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What a fascinating, unusual story.

Masculinity in America

A ‘real man’ in a dress

A small-town widow drives across Wyoming with a playwright to share the story of the Cowboy State’s most beloved cross-dresser: her deceased husband

By Jose A. Del Real

December 21, 2022 at 6:00 a.m. EST

Reported in Douglas, Laramie, Cheyenne, Buffalo, Sheridan, Cody, Jackson, Rock Springs, Riverton and Casper, Wyoming

ACT I

In late March 2020, 12 days after the death of her husband of 51 years, Vickie Goodwin received an email.

She had spent the past several weeks at home in central Wyoming sorting through his clothing, a common if painful burden for a grieving widow. In this case, however, the garments had weighed heavily on the life she built with her husband, Larry Goodwin, a onetime airplane mechanic, military veteran and rodeo cowboy. Skirts and peasant blouses dangled in their closet, alongside petticoats, dresses and hair ribbons. They were Larry’s.

His cross-dressing had been a private matter when Larry and Vickie first married in 1968, and their lives from that point might have unfolded in the same way as many other families of their generation. After years as a housewife, Vickie went in search of a career, selling Tupperware before she joined an environmental nonprofit and, later, became involved in local Democratic politics. Larry, meanwhile, jumped between trades before working his way up at the power plant near Douglas, Wyo., where he and Vickie lived with their two children. They were intent on climbing into the middle class.

But in the early 1970s, Larry began to wear feminine clothing in public.

The threat of violence loomed over them from that point on, especially in small-town Wyoming, the Cowboy State. No matter that Larry was in many ways a conventional man from rural America: great at building things, gruff in voice and demeanor, traditionally manly in almost every other way down to his calloused hands. He wasn’t gay and he wasn’t transgender — he identified as male and was attracted to women. But to break any one rule of masculinity was to be excluded entirely, and Larry became a warning about what would happen if you did so.

He was punched, teased, dragged, jumped, pushed and kicked, sometimes in front of his family. He was harassed by police officers and arrested on several occasions for wearing women’s clothes in public — which was not a crime. He was bullied at work. Once, Vickie recalled, Larry had his teeth knocked in by a stranger on their front lawn, some tough guy, as their son watched helplessly.

Even with his self-esteem in tatters, Larry forged an identity out of defending his right to wear what he wanted. Defiant, he adopted the nickname Sissy in the 1990s.

The end was not what they expected.

It was a brain tumor that killed Sissy, in March 2020, just five weeks after his first doctor’s appointment about tremors and extreme fatigue. He was 73.

The suddenness of his illness left Vickie, now74, with a vast collection of papers and photos of Sissy, including piles of old newspaper clippings.

That such a man was not only born and raised in Wyoming but also chose to stay in Wyoming — the conservative frontier playground of the American cowboy — made him a staple of human-interest stories since 1997, when a Washington Post reporter encountered him on the National Mall during a visit to the District. Profiles in the Los Angeles Times, countless interview requests and even a “Dateline” segment followed. He and Vickie indulged all this with good nature, and just a little bit of dread. They enjoyed the idea that it might provide comfort to others who felt similarly victimized for not conforming strictly to gender norms.

Sissy’s death prompted an outpouring of public support in Wyoming, especially from the state’s thin but vibrant community of LGBTQ activists. They had come to see Sissy as one of their own. Several glowing obituaries were written.

One thousand miles away, in Los Angeles, a writer named Gregory Hinton was putting the finishing touches on a sensitive note he hoped might lead to his next project: a play about Sissy Goodwin’s life. Gregory, a published novelist, had lived in the mountain West as a boy and fled after coming out as gay in college. He now made it his mission to compile true stories of LGBTQ individuals in rural America, which he referred to affectionately as “our community.” He learned about Sissy in the Los Angeles Times and was inspired by his resilience, by his decision to stay.

He saw in Sissy a hopeful symbol, especially amid persistent anti-LGBTQ posturing by right-wing political leaders and the growing threat of violent attacks by bigots and extremists.

“Please forgive me if I have fumbled this, but when the time is right, I hope we might say hello. God Bless Sissy,” Gregory wrote at the end of his email.

Vickie, stalled in her grief and clinging to Sissy’s clothes, read the message with curiosity.

“I am still struggling to come to grips with a whirlwind,” Vickie wrote back 90 minutes later. “I’ve written some stories about our life and someday hope to write a memoir when all my thoughts converge into something coherent. I think a play or production would be a wonderful tribute to Sissy.”

Maybe, she thought, this would be a way to use Sissy’s story to help others even in death.

* * *

Gregory fretted over the script for more than a year, using Sissy’s journal entries as source material alongside 22 hours of oral history that Vickie gave to the American Heritage Center at Gregory’s request. Their words became the basis of “A Sissy in Wyoming,” a verbatim play told from Sissy’s perspective.

Neither remembers whose idea it was exactly, but by early 2022, Gregory and Vickie agreed to a nine-stop road trip to bring the story of Wyoming’s most beloved cross-dresser to rural community centers. To do the show on a budget, Gregory would deliver the script as a “playwright’s reading” in lieu of a full production. But the first stop in late September would be at a proper theater, at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, a fact that made him weepy with pride.

A who’s who of Wyoming organizers and activists on the political left were in attendance at the first show. Even if it is still known nationally as the place where Matthew Shepard was beaten to death in 1998, Laramie is regarded by people in the state as a liberal-ish college town. Some in the audience got to know Sissy in 2017, after then-U.S. Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) ignited an international firestorm when he told a high school classroom: “I know a guy who wears a tutu and goes to bars on Friday night and is always surprised that he gets in fights. Well, he kind of asks for it a little bit.”

Sissy, who was navigating a bout of deep depression at the time, accepted the senator’s apology, which earned him even more goodwill among the state’s moderates.

Before the show started, Gregory stood anxiously in black slacks and a black sweater as people came by to congratulate him. “I’m not very popular back home, so when I want some respect, I come to Wyoming,” he joked.

Vickie, in a turquoise blouse touched at the shoulders by silver embroidery, stood outside the theater smiling nervously and greeting audience members, about 200 in total. On display nearby were some of Sissy’s clothes, hung gingerly like artifacts or museum objects.

“Are you having fun?” one person asked her.

“I think so,” Vickie responded.

During the reading, Gregory was emotional. His lips quivered. His eyes grew watery. His throat caught.

“My mother did nothing to prevent the abuse,” Gregory-as-Sissy read onstage. “Once at a family Thanksgiving, as a grown man, she reaches down my trousers and yanks up my underwear to humiliate me in front of the family. ‘Still wearing panties, are you?’”

“Years later, when my mom was dying, I visited her in hospice,” Gregory-as-Sissy continued. “And these were my mother’s parting words to me: ‘Don’t come back, Larry. I don’t want the staff to know you are my son.’”

Vickie watched near the front row. She frowned slightly in the dark of the second act but soon put on the smile she usually wore.

As the show built to its endpoint, a few people began to sob openly. The audience erupted in a standing ovation, which Gregory directed to Vickie, who scrunched her shoulders as if unsure what to do with so many eyes on her.

It was a success.

But Vickie was caught off guard during a question-and-answer session by how personal some of the inquiries were, she told Gregory later, particularly from transgender audience members.

“How was he able to be so strong? Did he ever just fall apart sometimes?” one person asked.

“Yes, he fell apart. He cried. There were times where we both sat there and cried together. It was so incredibly difficult,” Vickie said, carefully. “And we just stuck it out.”

“Were there times where you felt he needed to get sober?” another person asked.

“Um. Sissy did have challenges with alcohol. Um. He tried — I mean, I guess, he tried to cure his depression with alcohol. It never got, it never, you know, kind of tipped over the edge,” Vickie responded. “But alcohol was a real challenge.”

Vickie braced herself for what was next.

Already, some people in a northeastern Wyoming town called Sheridan were grousing on Facebook about having a show with LGBTQ themes at their public library.

* * *

The bickering began soon after they left Laramie.

It was good-natured, mostly. Vickie wanted to sightsee and then wanted to go back for her purse, which she had left behind. Gregory wanted to arrive early to the next venue. Each thought the other was a chatterbox. Both preferred to be behind the wheel.

“How are we?” a man asked when Vickie and Gregory arrived for the next reading in Cheyenne. It was several hours before call time.

“Well, Greg thinks I’m a ridiculous person, but we’re fine,” Vickie said, exasperated.

“We’ve gotten to know each other and now we have nine more stops,” Gregory said in a deadpan. “No, no, it’s fine. We don’t want to talk about it because we finally made up.”

They were nearly perfect foils.

Heavy in frame and manner, Vickie could navigate the entire state of Wyoming without a map and wrote murder mysteries in her spare time. She seemed like she had never needed help with anything in her life. She relished working as a behind-the-scenes community organizer in rural Converse County for the library board and the local branch of the Democratic Party. She might begin telling a story about the time she went to Iraq with a charity on the sole condition that she could wear pants the entire time. Or about the sex workers she met once in D.C. Or the time she went to a lobbyist party and ran away when she realized several attendees were smoking pot. Inevitably, she would trail off abruptly: “So, but, anyhow.”

Gregory moved through the world with a gentle demeanor, the sort of curious softness that elicited the kindness and concern of complete strangers.His sentences were careful, complete and full of cultural references — subtle Joni Mitchell lyrics, or gag lines from old episodes of “I Love Lucy.” He had built a modest life over the decades as a writer in Southern California, but it was now, in his late 60s, that he felt he was truly hitting his stride.

Gregory had a way with words, and Vickie had countless stories to tell.

She knew the details of Sissy’s life, and he knew the audience that needed to hear them.

Before the reading in Cheyenne,two actors volunteering as stage hands sat with Gregory and Vickie ahead of the show. One of them, Jedediah, who revealed he was transgender, thanked Vickie for helping share Sissy’s story.

“You can keep the petticoats, if you want them,” Vickie told Jedediah suddenly.

“Are you sure?” Jedediah asked her. His eyes grew wide.

“It’s been really hard for me. It’s been sitting in my house for two years, but I didn’t just want to donate them. I want the petticoats to go with someone who wants them and will love them,” Vickie said. “So, anyhow, you just keep them.”

As they drove toward central Wyoming later that night, after the reading, lightning stretched across the sky. Vickie was unfazed as 40-mile winds pushed against the car. Rain poured down so violently that the road briefly disappeared.

“The response tonight was pretty awesome,” Gregory said. “I’m eager to see what kind of audiences we get at the next stops.”

“I don’t know about Cody, to be honest,” he added, referring to the town in north central Wyoming.

“Cody has had some issues. There was a lesbian couple there that was harassed. And there are all these ‘Don’t California-ize Wyoming’ signs everywhere. It’s all these people that aren’t even from here,” Vickie said.

“This is so fun,” Gregory said a few moments later. “I know it’s not the point, but I’m having so much fun.”

“No. It is the point, Greg,” Vickie told him, very seriously now. “What’s the point of life if you’re not having fun?”

* * *

ACT II

Staff at the Sheridan Public Library seemed tense when Vickie and Gregory arrived. Angry comments about the play had flooded a local Facebook group.

“Yuck.”

“Crossdressing is immoral.”

“Actually real men aren’t sissies.”

In response, the library director had stressed the space “was available for anyone to rent.”

“I welcome some negativity,” Vickie said, defiantly. “That’s what this is about.

Gregory looked distraught whenhe heard there might be trouble. He looked down at his clothes.

Before they began driving that morning, he had decided to wear one of Sissy’s old petticoat skirts over his own trousers. It was large and ruffled and deep green. Gregory remarked that the skirt brought out his eyes, but it was a deflection; he felt self-conscious each time he stepped out of the car, even scared.

