circle!” shouted the short guy with the clipboard. “That includes crew members, too!”

They all shuffled around and got some chairs and sat in a circle.

“Okie dokie,” said the short guy. “So, today isn’t really a rehearsal, it’s more of a “get-to-know-you” type thing. We’ll introduce ourselves, maybe do some trust exercises, talk to new people, that kind of thing. Let’s start with a pronoun round. I’ll start.” He stood up. “Hi, my name is Gabriel, and I use they/them pronouns.”

They went around the circle like that, each person standing up, introducing themselves, and saying what pronouns they used.

After everyone finished, Gabriel leaned forward in their chair with a serious look on their face. “Now you know how you all prefer to be referred to by, there are no excuses to use the wrong pronouns. If you can’t remember which ones someone uses, ask them. If you can’t do that, I have no issue with replacing you. There were a lot of good actors at the auditions.”

There was a lot of mumbled okays and nodding of heads.

“Great! Now, everybody stand up, there’s this game I like to do with new theatre-goers…”

The second rehearsal, they started practicing their lines. They started with a table-reading of the script, which Gabriel had arranged a seating chart for. Sam sat in between Jess, who was playing his girlfriend, and Castiel Novak, who was playing his brother.

The play was about a young man, Elliott, who slowly discovered that he was not a man, but was actually nonbinary. Gabriel admitted that a lot of it was based on their own experiences.

After that rehearsal, Sam went home and researched as much as he could about agender people. There wasn’t a lot, which was frustrating. Then he stumbled upon a site called tumblr, which was an absolute wealth of information.

It turned out that agender was a subcategory of the umbrella term nonbinary. Gender was split into a lot more categories than Sam had previously thought. There was cisgender, which was identifying as the gender a person was assigned at birth (the opposite of transgender), and binary genders, which meant someone identified as a boy or a girl, and nonbinary genders, which meant someone didn’t identify as a boy or a girl - or, in some cases, identified as both.

A lot of nonbinary people on tumblr wrote about their experiences discovering they were nonbinary, or what it was like being a nonbinary person in a culture that was very strictly designed around binary people.

The thing was… the more Sam read, the deeper he researched, the more familiar all these people’s experiences seemed. Not being bothered when they were called the opposite sex by teasing peers, feeling boxed in by societal expectations, realizing that the wouldn’t mind being called pronouns different from what they grew up using.

Sam stayed up all night, scouring the internet for more information. A lot of the definitions of certain genders were really vague, and a lot of the advice blogs he found said it really depended on feelings, which were hard to put into words.

Over the course of the next few months, Sam found himself fitting more and more into the role of Elliott Joyce while preparing for the play. Gabriel had been right - Sam was a natural talent. He’d just needed a little push. Sam also found himself comparing his experiences and feelings to Elliott’s - to Gabriel’s. He found that it felt right when the other actors referring to him as them, even though they were actually talking about Elliott.

Sam spent a lot of time in front of the mirror trying out different pronouns - and jeez, were there a lot to try. A lot of older people - elderly people and middle-aged people - seemed to disagree with the more obscure ones, saying they weren’t grammatically correct, or that it was a new fad to change your pronouns, which made Sam’s blood boil a bit.

Using they/them pronouns just seemed to… fit Sam. And after Sam realized that, other people saying him made Sam’s skin crawl.

The next time Gabriel scheduled a rehearsal, Sam cleared his throat before they got started.

“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately, and I, um, I think I want to use they/them instead of he/him. Pronouns, I mean.”

Gabriel’s smile was even wider than the time Jess treated the whole cast to milkshakes and burgers at the diner down the street. “Cool beans, Sam-I-Am. Are you looking at changing your name, too, or…”

Sam shook their head. “No. I… maybe later, but I don’t think I will.”

Coming out to their cast members was easy, because Sam knew they would all respect them, but coming out to their professors and classmates was a whole different story. Sam thought about it long and hard, and decided that if they did come out, it would be after the play, so people would have an opportunity to be educated about the subject.