“I guess I never knew how Sissy felt the first time he stepped out in a dress. Until now,” Gregory had said at a rest stop as they pushed into northeast Wyoming.

The rhetoric against LGBTQ people was beginning to feel more dangerous than it had in a long time. Across the United States in 2022, people who lived in defiance of gender norms were singled out for public disdain by right-wing politicians who treated them as symbols of a changing country. This was especially true in conservative regions ahead of the November midterm elections, which were just weeks away. The playbook was an old one: accusations of depravity, “grooming” and contagion.

Gregory walked to the back of the library, sat down and closed his eyes.

He began to run his hands along the skirt’s ruffles.

Suddenly, he smiled.

“I can’t get over how beautiful the drive was today,” he said to no one in particular.

During a question-and-answer session after the reading, a burly Army veteran with unruly hair raised his hand. His name was Jerry Moore, and he sat hooked up to an oxygen tank. He was wearing a blue plaid dress, a price tag still dangling from the armpit. He was one of six male audience members out of about 50.

Jerry told the room he had come here with his son, Charlie Falkis, a transgender man who served in the U.S. Air Force and felt unwelcome in Wyoming. Both men were distraught to see the Facebook comments about the reading, so they decided to wear dresses to the event in solidarity with Sissy.

“Just a statement of gratitude,” he said. “I’ve never seen as much hate as I saw on that thread. It’s all about fear.”

On the other side of the room, an elderly man in a Marlboro-red shirt and a black cowboy hat decided to speak up. The room suddenly felt heavy.

“I guess I kinda got a comment,” he began. His giant white mustache bounced with each word.

“You know, on the surface, the Western culture says mind your own business. But that’s so far from the truth. A lot of people believe that everything is their business,” he said. “And, you know, I’m really grateful for the play you did and for Sissy, for reminding people that it’s the inside that counts, not the outside. What somebody is wearing is none of my damn business.”

* * *

Now they made the long drive across the Bighorn Mountain range, toward the town of Cody, where Gregory had lived as a boy. His father had been the editor of the Cody Enterprise, the local paper, and Gregory felt like he was going home.

“The cool thing is that Sissy’s is a happy story. Your family didn’t break up,” Gregory said to Vickie from the driver’s seat. “You two loved each other and supported each other. Though it is tragic that he died.”

“He always used to say, ‘When I die, I want to be shot in the back by a jealous husband,'” Vickie said, laughing. “Well, he didn’t get shot in the back by a jealous husband. But I don’t think he would have minded how he went. It was quick, but he got to say goodbye.”

When doctors discovered his brain cancer was terminal, Vickie asked Sissy the hardest question of their lives, in a life full of them: whether he wanted to take out the feeding tube that was keeping him alive. He did. She held his hand while he slowly starved. She played “Love is Blue” and Brahms’s Lullaby for him, to ease his way.

She didn’t say any of that to Gregory.

“This is what you call a Wyoming traffic jam,” Vickie said instead, as the car approached a herd of cattle crossing the road. “Watch out, you’ll have cows splattered all over. And those ranchers get real grumpy.”

“Wow. Just look at this,” Gregory said, scanning the landscape. “Why isn’t Wyoming simply overrun?”

“It’s hard! You’ve gotta be tough,” Vickie said.

Gregory’s father had a gentleness about him, he told Vickie, but he was prone to terrible flashes of anger, which Gregory admitted he experienced, too. Vickie’s father had been a trucker who hauled mud out for the drilling rigs on oil patches; he and Vickie were not especially close. She still sometimes referred to herself as someone from the wrong side of the tracks.

When they finally reached Cody, Gregory suddenly grew silent.

“Do you mind if we drive through town quietly just for a moment?” he asked.

Gregory left the Mountain West for California in the late 1970s after being outed as a gay man while attending college in Colorado, he recalled. His parents were accepting. But being gay was forbidden in his charismatic Christian community, and he began to receive violent threats at home, which, he noted now, was not very Christ-like.

He returned to Wyoming in the early 2010s on a research fellowship. During that time, he would visit the basement of the courthouse in Cody to sift through the old Enterprise newspaper archives.

Gregory was often compelled by the urge to memorialize the past. When he talked about the early years of the AIDS epidemic, Gregory, who is HIV positive, often spoke about all the lost diaries and mementos, thrown away after each premature death as if the young gay men who owned them had never existed at all. To hold on to the evidence of a life, he believed, was to insist that it had mattered, even if others didn’t agree.

The Cody Enterprise, he pointed out now to Vickie, was founded in 1899 by William Cody, the town’s namesake, better known to history as Buffalo Bill. More than anyone, it was Buffalo Bill who transformed cowboys into icons of masculinity in America and across the world with his Wild West show.

In those old archivedissues of the newspaper, Gregory even found a few photos of himself and his relatives, perks of being the editor’s son. Here,he saw a family album, one that asserted he belonged to Wyoming even after all that time away.

* * *

Gregory’s voice caught several times during his reading that evening in Cody, including in one section where Sissy-the-character remarks on the random acts of hate his family endured at home — broken windows, packages of human excrement, dead animals, slashed tires. The play builds toward an emotional scene when a honeylocust sapling was vandalized in the Goodwins’ front yard, a real-life event that devastated Vickie. She used tent stakes and rope to keep it upright.

“Can I ask you to give us that quote about the honeysuckle tree again?” one audience member asked Gregory after the reading.

“For two summers, just to humor my wife, I silently sparred with the tangle of lines and stakes as I mowed around the tree thinking it was certain to die,” Gregory-as-Sissy read, delighted. “Now, when the occasion arises, Vickie offers her lovely honeylocust, which is now taller than our old two-story house, as proof that anything can survive random acts of hate as long as it is loved.”

The audience burst into applause.

If anything, this was the thesis statement of Gregory’s work.

That LGBTQ people not only lived in rural America, but should be able to thrive there as well, unharmed. Even cherished.

But the next question went to Vickie. It was her perspective people wanted to hear.

“Vickie, what’s your tidbit of advice for people who have someone close to them that’s living an alternative lifestyle that they don’t understand?” a man asked her.

“I would think, ‘Talk to them.’ And do it in a way of asking questions but not judging,” she said from the stage.

“And sometimes it is hard not to say, ‘Well, that’s weird!’” she added, laughing. “I hope I’m answering your question. I hope that’s helping some.”

* * *

After a sparsely attended reading in Jackson, in the western part of Wyoming, a woman raised her hand to ask a question. She stopped several times to gather herself amid tears. Her partner, she said, was transgender and didn’t feel safe in Wyoming.

“I was just hoping you had experience, advice, on loving somebody, celebrating them, but being scared as well,” the young woman said to Vickie.

The truth was that the constant drumbeat of attacks and questions about Sissy’s manliness took a toll on him. And some of Vickie’s memories felt too exposed, too far off script to share.

Like when Sissy tried going to gay bars in search of friends, believing that perhaps the also-marginalized men there would accept him — only to be thrown out because the guys didn’t want to seem effeminate by association.

Or like when Sissy asked Vickie if he should pursue a sex-reassignment surgery, which prompted a serious and painful conversation about divorce. Vickie tolerated the cross-dressing and, after a long journey, supported his need to do so in public. But here was a firm line. Vickie was heterosexual. She did not want to be married to a woman. Vickie felt selfish thinking back on it now. In the end, Sissy told her he did not feel like a woman, and they stayed together.

“I was gone when this person stopped and beat him up in the front yard and kicked him in the kidneys and kicked his teeth in. I was off at a meeting and out of town,” Vickie told the young woman at the reading, stumbling a bit. “So. There were some words said between us about, well, protecting you — at one point he said, ‘You’re not my mother.’”

“And it is, it is, it was difficult,” she added. “My heart goes out to you. I know how hard it is.”

Among the things Sissy left behind was a journal he kept during one of his many bouts of depression, in the mid-2010s, in which he wondered whether his cross-dressing stemmed from the physical and emotional abuse he experienced as a child. He asked himself at times if subjecting his kids to the shame of having such a father was itself a kind of abuse because of the bullying they endured as a result. These were concerns he and Vickie kept to themselves. Now, she struggled with the right way to talk about such topics.

Despite his own reflections on gender, Sissy was taken aback when their oldest child came out as a transgender woman in adulthood. Sissy sometimes struggled with her pronouns, though he loved her deeply and accepted her transition.

“Are your kids involved in this process?” another person asked.

“In the play? They know it’s going on. Our son, well, our son is now our daughter. Both our kids live in Denver now. They didn’t participate a lot in the putting together of things. Both of them have busy lives,” Vickie said.

The truth was that Sissy hadn’t quite known where he fit into the LGBTQ movement either. He was cisgender. He was straight. Now, these young people were looking to Vickie as his delegate and also as an elder in the movement.

Vickie had just loved her husband.

She had just wanted him to be happy and to find peace.

“In the play, Sissy says, ‘I don’t choose to cross-dress, but I must.’ Is that fair?” Gregory asked Vickie the next morning as they were leaving Jackson. “We haven’t encountered somebody challenging Sissy’s cross-dressing in terms of what his motives were. My concern has been that there would be a trans person who would say: Trans people are not compulsive.”

“One thing I’ll tell you is that Sissy was looking for community. He was looking for a place to belong,” Vickie said. “And he struggled.”

* * *

ACT III

The landscape was fading from forest to plains to desert when Vickie mentioned that a filmmaker reached out to her with an idea: a movie about Sissy. They were driving now into the southwest part of the state, where Utah was suddenly closer than Montana, where the greenery of the Tetons gave way to arid canyons. Gregory’s entire body tightened. His tone became terse.

“What would happen to the play and me? I would wonder what I’m doing here,” Gregory began. “I’ve also talked to some producers. It’s your right to do, but I’m just wondering where that leaves the play.”

“This is the thing I’m still working through,” Vickie said. “The man died and I was trying to figure out what to do with his clothes, for God’s sake.”

“I feel at risk here,” Gregory said, shaking now. “I’m branded now as Sissy as well.”

They pulled over to stretch their legs.

“I’ve been on this for two years now,” Gregory said. “Are you intending to include me on any of this?”

“I don’t know what I’m doing, Greg. I haven’t done anything. And I guess I was hoping for guidance from you,” Vickie said.

“You weren’t approaching it that way. You were telling me what was going to happen, and I just hope this hasn’t been a waste of precious time for me,” he said.

“I, I did not —” Vickie said, talking over him.

“I just think this is all gold. And you deserve the best for you and your daughters. It’s your husband and your life and you’re models for all of this. It’s your story,” Gregory said. “This conversation is the oldest thing in the books. We’re dividing money we don’t have.”

“But that’s what dreaming is,” he added.

Sometimes, when Sissy and Vickie would fight, he would accuse her of staying with him for financial security. Vickie would tell him that she would live in a tent in the forest with him if that’s what it took to be together. They would make up.

Now, as a widow on a fixed income, she hired out a lot of work Sissy used to do. She paid $12,000 to replace her furnace, and other projects were pending; about $4,000 to replace a hole in the sidewalk and about $3,800 to repair the sprinklers in the yard. Vickie could not maintain a pond Sissy proudly installed in the backyard, which would cost $8,000 to remove. It was adding up.

All the while, Vickie worried about her transgender daughter, who could not afford to transition fully. Vickie was anxious about the hormone pills her daughter took without medical supervision.

“Everybody is going to want a piece of it,” Gregory said. “But Sissy’s life story belongs to you.”

“I haven’t given away my story. I’ve shared my story. And I have no intention of giving away my story or giving away your story,” Vickie said.

“I’m just really exhausted,” Gregory said.

A long silence followed.

Everywhere now was desert, an expanse so desolate that one could see the curve of the earth in the distance. Few plants. No trees. Absolutely nowhere to hide: from the sun, from the wind, from oneself.

* * *

They were driving past a sign that said “Eden Valley Welcomes You,” surrounded by red rocks and dried out sagebrush, when they started talking again. Something between them had changed.

“We’ve got these great stories that are so meaningful and worth it,” Gregory said now. “And we’ve both agreed that what’s meaningful is people hearing the play.”

Maybe it was spin.

But, in truth, Vickie felt immense gratitude to Gregory. He had arranged for her oral history to be preserved at the American Heritage Center. For free, he had sifted through her words and Sissy’s words to write something beautiful.

“In some ways it’s scary to have Sissy as an ideal and bigger than life,” Vickie said, earnestly now. “I wait for the person that comes along and says, ‘Well, he was too gay, he hit on me.’ Or, ‘He was down in Denver at the gay clubs.’ Or the nasty remarks he made to somebody in a bad mood because he was being a son of a b----. Sissy was not perfect. He was not a saint.”

“Did you feel blindsided?” Gregory asked now. He was talking about Sissy’s cross-dressing. His tone seemed conciliatory.

“I did feel like it later, when he kept coming out more and more. Because in my mind it wasn’t going to be a public display,” Vickie said. “And I didn’t know any better. God, I was so damn naive.”

“You lent Sissy credibility for people who didn’t understand the lifestyle he was living,” Gregory said.

“I think he felt that way,” she said.

“This is such a different landscape now,” Gregory observed after a pause. “In the spring, does this all just come to life?”

To drive across Wyoming is to see endless contradictions manifested in terrain. Plains and peaks, deserts and forests, despair and exaltation. There are sheer cliffs that come out of prairies as if in a hallucination. There are flat highways that appear nestled within valleys but sit at elevations of 7,000 feet, so that the sky feels like it’s pressing down on the Earth. Wyoming is where the West becomes the Midwest. Where the North bleeds into the South, though it isn’t either of those, really. It is old ideas and new ideas. Myth repeated so many times it becomes indistinguishable from truth. Proof that no place and no body can be any one thing. It is all of America, at all its extremes.

“When the rain comes, it is beautiful,” Vickie said. “I just keep thinking about how it must have looked to people coming West for the first time. There was just more of it. And more of it. And more of it,” Vickie said.

“Can you imagine?” she added.

* * *

The play begins with a spotlight on a burly man in a flowered skirt and a ruffled blouse. He is wearing work boots and a tool belt, too, but what stands out first is the feminine clothing. Second is the blood running down his face.

He has just been beaten.

“I am a good person. I am a good person,” the man tells himself. “I am a good person. I am a good person. I am a good person. I am a good person.”

It ends with the same refrain — the real-life words Sissy would tell himself in the mirror to assert his dignity and self-worth.

But not before turning one last time to Vickie.

“I wish I could be like Vickie,” Gregory-as-Sissy was reading now in Rock Springs. “No matter what she is doing, there is invariably a smile on her face. She gets so much pleasure in life. For me, to live, it’s always been a matter of self-survival. To pretend otherwise was death.”

As the audience clapped, Gregory held his hand out to Vickie, directing the adulation to her. Now they were embracing, and even as Gregory began to cry, Vickie continued to smile.

Afterward, a few audience members asked Gregory if they could buy the play somewhere. It was unpublished, he said, but he could email them a free copy.

Three more stops to go.

“What would you say to someone who is going through the same process as before he started being Sissy?” a woman asked Vickie after another reading, in Casper.

Sissy had been a “real man” in all senses of that term, but Vickie settled now on sharing a version of him that could help people most.

“What I hope happens from this is people understand they’re not alone. It’s really important that you realize you’re not alone,” she said.

Soon, Vickie would return home to Douglas, to the house she had shared with Sissy.

There were signs of him everywhere there.

The cabinets he had stained, the dining table he had refinished, the tile he had laid. His pond was in the backyard. His tools in the garage. The three honeylocust trees he planted in the front yard.

Proof that their life together had been so much more than the clothes he wore.

Proof that he had been a real man and not just a character in a play.

Proof that, through love, Sissy had found where he belonged.

By Jose Del RealJose A. Del Real is a reporter for The Washington Post. He travels the country to write in-depth feature stories about American life and politics.

#cross dressing #marriage #wyoming #washington post #cisgender #transgender #gay #straight #parenthood #bullying #clothes #mourning #grief

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gayxavierplympton · 3 years

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the next season of ahs shouldnt have any white women under 45 allowed in the cast. milfs, fruits, and angelica ross ONLY

#NO evanpeters NO emma. lastname #i forget #no more white girls!!! wednesday is OVER #kathy bates jessica lange and angela bassett play a monster-rehabilitating lesbian power throuple #cody is their gay little adopted son #angelica ross plays the main character #a girl who refuses to believe in monsters. she sees them and touches them and everything and shes still like 'im not buyin it'#i just remember ahs cause i had a dream abt it #i was in the next season it was called boarding house and it was lowkey terrifying and surreal

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phoenixyfriend · 3 years

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The Family Tree is... a Disaster

Takes place in the TCW Leverage AU. It does contain a few deviations, namely that the narrative ended up shifting Plo's role in Ahsoka's life, and Ventress's role overall.

This is mostly just dialogue where I outline the fuckery that is the disaster lineage family tree, not actual fic. It stemmed from my incessant need to justify "25yo Obi-Wan somehow got custody of 9yo Anakin without Shmi dying."

Warnings for: canon character death (modernized), canon violence (modernized), and references to Nazis and white supremacists (Palpatine collects WWII weaponry as a parallel to his canon display of Sith artifacts in his office as chancellor, and Ahsoka thinks it's sketchy)

----

"Okay," Cody says, setting down a glass of whiskey as he drops into the seat across the table. "What the hell is your family tree like?"

Obi-Wan raises an eyebrow, and continues cleaning off the definitely-not-stolen crystal komodo dragon he'd won in today's job. "I beg your pardon?"

"You and Skywalker," Cody says, gesturing between Obi-Wan, who is just sitting there minding his own business, and Anakin, who is across the closed-for-tonight bar and doing something inadvisable on the pool table. "You've said he was your brother, and mentioned raising him, which, sure, I'm over twenty years older than my youngest brother, people take over parenting roles all the time. But you have different last names, have mentioned stepfamilies that the other doesn't have, reference things as 'your aunt, not mine,' and I am just getting... very confused. I figured it was personal and I could leave well enough alone, but considering your older brother almost shot us today--"

"Okay, Xanatos is not my brother," Obi-Wan immediately says. "Just. I just have to stop you right there. Xanatos was a student of my father's for a time, but I promise he's not family. Nobody except maybe Komari would consider him even close, and she doesn't count since she's in prison for life and the farthest thing from stable."

Cody gestures. "That, Obi-Wan. That's what I'm talking about. I don't even know who Komari is."

Obi-Wan purses his lips in a failed attempt to not smile. "Do you actually want the explanation? It's long and unnecessarily complicated."

"So's mine," Cody snorts. Obi-Wan waits, patient and pleasant, and is rewarded when Cody sighs. "Please."

"Of course, my dear. To answer your first question, though, Anakin is my half-brother." With a smile, Obi-Wan digs a piece of paper and a pen from his briefcase. "So, center of the chain: me, my father Qui-Gon, my grandfather Yan, and my great-grandfather Yoda. With me so far?"

"Easy enough. Do you have to go back that far?"

"Great-grandfather Yoda is still alive and regularly escaping the old folks' home to terrorize younger relatives, so yes," Obi-Wan says. "Given that you may just meet a tiny, meddling relative of mine when he's bored, we do in fact have to go back that far."

"...how old is he?"

"We don't know for sure. A hundred and eight-ish is the best guess." Obi-Wan shrugs. "It's not a huge deal, mostly he likes bothering Anakin these days. Anyway, grandfather. Yan Dooku. Inherited a minory duchy from his maternal grandfather decades back. Mostly hangs around there because he's on terrorist watchlists in the States."

"Oh, lovely."

Obi-Wan grins. "Trust me, it gets worse. Anyway, grandfather never actually married, but spent most of his time with his 'best friend' Sifo Dyas, who died about a decade back."

"Gay?"

"Well, we know that now, but they got together in the seventies, and this was back when they were both working government jobs, so, you know. It happens."

"Good to know," Cody says. "So, Yoda's kid is Yan, who inherited a title and land from a maternal relative, and had a life partner but never married. With you so far."

"All of Yan's kids were adopted," Obi-Wan continues, sketching out the first branch away from the Yan/Sifo partnership. "Rael was actually grandfather's cousin, maternally, and ended up in his custody after getting orphaned at five. These days, he does most of the stewardship duties at the Serenno Duchy. His daughter Nim is teaching military history at a university in Germany."

Cody nods. "Uncle number one is named Rael, technically your dad's cousin, has a daughter. Got it."

"About a decade after Rael, they adopted my father, Qui-Gon. He and grandfather fought, frequently, but they did care for each other. My father was a botanist, did bio-engineering. We'll get back to him later, because he's where things get complicated." Obi-Wan made sure to leave room around the name. "Just a few years older than me was--is--Komari Vosa. She is... serving a life sentence. I think she fought Jango once."

"She fought my father?"

"To the best of my knowledge, they both almost died, yes," Obi-Wan says. "She's in maximum security these days. She was an assassin. I'll get a call if she breaks out, and I'll let you know along with everyone else."

"Bad news auntie, got it."

"Last adoption, sort of, is Ventress," Obi-Wan finishes off. "A few years younger than me, is technically grandfather's personal assistant and does secretarial work and the like, but we all know he's planning to leave as much of the inheritance to her as he is to the rest of us. She's aggressive and unpleasant, but she takes care of him and hasn't actually threatened to kill any of us yet, so that's fine."

"How'd she join?" Cody asks.

"Ky Narec was a friend of Qui-Gon's; Ventress was his daughter. Ky died a few years after Qui-Gon did, and Ventress was a mess, after." Obi-Wan shrugs and scratches that connection into the little sketch of a family tree as well. "Grandfather offered her a job until she got herself back together, and then she just kind of... stuck around."

"Youngest aunt, more of a cousin." Cody summarizes. "Now we go back to your father?"

"Qui-Gon Jinn was a man of many skills," Obi-Wan says drily. "Adequate birth control was not one of them."

It's almost a pity that Cody wasn't drinking anything, because going by the way he chokes, Obi-Wan's pretty sure the spit take would have been spectacular.

"I'm sorry," Cody says. "Can you repeat that?"

"I was an accident," Obi-Wan says, not even bothering to hide his smile. "So was Anakin."

"So that sounds like... a story."

"It is," Obi-Wan confirms. "My biological mother has never been in the picture. They had a fling, she wasn't sure if she'd want to abort or give me up, just that she wasn't ready to be a parent, and Qui-Gon volunteered to take full custody so she could go back to her life after the birth. I've never met her, but I kept her family name. You can consider her irrelevant beyond that."

Cody nods.

"So, when I was about a year old, Qui-Gon reconnects with an old flame, they get married two years later. Step-mother number one is Tahl. Lovely woman, I absolutely adored her, and she had a daughter, my stepsister, Bant Eerin."

"I met her, right?" Cody asks.

"Yes, she was the doctor who patched up my bullet wound a few months ago," Obi-Wan says. "With the giant glasses that make her look a little fish-eyed."

"She was nice."

"She is," Obi-Wan agrees. "At any rate, that was our family for a while, and then Tahl died when I was fourteen. Bant wanted to go to a magnet school for medical studies, and Qui-Gon's grief was... not optimal for taking care of multiple teenagers, shall we say, so Bant moved in with her paternal uncle, Kit Fisto, and Kit's son Nahdar. He's a marine biologist, incredibly friendly, and has no idea of any of the rest of my side of the family's questionable activities. If you ever meet him, you will pretend that we are a legal firm with a team of security consultants."

Cody raises a brow. Obi-Wan despairs. "Best you could do?"

"We're not that likely to run into him." Obi-Wan draws out a new line. "So, Qui-Gon deals poorly with grief. This is also around the time that Xanatos came around to ruin our lives a little. He was a very rich and unpleasant man, but he's dead as of four hours ago, so you don't have to worry about him. Or his son."

"His son?"

"Anakin handled that," Obi-Wan says. "Thoroughly. Granta Omega is no longer an issue. He's not dead, but... well. Anakin has his ways. Er--I should probably mention Feemor; he was my father's assistant at the university for a long time. Anakin and I still call him our uncle."

"Also a person to avoid mentioning criminal activity to?" Cody prompts.

"Well... no, but only because I don't think he'd care. The man is, forgive me, more of a 'walking sweatervest' than I am. He's a very bland and unassuming man. He once described himself as the background character of the soap opera that is my family's existence."

"Sounds like a charmer."

"Oh, he's very kind and clever, and witty as well. I adore him, and he really is family. He's just also very, very normal. Not boring, but..." Obi-Wan trails off and shrugs helplessly. "He's an editor for an agricultural research journal. Also not someone I anticipate us running into."

"Noted."

"Right, so, Qui-Gon dealing poorly with his grief didn't involve much drinking, but there were a few months of him trying to... lose himself in the pleasures of the flesh?" Obi-Wan tries, and then deflates at the look on Cody's face. "He was slagging around. Shmi got pregnant with Anakin, who was born when I was sixteen. Shared custody at first, Qui-Gon got him weekends and every other holiday, that sort of thing, and then they got married because they actually did like each other well enough, and it was easier on the taxes."

"So Shmi is stepmother number two."

"Shmi is stepmother number two, yes." Obi-Wan sketches in Anakin and Shmi. "About nine and a half years after Anakin was born, Shmi and Qui-Gon were in a car accident with... well, it later turned out it wasn't an accident, there was a hitman called Maul involved, he's actually Ventress's second cousin or something, I don't know. Grandfather handled most of that problem. Qui-Gon died, Shmi was in intensive care, and I got custody of Anakin as his nearest adult relative. We weren't very close before that, because I was off at university by the time he was old enough to form memories, but that changed once he started living with me. I more or less raised him as a single parent from that point."

"This is why he jokes that you're like a father to him."

"Precisely," Obi-Wan says. "Shmi took about a year to recover enough to move again, and grandfather covered the costs. She still had to live with a dedicated carer and attend daily physical therapy. At that physical therapy, she met Cliegg Lars, whose son Owen was also a patient there. They hit it off, and three years later, they married. When Anakin refers to his stepfamily he's talking about the Lars out in Nevada."

"Nevada?"

"They have a farm. A very, very normal one. We don't drag them into our activities, unless we have an at-risk person who needs a safe house." Obi-Wan pauses, and then decides this really needs to be stressed. "This is important to me and Anakin, that we don't get them involved unless there's absolutely no other choice. Shmi's been through a lot, and the Lars are busy enough running the farm."

"Works for me," Cody says. "We've got enough safe houses that it shouldn't be an issue. I'm guessing this story doesn't end there, though."

Obi-Wan grimaces. "My own love life has been... a bit of a mess."

"I already know about Kryze, at least."

There's that. "I was temporarily engaged to a friend, Siri Tachi, shortly after high school. We were in a relationship, but this was mostly something done to appease a relative of hers that was getting overbearing to the point of absurdity, and she couldn't just cut them off. We broke off the engagement after the relative passed, and we're still friends."

He notes that down, then adds the other embarrassment of his early years. "First marriage was actually a drunken joke between myself and my best friend when we were in college. We got it annulled a few months later because we just didn't have time to drop by the courthouse before then, and he's actually engaged to Asajj now."

"Asajj?" Cody asks, watching in fascination as Obi-Wan tries to mark in both his own short marriage and the newer, long-term engagement without crossing any lines. He settles for just writing the name twice and including an asterisk with 'this is the same person.'

"Ventress," Obi-Wan clarifies. "Yeah, Quinlan's a fun guy. His little sister, Aayla, treats Anakin like a beloved younger cousin."

"Are they also off-limits for criminal activity?"

"No, Aayla's the one that taught Ahsoka how to vent-crawl," Obi-Wan says. "And I'm pretty sure Quinlan has contacts in every major government branch, criminal organization, and Fortune 500 company on the planet. I reach out to them regularly."

"Resources, then."

Obi-Wan nods. "Some time later, I married Satine. We had a son; you've met Korkie. We split due to incompatibility a year and change before Qui-Gon's death. Satine doesn't engage in criminal activity, but Bo-Katan is..."

"I've met Bo-Katan. I know what she's like, Obi. You don't have to explain."

"She works with Maul sometimes."

"...the man who killed your father?"

"Yes. It's all very stupid and convoluted." Obi-Wan still writes her in. "So, that's them. Korkie goes to boarding school, and I try not to involve him in anything. Anakin and Ahsoka like to teach him self-defense and the like, but Satine is adamant that he stay unaware of my less legal dealings until he's an adult."

Cody shrugs. "Makes sense. Is that every--wait, no, Skywalker's married."

Obi-Wan grins. "Yes, and Padme's got twins on the way."

"I was there when he told us," Cody says drily. "He was very loud about it. Okay, how does Ahsoka fit in?"

"Hold on, I forgot Beru," Obi-Wan mutters. "Owen's fiancee. Same rules as the Lars. Okay, you asked about Ahsoka. Right. So. Um."

He dithers. Cody waits for him, and then Obi-Wan just gives up. "Ahsoka, dear, would you like to explain how you joined the family, so to speak?"

Ahsoka looks up from whatever she and the boys are doing--there are multiple beer glasses and straws and duct tape involved, and Obi-Wan doesn't really want to know--and then flips off the table and over to Obi-Wan and Cody. She looks over the family tree chart, and then says, "Oooh, did you tell him about the cult?"

"You were in a cult?" Cody demands.

"No, Komari was. She was head priestess or something. I dunno, it's why she's in prison and stuff."

"I did not tell him about the cult," Obi-Wan mutters, already regretting this. "The Bando Gora aren't a problem anymore. I've already gotten to explaining how you and Anakin know each other."

Ahsoka rolls her eyes, steals his pen, and starts sketching in around Quinlan's name, over by Asajj since Obi-Wan's section is too crowded. "Okay, so, Quinlan's adopted. His dad is Tholme, and Tholme's dad is Plo Koon. Plo Koon is good friends with my Auntie, Shaak Ti, who raised me. They live next door to each other, out in the country, and I'd play in his yard a lot, because he had puppies, and he took me to visit his bees. Whenever Auntie needed a babysitter, she asked Quinlan or Aayla to do it since she knew and trusted them, and Aayla needed pocket money."

"This is so unnecessarily complicated," Cody mutters.

"It is!" Ahsoka chirps. Her grin is far too sharp. "So, this one time, Aayla was watching me when I was fourteen, and she was just helping me with my physics homework. BAM, the door slams open, and in stumbled Skyguy with his arm missing. I've never met him before, and my first introduction is him shortly after he's gotten an unplanned amputation."

Anakin, on the other side of the room, giggles. Obi-Wan just sighs. The Fett brothers appear to be in the land of 'horrified fascination.'

Ahsoka revels in it. "There's blood everywhere, I'm screaming, Aayla's panicking, Anakin's halfway to unconscious and insisting we can't call the hospital, and nobody can get Obi-Wan on the phone. Quinlan's in another country, and Auntie Shaak and Uncle Plo are at a movie, so they've both got their cellphones off. Tholme was faking his death at that point to get away from an incident with the Irish Mob, so we didn't even try him."

"What the actual fuck," Rex breathes.

Ahsoka continues with relish. "We get Bant to pick up, and she's there an hour later with Padme, because Padme knows how to drive the way Skyguy does, and the entire drive there is just Auntie Bant on speakerphone telling Aayla how to stop the bleeding and get him stabilized while Padme's screaming at traffic at the top of her lungs."

"I owe Aayla a fruit basket," Anakin muses aloud. "The anniversary of her saving my life is coming up, it's warranted."

"Five years, baby!" Ahsoka crows. She fist-pumps.

Obi-Wan just drops his head into his hands. "You're killing me, children."

Anakin shrugs, grinning. "You know, I think Fett Senior might have been involved in that fight."

"My shitty dad cut off your arm?" Rex demands.

"No, I think he was busy fighting the Interpol guy," Anakin says. "But he was definitely there. I think. Blood loss kinda got to me after a bit, but I'm pretty sure Jango Fett was there, and also Boba might've been hiding in the getaway car?"

"I need another glass," Cody mutters. He doesn't stand up, though.

"Wait," Rex says. "So who cut off your arm?"

Anakin shrugs with an unsure noise. "Someone tried to convince me it was Grandpa Yan, but he was in the middle of a court case in Italy for some kind of parole violation when it happened, so he had an alibi."

"...did he actually violate parole?" Cody asks, and Obi-Wan thinks he looks like he doesn't know if he actually wants an answer.

Ahsoka shrugs. So does Anakin. Obi-Wan carefully looks at a spot behind Cody, and doesn't explain anything about wine tastings used as covers for illicit arms deals.

"The arm?" Rex prompts, sounding a little desperate to get back to the question he likely thinks is the most important.

"I still say it was Skeevy Sheev," Ahsoka chimes in.

"It wasn't Palpatine," Anakin snaps.

"Your creepy older friend who took you to operas and gives you fancy gifts and knows way too much about swords who was conveniently there to talk to the police and cover for you so you didn't get arrested for getting in the middle of a gang war in the first place, yes," Ahsoka says, dropping into a chair and sighing dramatically. "The guy who definitely hasn't been trying to convince you for a year and change that your wife is cheating on you with your older brother."

"Ahsoka!"

"What? He is."

"Anakin," Rex says, "your life sounds like a trainwreck."

"I'm not going to assume a frail, elderly man cut my arm off!" Anakin protests. "Even if he wanted to, he doesn't exactly have the muscle for it!"

"Grandfather's older," Obi-Wan points out, even though he knows it won't help. "And he definitely still could."

"Ha!" Ahsoka shouts.

"He could have hired someone?" Cody suggests. "Doesn't need to do it himself, if he has enough money."

Obi-Wan has a sneaking suspicion that Cody is deliberately stirring the pot as revenge for Anakin sending him eighty-seven cat memes inside an hour during last night's dinner.

"You all suck," Anakin declares. "Also, what the hell do you mean 'knows way too much about swords,' Ahsoka? You know way too much about swords!"

"Yeah, but I'm like ninety-percent sure that his antiques are Prussian and mid-century German military officer dress uniform relics, and pairing that with the Nazi pistols he's got on display--"

"He's just a history buff! And his family's German, of course he prioritizes that region, it's not like he doesn't have Russian or French or English antiques in there too, it's all sides of the war and--"

"I'm just saying he's almost definitely sending me sketchy glances like he thinks I'm planning to steal the silver on the three occasions you've had me with you when you stop by, and I'm pretty sure it's got less to do with my criminal record and more to do with me being, you know, not white."

Anakin looks ready to blow, so Obi-Wan interrupts. "Ahsoka, you were explaining how Anakin passing out on Aayla and scaring us all half to death led to your friendship?"

Ahsoka blinks at him, and then sticks her tongue out at Anakin and turns back to the chart. "So basically, Skyguy had to recuperate in Uncle Plo's living room for a week or two, and I kept showing up to bother him because he was bored and nobody would give him a laptop for 'security reasons,' because he had to lay low and stuff. He made me help him sketch out designs for a prosthesis and do all the writing for the math he had to do for the 3D printer, and we got to chatting."

Ahsoka hops up and back onto a table, legs swinging below her. "I decided he was cool and started following him around while he was getting used to only having one hand, mostly because I was bored. He showed me how to hotwire a car, and explained the best places to put a bug if you were looking to make it sneaky, and he picked my pocket to show off so many times when he was walking around Uncle Plo's house that I made him teach me that, too. And, uh, then Aayla found out and they got into a shouting match about it and decided they both needed to teach me parkour so I could get out of any mess I got myself into, since I was obviously going to follow them into a life of crime."

"And you did," Anakin says, far too proudly. "You're the best thief in this half of the country."

"Only because Aayla moved out east."

Anakin rolls his eyes and pulls Ahsoka into his side, digging his knuckles into her skull. "Best thief! You are the best thief! Be proud of yourself!"

"Let go!"

"Never!"

Obi-Wan sighed heavily and rubbed at his forehead. "Children, please."

"You're not my dad," Ahsoka growls out at him. "Skyguy, I'm going to bite you!"

"Good luck, the only arm you can access is the one that's going to break your teeth."

Ahsoka shrieks in outrage and stomps on Anakin's instep.

It's almost funny, for all that Obi-Wan's seen it play out a million times before, but the really interesting part is seeing Rex's look of fond dismay.

Obi-Wan thinks he might be adding a branch out to the Fetts soon. He's not actually sure if Rex is interested in Anakin or Ahsoka, and he's smack dab between them in age, so that's not a help either, but... well. The expression is familiar enough.

"Please tell me you don't match-make," Cody mutters to him.

"No, I plan to let the pieces fall where they will," Obi-Wan responds, just as low, and far more amused. "I'm simply trying to predict where those landings are to be."

Cody looks at him, and then back at the roughhousing trio, and sighs heavily. "You know, I really didn't think that you technically being minor royalty was going to be the least convoluted thing in your story, Obi-Wan."

He laughs, because it's true. "I'm first in line to inherit the title, since Rael denounced his claim. Nim isn't interested, and Qui-Gon's dead, so... I'm next."

Cody makes a face. "Delightful. I'm guessing that's not a connection we can safely make use of."

"No more than the Kryze or Naberries, I'm afraid." Obi-Wan claps him on the shoulder. "Chin up, I've plenty others in the metaphorical rolodex, all far less legitimate and far more amenable to work with our little outfit."

"Rolodex, really?" Cody snorts. "You're not that old."

Obi-Wan smiles winningly. "You don't know how old I am, Cody. All my IDs are fake."

"Anakin's twenty-four, and you're sixteen years older than him, going by the story you just told me," Cody points out. "I do know how to do basic math, Obi-Wan."

"I had to try," Obi-Wan admits. "I threw a lot of information at you all at once; I'd hoped you missed some of the ages in there."

"I have eight brothers," Cody scoffs. "And literally dozens of cousins, plus niblings, uncles, aunts, and so on. I have experience on this."

"If I asked you to list of the age of every single relative you have, you'd be able to do it?"

"Do you want me to draw a chart? I can draw a chart."

Obi-Wan can't help but laugh. "I'd be delighted, my dear."

Cody rolls his eyes, but Obi-Wan thinks--it's hard to tell in the dimmed lights of the closed bar--that there's a hint of a blush on the man's face. Obi-Wan lets himself slouch to the side, drops his head to rest on one fist, indolent debauchery in every line of his body. Cody does his best to ignore him, but Obi-Wan knows how to smile lazily and blink slowly and draw a man in.

(The whole 'indolent debauchery in every line of his body' phrasing is Anakin's, from back when he was a teenager trying to read highbrow literature to impress a cute girl... and to come up with new insults for his older brother.)

"So," Cody says, with a cough meant to somehow distract Obi-Wan from whatever's showing on the man's face. "Why, uh, why is your grandfather on terrorist watchlists?"

"Well, he didn't initially do anything," Obi-Wan says. "He was just a gay man who didn't hide it quite well enough, and had too much money and too white a face for someone to just call the cops on a faulty report. The Red Scare was technically over by that point, I think, but if a few people made suggestions that he was more loyal to the country that gave him a noble title than to the United States... he received a few warnings, of course, and it could have all blown over..."

"But?"

"But my grandfather is not a man to do things by halves, and instead decided that if the government was to list him as a threat, then he would oblige and make himself a threat," Obi-Wan finishes. "Living up to their labels, rolling with the assumptions, whatever you'd like to call it. It all irked him, and so he made some incredibly questionable decisions to make the government's lives harder. Some weren't bad, like donating to anti-war foundations that were protesting the Gulf War and the interventions in Yugoslavia, that sort of thing, and some were... nobody really looks well on gunrunning, you know."

"For fuck's sake..."

"Indeed," Obi-Wan chuckles. "Ironically, he has minimal opinion on the optimal form of economics, for all that virulent xenophobia and the remnants of anti-communism were involved in the whole mess. He just wanted to create problems for the people that were causing him problems."

Cody shakes his head. "I want to judge that, but you've met my father."

"Jango Fett is, indeed, also not a man to do things by halves," Obi-Wan agrees, attempting to nod gravely but breaking into a smile at the end. "That man is absurd."

"At least he's not dragging Boba into it anymore," Cody mutters. He drags over the fresh sheet of paper and pen that Obi-Wan offers him. "Okay, right, let's start with Jaster..."

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aromoji · 5 years

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The Scott Family

I’ve been meaning to make a post about Cody and Abby’s family for a while.

Anyways Cody’s parents more or less adopted Abby after her parents decided that an 11 year old tagging along on their adventures in Africa would be a drag. However once Cody turned 18 he became Abby’s legal guardian, as Mecedes was sick and Hakeem had to work all the time.

Hakeem and Mercedes are like the only cishet ocs I have that aren’t gross creeps, shitty relatives or straight up villians and they actually love each other very much. Mercedes absolutely loves her son to death, her being the first person Cody came out to as gay, as well as the first person Cody introduced Trent to besides Abby. She fell gravely ill when Cody was 13, almost dying on the way to the hospital. However, she’s slowly managing to recover with frequest visits to the doctor. Cody worries for her, because every now and then she relapses and he panics, thinking it would be the end for the one person he could talk to about anything. But Mercedes always manages to bounce back in the end, teasing Cody when she can about it.

Hakeem is Mercedes’s doting husband. Because Mercedes needs to go to the doctor a lot, he spends most of the day at work. Mercedes and Abby tend to visit him on his breaks to make sure he doesn’t burnout. Hakeem had a more difficult time understanding Cody being gay due to his up bringing, but after having a deep discussion with his son he came to love and accept him too, even jokingly asking Trent to play a game of foot ball with him and Cody (Trent said no, obviously.) He can never forgive his sister in law and her husband for deserting Abby to go traveling, but he loves Abby like a little daughter he wanted.

#my ocs

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hitchell-mope · 6 years

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Ok I’ve been working on something for years that I hope to make it into a tv show one day but probably can’t because once upon a time beat me to it

So imagine

Michael darling single handedly stopped a war that was never meant to end at the cost of his life and to correct “something” the universe sees fit to tear open a hole in the fabric of reality which all cartoons bleed through. Disney Pixar Simpson’s marvel dc blue sky laika everything you can think of are now inhabiting the real world the only humans left are Wendy darling and her close family and friends

Disney’s taken over Great Britain and Ireland. Mickey and Minnie are the king and queen until they see fit to retire

Simpson’s are now in Hollywood Bart is filthy stinking rich and the Whitehouse is his mansion

So on and so forth

Main characters

Jane Ophelia Emerson: now known as Jaime aster blonde hair blue eyes around 5 foot 8 inches. Has magic like the whole of her mothers side of the family. Unlocks it when she meets Peter Pan for the first time. Like her mother and grandmother before her she fell for him hard. So imagine the bitterness when she discovers she wasn’t the first to fall for him and she won’t be the last seeing as he’s fated to be her son in law. She stops her and her friends physical aging process when she’s 16 because she’s terrified of growing up and having to leave everything behind. Gets married to three guys. James pleiades Hawkins from treasure planet. An evil bisexualversion of superman she was forced to create out of two variations of kryptonite (black and pink). William smees illegitimate son that he got from a hooker on the neverland pier. Padraic hutchins. And together they’ve adopted three kids not much younger then them. Youngest to oldest. Timothy Tiberius Turner. Horrid Henry. Alice Liddell. Preferred drink is olive oil until she decides to stop aging then she goes all out on the booze. She really does not like using mjolnir but that’s exactly why she can use it. She killed her own cousin after Peter Pan was taken advantage of. Speaks how she was raised. Posh. But the angrier she gets the more common she sounds.

James pleiades Hawkins: nicknamed Plei shoulder length brown hair turquoise eyes five foot nine. Space cadet. Made a little mistake in that he wished he had magic when holding an empty lamp. This means he’s now a genie but he can appear normal except when angered and he turns an olive green. His lamp stays hidden in Jaime’s blood stream. Very protective of his kids. From montressor but speaks with a middling California accent

Kal: under duress Jaime creates him by combining black and pink kryptonite (according to what I’ve read black turns him evil and somehow pink turns him gay I don’t know why so please don’t ask) so imagine a five foot eleven inch evil bisexual superman built like a tank flirting with anyone he sees. There are limits. He cannot go after anyone younger then Jaime or older then Wendy. Or anyone she is directly related to. Has a side thing going with she hulk (cause of that man of steel woman of Kleenex problem). Looks so much like Clark Kent (blue eyes jet black hair) that once the bitterness has subsided they eventually declare themselves twins. Actually talks with a Kansas accent (it’s a pet peeve of mine) hair goes to his shoulder blades

Padraic Hutchins: five foot ten. Mixed race but unless he showed you a picture of his father (mr smee who is like really white) you wouldn’t be able to tell. Dark black skin (think terry crews) dark blonde waist length hair. Emerald green eyes. Met Jaime when he was working as cabin boy (and hooks personal stool master) on the Jolly Roger. Jaime offered him a deal. Sword fight just him and her. She wins he becomes her butler and all that entails. He wins she becomes his butler and all that entails. It comes to a stalemate. He decides to go with her though. (If you had to wipe hooks ass wouldn’t you leave given a chance) invents a new method of killing when getting revenge on a racist homophobic cop in Springfield. He may look like terry crews but speaks like Katie McGrath (his accent is Dublin posh)

Merida: jaimes best friend. Scottish. Really really curly bright orange hair halfway down her back. Grey blue eyes. 5”8. Harsh rivalry with Clarabelle cow Clarabelle keeps calling her fat by accident. She is not fat. The slightly barrel like figure she has is pure muscle. Moved in with Jaime after an absolutely blow out fight with her mother and hasn’t looked back since. Met Parker through tragedy. The were on an excursion with the parr children and dash died in front of her. Completely destroyed her for months. Tried to change everything about herself to feel better. None of it worked. Cut and straightened her hair. Tried to lose weight (just became addicted to caffeine). She even gave up archery (which if you know her is a serious cause for concern). And through it all Parker was there

Peter Benjamin Parker: the group calls him Parker because there are one too many Peters in the world and they needed to differentiate. Brown hair that grows out to his chin. Brown eyes. 5”9. Splits himself so he can have a somewhat normal life. There is now three of him. The original with Merida. Petey living with aunt may. Spider-Man. Parker actually grows to like the venom suit and through magic is actually able to control it. Realised he was bi when he kissed Padraic to cheer him up after Kal was being a jackass. Then harry arrived. Still has his native New York accent but it interchanges with a British accent after he’s lived in Kensington for some time.

Melody: Danish princess. Daughter of Ariel and Eric. Granddaughter of king triton. Black hair blue eyes. 5”8. Has a thing for blonde men. Was attracted to Cody before he told her he was asexual then she layed off him. Eventually gets with zephyr. Non practicing catholic except in one respect. Jaime gave her her own trident. Loves to swim. She’ll shrink herself down and use a wine glass if she has to. Always wears her hair in a ponytail

Zephyr: French Romani. Blonde shoulder length hair in a pageboy style cut. Green blue eyes. 5”9. Always wears the outfit he had on in his film only now it’s in an older more mature style. Smitten with melody when they met but she had a thing for Cody so he couldn’t say anything. He just got steadily more drunk. Scarily flexible. Likes to hang from chandeliers with his toes. Bit like a blonde Dick Grayson. Non practicing catholic in the same way melody is.

Cody Anderson: Swedish but has spent a lot of time in Australia. 5”11. Blonde hair long enough to braid. Keeps it in a man bun 90% of the time. Asexual. Much rather run climb or play video games then date or sleep with someone. Poor thing has been conscripted as Kals wingman. He absolutely hates it. He just tells the intended targets the truth and if Kal can’t seal the deal on his own merits it’s not Cody’s problem. Apparently can survive on one hour sleep.

Alice Liddell: one of Jaime Plei Kal and Padraics adoptive children. 12 years old. 5”5. Reality warper. Mostly this means she can make a portal to wonderland through any surface. But then she gets magic and all bets are off. Adopted because we birth parents were about to have her committed to an asylum because she kept insisting wonderland is real (it is of course but they have literal Victorian sensibilities and to them Alice has cracked) favourite Dad is Plei. Blonde hair half way down her back. Blue eyes. Actually does look like Jaime a little bit except Jaime’s hair is more of a tawny gold colour and Alice’s is more yellow. Like Jaime defies the dumb blonde stereotype. Uses her powers in very creative ways. Eventually ditches the pinafore

“Horrid” henry: except not really. His biological parents are just jackasses who scapegoat him so the worm is the professed golden child. Reddish brown hair and definitely fulfils the firey redhead stereotype. But manages to use it in helpful ways after Henry’s his own magic. Loves his chemistry set. Many a stink bomb was made from it. 5”4. 11 years old. Green eyes. Favourite Dad is Kal. Again like Zephyr, he always wears the same outfit. Adopted because Jaime could see that he was miserable at his own house and was always happiest when she was babysitting him.

Timothy Tiberius Turner: brown hair blue eyes pink hat. Still has his fairy godparents because Jorgen Von strangle is terrified of Jaime (the girl unionised death). Not stupid per-say but he doesn’t think things through. Favourite Dad is Padraic. Adopted after Jaime went to talk to his fairies and saw his babysitter strapping him to a torture wheel. Definitely the baby of the group being 10 years old

Harry Osborn: 5”9. Black hair blue eyes. Bi. Enters a relationship with Parker and Merida. Hung up on Parker for longer then he’d care to admit. But always believed (as Parker did) that he was straight. Strikes up an odd friendship with Jaime over the “Peters who have ruined their lives” (Parker and Pan) the only difference Osborn is now with his Peter and Jaime doesn’t love her one anymore. He revels in the fact Parker feels the need to protect him and their respective positions in the relationship have changed. Was dying before he used magic to cure the unknown disease that would ravage his body. Couldn’t use his fortune to find a cure because his fathers will stipulates that he’d be disinherited if he tried to cure himself. That and he wanted to defend himself properly should the need arise

Ashton Darling: Jaime’s cousin born in the same hospital month day and the exact same time. Shoulder length tawny gold hair blue eyes same height as Jaime. It’s a running gag that he and Jaime look so much alike they could easily be the same person cloned and don’t think that before puberty when her hair was shorter they didn’t pull pull a twin switch. They even have the same taste in men. Fictional with bright eyes. Expected a bigger reaction from Jaime when he came out to her. She knew and they carried on as normal. Eventually starts dating Jack Frost from rise of the guardians. His parents are fans of that 70’s show. His younger brother is called Topher

Jack Frost: pure white hair blue eyes. 5”9. Always in the same outfit. Guardian of fun. Has a sibling like rivalry with Elsa. She thinks he’s annoying and he thinks she’s boring despite them having the same powers. In Jack Elsa sees what she could have had. Yes Jack was lonely but he made the best of it for centuries and he had people to talk to (North toothania bunnymund and Sandy) whereas Elsa retreated into herself scared of going near others. Though they come to an understanding and when Jaime gives the shovel talk to Jack Elsa gives the shovel talk to Ashton. Ashton and Jack met in similar circumstances to Merida and Parker except the Ashton and Jack’s weren’t nearly as tragic as Merida and Parker

Taran: 13 years old. 5”6. Red hair green eyes. Dalbens ward but somehow ends up staying at Jaime’s (admittedly insanely cavernous) flat more then necessary and everyone knows why except him. Alice has taken a shine to him. He doesn’t quite know why. Gurgis still attached to his hip. He and Eilonwy drifted apart but they are still friends. Has next to no idea what’s going on more than half the time

Felicia Hardy: old friend of Harry and Parker. The friend that would not leave. Her father died and she still is not over it. Cinnamon colour hair hazel eyes. 5”8. Hapless. That is until the symbiote infects her and almost starts a war with the galactic federation.

Johnny Storm: like Parker the group just call him storm. 5”9. Mid length spiky blonde hair. Blue eyes. The human torch. Enters the group by happenstance. Works at Oscorp on an intern. When Parker took the fall for what Felicia was blamed for harry had a bit of a panic attack demanding that he and Parker weren’t separated again so to assuage him Parker takes him on a holiday in a private suite in the death hotel. But then Storm arrives with this contract he needs harry to sign and it escalates from there so now Merida has three boyfriends who are also dating each other one of which is in intergalactic jail.

There are a multitude of alternate realities that are accessed through a full length mirror in Jaime’s flat. Some have diffoerent circumstances or flipped morality/genders or different outcomes. For example

Different circumstances: Clark crashed into the Wayne’s greenhouses and the shock set off Martha’s labour. Clark married a one Diana prince and had two children. Oliver Kingston Wayne and Barry Allen Wayne. Bruce is the drink uncle who accidentally joined a big brother program and Clark is making damned sure Bruce is honouringthe commitment. Oliver dances at a club to be self sufficient. Barry meanwhile is obsessed with chemistry. Clark stayed home with a sick Alfred that fateful night and has never forgiven himself. So he became superman to make sure something like that never happens to anyone else. Bruce however became a preteen alcoholic. Chardonnay is his drink of choice. Their pool cleaner a mr Arthur curry and their chauffeur is a mr Hal Jordan

Different outcome: Professor farnsworth took over New New York with an army of bending units aided by his insane son Phillip. Leela is Phillips personal slave. An impoverished Amy Wong is his public slave (Leela is a sewer mutant). Carol Walt Larry and Igner are incarcerated for trying to throw a coup

Flipped morality: Snow White, jealous of her fathers affection for his new wife, killed her father and blamed grimhilde for it. She learned dark magic and killed the queen in a mirror storm then took over the kingdom with only seven diamond armoured dwarfs. All when she was fourteen.

Flipped gender: Cendrillon used as servant in his own home until he’s able to go to the ball aided by his fairy godfather. The princess saved him with a glass slipper

You get the idea

The characters relation ships with their parents:

Jaime and Wendy had a major falling out because Wendy kept trying to put her solutions in alignment with Jaime’s problems. Eventually Jaime moved next door into a flat in Mickey and Minnie’s castle. And now Jaime’s the queen. Wendy is 5”10 tawny gold hair almost always in a bun. Blue eyes and always dressed in blue. Mid to late forties. Edward Emerson. Think Henry cavil in prime superman mode greying at the temples in either army fatigues or black denim. One year older than Wendy. Besides George he is the only mortal in the family and being mortal he can use a magic wand (no one quite knows why only mortals can use wands)

Plei’s mother Sarah looks the same as in the film. Now you need to go through trauma for your magic to settle. And Plei’s trauma is seeing his father Leland a gain in god know how long. It does not go well

Kal have a rivalry with Clark because Kal sees Clark as a wimp who is wasting his powers on helping people and Clark thinks Kal is a no good miscreant. Their parents though treat Kal the same way they treat Clark. Doesn’t matter if he’s a close W he’s their son. In return Kal values them and does not hate them like he hates Kal (high praise in deed)

Smee just wants Padraic to be happy and if that means Padraic being in England in an entirely different dimension then so be it.

Elinor got impatient with Merida taking so long to choose a suitor and then Merida decided to try and find a boyfriend from non options (read as she doesn’t love the clans sons). So they had a hard he blow out fight which led to Merida moving in with Jaime and she’s barely looked back since

May doesn’t know Parker is no longer st school and he is not planning on telling her. And besides she’s got Benji

Ariel and Eric know everything and as long as melody isn’t hurt they’re fine with it

Phoebus and Esmeralda are just like Ariel and Eric

Cody’s mother isn’t in the picture anymore

Alice’s parents tried to have her committed so their relationship is next to nonexistent

Henry’s is his parents scapegoat so his brother retains a veneer of so called “perfection”

Timmy’s parents are negligent and let him be babysat by a psychopath who repeatedly tries to kill him. His fairy god parents are crazy but at least they care

Norman put a stipulation in his will that if harry seeks a cure then he will be disinherited. So try to gage their relationship from that

John darling came out as bi and his wife couldn’t handle it so she divorced him and took Ashton and Topher to New York. John remarries Casey mulligan. Casey is actually Jamie’s ex husband (don’t get worried it was some stupid new law that all marriages in England are legal. Including playground marriages. Jaime and Casey’s happenedwhen she was five and he was nine). So they got a quickie divorce. And as it turns out Casey has a son from his ex girlfriend. Casey junior (get it?). So now John is a 42 year old divorcee remarried to a twenty year old with a 10 month old step son and two teenage children. Annalise got remarried to Ashton’s high school crush, his Australian swim coach

Jack’s family died a couple centuries ago so what accounts for his family are the guardians a boy who remembers him less and less every year. Elsa who sees him as who she could have been and Anna who just wants everybody to get along. Then there’s kristoff who just wants peace

Taran still goes to see Dalben henwen fflewder and eilonwy when he can

Felicia’s last words to her father were “piss off” so she desperate to make amends with his ghost

Well you know about the fantastic four.

Jaime has become a children’s advocate. Simple stuff like babysitting and making sure the recess gang isn’t split up. But she isn’t up to date on slang so when a mourning 13 year old Angelica pickles drunk dials her, Jaime has no idea what’s the girls saying. And she takes it upon herself to punish the “evil children” ie DW Reed, 3 year old Angelica Pickles, manny heffley, Francine nebulon the children the make their older siblings lives a living hell.

Simpson’s:

Jaime aged up the child population of Springfield by ten years. Barts twenty Lisa’s eighteen Maggies twelve and so on. She also given them special powers. Bart has super speed Lisa HAD telekinesis (she abused it so she losed it. Painful rhyme I know) Maggie has electrokinesis milhouse can ghost through objects Nelson can put national monuments on his pinky nail. Ralph can bend reality to his will. Sherri can teleport Terri can fly. That sort of thing. Though some have non active powers. Moe can not die no matter how hard he tries. Homer and barney have regenerative livers (so they can be sozzled all the time) Bart has inherited Montys fortune and company

#mine #copyright me

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cdc1345711 · 6 years

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Charles Coburn’s Cat Family

Katie-Wife,mother of Charlie, Dracko, Steven, Niko, Moots, Dotty, Eve, Rory,Peter,Tyler and Emily,Grandmother to Allie(Dracko’s Daughter),LC(Niko’s son) and Nicky(Steven’s son)

CHILDREN

Charlie:First born son,Military cat,gay with a coyote boyfriend,engaged and planning on adopting a child

Dracko:Second son who fell off the roof and had to get his leg amputated off and replaced by a plastic one,new Knight Raider,Husband to Sunni and father of Allie and an unborn child

Steven:Third son,Niko’s twin brother,died once but was brought back,super violent,Expert gunsman,idolizes his father,secretly married a beautiful cat(Lexi) who died giving birth to their son Nicky,acts like the Punisher

Niko:First daughter,Steven’s twin sister,magic user,works as a lawyer or teacher,had a one night stand with Sunny(Jerome’s son)and gave birth to a son Little Charles or ‘LC’ and is pregnant with another of Sunny’s child

Moots:fourth son,orange cat with acrobatic skills,started high school,excellent with technology,new Star Squire(Knight Raider’s old partner) and is dating a Squirrel named Sally

Dotty:Second daughter,Eve’s twin sister,bubbly personality,super nice,naive,normal,but very acrobatic like Moots,is crushing on her best friend Milton(Who is Moon Kitty son of old hero Moon Cat)

Eve:Third daughter,Dotty’s twin sister,also violent bordering on satanic,skilled swordswoman,is in a lesbian relationship with Mira the Meerkat mutant(from TMNT Mutant Apocalypse special)

Rory,Peter,Tyler,Emily:Quadruplet children who are about 5 months old and just do typical toddler things

SON/DAUGHTER-IN-LAW

Sunni:Little sister of Pepper,Coco and Anubis Kitagawa,Dracko’s wife,mother of Allie and an unborn child

Sunny:Jerome’s son and father of Niko’s child LC and her next child,has cool extending claws that passed on to his son

Lexi:Secret wife of Steven who died giving birth to their son Nicky,but is watching over her love and child in the afterlife

Cody:Coyote fiance to Charlie,also military and future father of an adopted child with Charlie

GRANDCHILDREN

Allie:Daughter of Dracko and Sunni,4 years old,idolizes her ‘papa’ and is about to have a new sibling(or two)

LC:Little Charles LC Coburn is Niko and Sunny’s 5 year old son and future brother of a new sibling,has cool claws like his dad as well as a healing factor

Nicky:Secret son of Steven and Lexi who was kept secret because he father didn’t want his son to come into the family business

Soon-to-be adopted child of Charlie and Cody

Unborn children of Dracko and Sunni and Niko and Sunny

THAT’S ALL FOLKS

#Coburn Cat Family

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phoenixyfriend · 3 years

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Okay so @willowcrowned and I came up with names and places and personalities for the Aniclones in the Skysisters AU. Behold! Some nerds! But first, some worldbuilding background.

Shmi is still alive and Anakin INSISTS she has to meet The Skysisters. Being a very capable and cool headed lady she reacts as well as anyone could. New daughters! Anakin's always been a little strange, she's not THAT surprised. Up until the point they meet Shmi they're hesitant to use the last name Skywalker because it’s not theirs just the person’s they got their DNA from (for all that Anakin already adores them). And then Shmi adopts them! And suddenly there’s almost thirty new Skywalkers running around.

Every Skysister has one mom (Shmi), one dad (Obi-Wan), and then one ADDITIONAL parent that is their Jedi (or Senate) supervisor.

The Aniclones definitely pick up on how much Anakin likes Hugs and so they always perk up and sprint to throw themselves at him when they see each other.

Ahsoka insists on hugging Anakin more because That's HER Master, So There.

Willow: I’m cackling at Palpatine’s plan to make Anakin super angry and distrustful backfire and have him end up getting all the physical affection he needs.

Please imagine Anakin doing his Vader-esque "I'm the baddest bitch here" stalk, and a bunch of the Aniclones trying to copy him in a little horde right behind so they can look cool too.

Robin: assigned to Yoda, named by Willow - Like Robin Hood but more importantly because they caught her robbin the kitchens - My own contribution here was 'also like Dick&Steph DC Robins'

Addie: assigned to Obi-Wan, named by Willow - Initially, we joked that, given just who Anakin and Obi-Wan are, and what ANY person who is around them, let alone someone who wants to impress them, is like… Anakin and Obi-Wan’s Aniclone might be called Risk. - But, here's for the actual name. Obi-Wan calls her "Little One" so often (because she doesn't have a name! And also she's still shorter than anyone else on board) that she almost just goes by that but Cody steers her into one-word territory. - She asks Cody for ideas and he’s like. Idk a lot of us clones named ourselves in Mando’a so she starts asking for Mando’a suggestions - Cody is like.. ad’ika means little one. Ika is a diminutive. And Obi-Wan speaks Mando’a. So she goes by Addie. - Because she does what Cody did and take a Mando’a word and make it more basic-y. - ... Addie and Ani. (Ahsoka continues to be jealous) - SHE CAN'T DO A SHORTER TWO-SYLLABLE NICKNAME STARTING WITH AN A AND ENDING IN AN I SOUND. - Ahsoka just finding any number of reasons to Dislike This Girl (because a Jedi doesn't hate). - God all of the girls have Curls but I think the Disaster lineage is the only Jedi lineage that did padawan cuts and that means Addie is the ONLY sister that hold on Obi-Wan definitely misinterprets the name as being in honor of Adi Gallia. In an "I just think she's neat and I Want To Be Just Like Her When I Grow Up" kind of way - Addie: I am naming myself for the two men who have shown me the most support in my life that I’ve ever gotten from a non-sister. This is obvious to everyone Obi-Wan: oh, she has a crush on Adi :) - Adi Gallia is a very political Jedi! He can totally teach Little Addie how to do politics! Cody just sighing in the background. Addie: oh boy my dad is bonding with me :) - They're getting there! They got a little lost but they're getting there! - Cody is like wow you two are stupid. No I haven’t talked about my feelings with Obi-Wan. What feelings are you talking about. - Fellas, is it gay to coparent a female clone of the man you’re in love with’s son? Every clone but Cody: yes - ANYWAY if Addie gets the padawan cut she looks STARTLINGLY like teenage Anakin in a way the sisters usually don't. Obi-Wan may or may not have a SLIGHT breakdown when he sees. - Obi-Wan keeps doing double-takes like This May Have Been A Mistake. WHAT YEAR IS IT. - He keeps being surprised when he looks in the mirror and doesn’t find a mullet. - Everyone's a little disappointed in the padawan cut because they wanted to braid her hair

Teddie: assigned to Plo, named by me - because they went to a planet that had teddy bears and she loved one so much that the Fett clones were joking about it, and she was like "Actually--" - Willow: I was gonna suggest Kit, like a shortening of kitten or like a fox kit (which I think is a thing) because she’s Plo’s kid but has claws but that is AWESOME I love Teddie.

Mauve: assigned to Mace, named by me - She thinks very hard on her name and decides that, in honor of her new Master's most well-known skills, she names herself Mauve. - Because. Purple saber. - Runner up for this clones was Willow's suggestion of "Maisie" like Mace. But not AS obvious. - Depa doesn't get an aniclone because everyone kind of Feels that she's got a padawan 'waiting in the wings' so to speak.

Belle: assigned to the Coruscant Guard, named by Willow - She spends a lot of time hanging out with Padme (she and the other CG Aniclones asked Anakin and Obi-Wan for advice on which senators would be the best to go to about things), and as a result gets dressed up in handmaiden outfits regularly, and so... she gets Prettied Up, and thus Belle. - Belle imprinted on the Corrie Guard clones early and, as a result, Doesn't Actually Like Palpatine Very Much, which is very inconvenient for Anakin's evil granddad. - She’s a lot subtler than Anakin though, because she spends so much time around Padmé, who may or may not be subtly putting her through some of the same training her handmaidens did. - Sneaky Gorl

Aimée: assigned to Quinlan, named by Willow - Like ‘beloved’ in that she’s a flirt but also in that her family loves her. So it’s kind of a joke but also a ‘we love you’ thing. - My other thought was that quin’s aniclone could be ridiculously good as a sharpshooter/assassin so if she were named Aimée her name could get shortened to ‘ames’ a lot. Like aims. - QUINLAN AND PADME ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE SNEAKIEST SKYSISTERS - She’s a slut. Not for real but in a sneaky way. Just enough to get them in bed, knock them out, and steal their shit. (Well, not immediately. They're initially like mid-teens when the Jedi get them. But a few years in, she flirty.) - Anakin comes back and is like what are you wearing. Aimée: it’s a corset. cute, right? Belle helped me pick it out Quinlan, proudly: She flirts more than Obi-Wan! - She is so excited to go on Cool Undercover Missions with Quinlan

Henrietta "Hen": assigned to Kit Fisto, named by me - She's the one who kidnapped Boba - She got her name because she's a Mother Hen to Boba despite being barely bigger than he is. - The sisters are all shorter than Anakin since he went on T early enough for it to affect his height

Ducky: assigned to Aayla, named by me - She follows Bly around like a duckling

Ginger: assigned to Bant, named by me - Healer Aniclone is with Bant, names herself Ginger because she thought the pink sushi ginger looked a bit like Bant's coloration. She doesn't explain this to anyone, but it's her way of tying herself to New Mom. - The three more-or-less-permanently-on-Coruscant Aniclones are encouraged to have separate rooms to prevent the hivemind situation from reestablishing itself, but they still visit each other whenever they can and Gossip About Crushes. - Belle and Harpy are VERY protective of the CG Fetts. They are small but mighty and they aren't as well-known so most civilians just assume they're just regular Jedi Padawans. Ginger wants all the Senate Gossip whenever they meet up, too. - I want Ginger working on the Advanced Aging thing in her spare time. For her sisters AND the Fett boys.

Talas: assigned to Shaak, named by me - Talas is Serbian for "wave" - And like... Kamino. Ocean planet. - First instinct was to name her "Homebound" or something but I figured I could have some fun - I've decided that Talas is friends with Omega and ends up kinda sciencey and ends up needing glasses.

Stella: assigned to Saesee Tiin, named by Willow - Obviously all the Aniclones can pilot well but there’s gotta be at least one that’s REALLY good with starships.

Fritz: assigned to Feemor, named by Willow - Feemor runs a search-and-rescue legion, he's very overwhelmed by this hypercompetent, hyperactive child - She flies better than him and nobody even teases him about it because Maybe It's Just A Skywalker Thing - She's named Fritz because she’s like. Always on the move and starts getting jumpy and jolty when she has to stay still too long. - Anakin's ADHD just got passed along to all his little sisters. Poor girls.

Be’kebii’tra Kemir "Kebi": assigned (accidentally) to Satine, named by Willow - One of them gets lost on a mission (read: the engine conked out in the middle of hyperspace) and sort of. Ends up. On Mandalore. - Satine has this very battle-capable teenager in her pacifist city, and this girl is claiming her father is Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Satine has some calls to make, because sure Obi-Wan wasn't obligated to stay true to her, but she'd have thought he would have at least told her about kids he had! She told him when she took in Korkie from her cousins! He told her about Anakin! Where did this daughter come from?! - Willow worked out that she tries to call herself ‘Skywalker’ in Mando’a, and totally messes it up. She says sky’s walk, which is be’kebii’tra kemir, but everyone just starts calling her be’keb or something. Or Kebi? Kebi is cute. - They call her 'Kebi' from blue sky - kebii'tra. - I went all in on that because Kebi is adorable, but also it sounds like it's short for Kenobi so there's a lot going on with other people arguing that she does not pick up on. - Anakin and Obi-Wan and Satine are all having a hissed argument about whose child this is and whether she knowingly named herself after him, and Kebi is just like. Playing chess with Korkie and Ahsoka and Addie.

Jinn: AWOL, named by me - One of the sisters calling up Anakin like Hey how did you know you weren't a girl. "I'm a sister, but I don't think I'm a girl. I don't think I'm a boy either, though. How..." - Anakin, who between the ages of fourteen and sixteen compiled a list of 160 pronouns and the gender identities they tended to be associated with: well you SEE - Anakin socially transitioned pretty young, and started T a few years later, but he definitely had a few instances of "am I definitely a dude or somewhere else on the transitional rainbow?" - The nb sister gets REALLY into the whole anti-slavery "kill all the Hutts" thing after meeting Shmi. Like. Has to be kept from sneaking off for extrajudicial justice. - They pick the name "Jinn" in honor of The Dude Who Freed Our Older Brother (And Thus Made It Possible For Us To Even Exist) - Obviously we’ve been picking a lot of nongendered names anyways, but Jinn feels extra Gender, you know? - Obi-Wan has a fucking aneurysm when he hears that an aniclone named themself after Qui-Gon. - They run off after a few months with their Jedi supervisor. - They’re gonna explore the galaxy! Fight injustices! There’s a solid month where they’re working at a diner but it’s all part of the struggle! Gotta get money to fight the power somewhere. - They grab Kebi on the way like "You wanna fuck shit up? Let's fuck shit up." - Kebi might grab Korkie in turn. Like. Ahsoka is an honorary sister-of-Anakin (not that she knows the Skysisters consider her such), but Korkie is an honorary child-of-Obi-Wan (and possibly literal; Kebi still hasn't gotten confirmation on that). - Korkie: I have homework. Jinn: NO TIME FOR HOMEWORK WHEN WE’RE FREEING SLAVES. Korkie: But—homework. - "Korkie, help these recently-freed slaves fix up their government!" "But--" "It could be your final project! Think of the extra credit!"

Digit: assigned to Ki-Adi Mundi, named by me - She goes with Ki-Adi Mundi and ends up really computer-savvy and math-y, because the whole binary brains thing means that Master Mundi ended up heavily logistics-oriented and being good at computers was the best way to support that, and she decides her name is Digit.

Haunter and Slinky: assigned to Tiplar and Tiplee, named by me - Aniclones enjoy the vents and so one of them gets called a "haunting little fuck" by the Fett clones and decides her name is Haunter now - Tiplar and Tiplee are two jedi masters so they should have two Aniclones and the second one is named Slinky, because Haunter fucks around in the vents, and Slinky slinks around like a big cat, and they both scare the shit out of people by popping up where they're least expected.

Pixie: assigned to Siri Tachi, named by me - I want one of the Aniclones to get really into like... Monster High/Ever After High type of fashion? And then she names herself Pixie. It's like a fairy, but spikier! - Big Poofy Skirts that are a little too short to be Lolita style - "Pixie you can't fight in five inch heels." "WATCH ME" - She wears the heels for THE AESTHETIC but also because she ended up just a liiiiiittle shorter than the other sisters and insists that she has to make up for it somehow.

Lyra: assigned to Eeth Koth, named by Willow - One of the Aniclones does karaoke one time and gets REALLY into it and singing. - Eventually she wants to get into actual instruments but while there’s a war on she can’t exactly tote a violin around in case it gets destroyed so instead she forms a singing group with some of the Fett clones, and because I think the Fett clones would have their own bastardized versions of drinking songs and such taught to them by their teachers on kamino and then passed down by other brothers, she would start like… idk writing the music down? The lyrics? - I was thinking maybe Aria or Cadence? - Maybe Lyra

Lamb: assigned to Stass Allie, named by me - Stass Allie is a healer, so we have multiple healer clones! - Willow suggested she was the one who became a sheep farmer and I couldn't help myself. - Her name is Lamb. She’s Lamb because she’s young and innocent despite it all and she’s Lamb because she. Likes lambs. - She sees war and blood and battle (unlike Ginger with Bant, who is mostly temple bound) and decides she wants to leave it all behind. - Lamb discovers the chips because she's a baby healer BUT she's also a clone and she Gets how clone stuff works so she spends a lot of time healing clones against Kamino rules about Jedi healing clones for IP reasons because Lamb is also a Kamino IP, and after she's fixed up enough head injuries... - The first time she steps foot on a green planet she sees a lamb and it’s like she’s being born for the first time. - Animal trio: Lamb, Hen, Ducky - There’s Teddie too, though that doesn’t quite fit. - Lamb finds the chips, Ginger solves the aging.

Rocker: assigned to Adi Gallia, designed by Willow, named by me - Willow: I have no idea why but I have this vivid image of her with an Aniclone who’s shaved half her head and has died all her hair violet but like. I don’t know why. - I suggested Rocker based on the above. - She has a rock collection. It started as a joke when Adi’s CC gave her a rock he picked up after a battle and then it snowballed.

Nightshade: assigned to Oppo Rancisis, named by Willow - Oppo gets the Strategy Skysister - She’s devious and smart and maybe a little bit cruel but he helps work that out. - Picks "Nightshade" because she’s subtle and deadly and also has a wicked flair for the dramatic. - Runner-up name: Harriet

B.A.U.L.: Even Piell, named by both - Even passes along his sense of humor to his skysister - Baul, rhymes with Maul. Do not know why but I like the idea of her picking it and then Maul comes BACK. - It's an acronym that was an inside joke that’s a reference to something that happened on Kamino - Though what would be extra funny is if, like, even Baul couldn’t remember what the acronym was for, so now it’s just Her Name and everyone thinks she’s being deliberately vague and cagey about it but the truth is that that’s just Her Name now. - At some point she tells people it's for Bad-Ass Un-Leashed.

Harpy: assigned to the Coruscant Guard, named by me - One of the Aniclones decides her favorite non-family person is Bail Organa and whenever she's on Coruscant she just follows him around. - Bail has no idea what he did to make this girl invested in him (Obi-Wan said he was cool, that's it), but he can. Like. Teach her politics or something. She can be a sounding board for phrasing things. Teenagers-that-are-actually-eight can do that, right? - I think it would be very funny if she wanted to be Subtly Connected to him and went: Organa -> Organ -> Piano ->Harpsichord -> Harpy So her name is Harpy and nobody knows it's about Bail.

Krayt: assigned to A'Sharad Hett, named by me - I want to give one to A'Sharad Hett purely on the basis of "Anakin doesn't have Tusken-hate in this AU, and Tatooine is still Not The Absolute Worst because Mom Lives There, so maybe the other Tatooine Jedi can help." - She names herself Krayt because... A'Sharad Hett.

Pestilence "Pest" "Tilly": assigned to the Coruscant Guard, named by me - Pestilence, alternately goes by Tilly or, if she's being a brat and ruining Anakin's dates with Padme, Pest - I also want at least one Aniclone to catch Ventress's attention in a "I claim you as a little sister" way and they're just like "uhhhhh no I'm a Jedi" but Ventress does not care, she has found herself a little sister and she is KEEPING the little sister, since the little sister bites. - Palpatine was hoping that if he had multiple Aniclones to influence, he'd have more luck, and argued as Chancellor that they needed more Jedi clones on Coruscant than fighting the war. - There’s also the element where the aniclones are extremely dangerous and completely untested, so they should be under a powerful Jedi’s supervision. You only have so many High Council or potential high council members actually fighting. - So you chuck the rest of the Aniclones where there are enough Jedi around you don’t need a powerful one keeping watch all the time.

Fern: assigned to Pong Krell, named by Willow - This one's getting different formatting because it's like... an entire plot. Most of this was written by Willow. Warnings for systematic physical and mental abuse of a minor by her legal guardian.

Okay here’s the thing. If we don’t want everything to work out perfectly we could give an Aniclone to Krell… but not have it be one that gets reassigned. Like, that’s angsty as fuck.

Presumably Krell keeps putting the Aniclone in situations meant to get her killed, just like he tends to do with other clones. And she… doesn’t question it.

WAIT THAT MAKES HER SHMI VISIT SO MUCH BETTERWORSE

Presuming the Shmi visit happens sometime during the war and not right after Geonosis.

Like she’s already drawing away from her sisters—and her sisters are drawing away too! They’re all developing new identities! But it’s different for her.

phoenixyfriend: I was going with "sometime right after Anakin's already on Tatooine with Ahsoka for the Rotta thing."

That works perfectly, too far before the Krell thing comes to head for anything to be obvious to anyone.

And Krell’s Aniclone—who hasn’t named herself by the time she meets Shmi, even though the rest of them have (because, as Krell says, she’s just a clone. She doesn’t need a name)—is just. Incapable of communicating what’s going on.

Because Krell’s stuff lines up exactly with what the Kaminoans taught them, so she just accepts it, and when she’s talking to a sister and it comes up… well, maybe she’s just not gotten over all the Kamino stuff.

She shows up at Shmi’s with the other sisters and takes off her shirt to change and she’s COVERED in scars.

And the sisters are like: you need to be more careful, your Jedi wouldn’t want you getting hurt, and Krell’s Aniclone is just. Sitting there dully nodding along because of course Krell wouldn’t want her getting too hurt to fight. That’s why she’s still alive.

Okay Shmi probably picks up at least a Little on what’s going on, and tells Anakin to keep an eye on her, but Krell’s Aniclone is just. Very cold and polite to him. She doesn’t call him sir because he told her not to, but that’s her general mien when it comes to him... because she thinks he knows.

phoenixyfriend: I want Anakin to piece together what's going on and accidentally showcase his many problems by attempting to murder Krell on sight the next time they see each other, but like without actually explaining anything to anyone.

It happens in a room with other Jedi too, like the Jedi entrance hall.

Krell’s Aniclone is standing by the door and she lifts her hand up enough for him to see lightsaber burns and oh that’s weird he didn’t think she and Krell had faced any Sith recen—

Lightsaber out and at Krell’s throat

Snarling ‘What have you done to her.’

But she DEFENDS Krell.

She fights Anakin off and obviously he would beat her, because he’s Really Good At Laser Swords, but he can’t actually even try to hurt her.

phoenixyfriend: After everything is over I want her crying while Anakin hugs her and has her wrapped up in his cloak. Maybe she joins Lamb after the war.

And she’s like “You’ve crossed a line, General” and it’s so strange for her to call him that because all the other Aniclones call him Ani or Anakin or some insulting but friendly insult

Ooooo, yeah I bet she spends some time with Lamb

phoenixyfriend: ANAKIN COMPARES HER DEFENDING KRELL TO HOW HE TRIED TO FORGIVE WATTO FOR BEING LESS AWFUL THAN HE COULD HAVE BEEN.

Anakin snarls to look at the burns on her arms (because those are some serious scars, not just training saber level but worse, and ones that have been reopened so much that they’re just messy tears in the skin).

Oh but she’s TERRIFIED when all the Jedi close in around her.

Later she tries to defend Krell in front of the council and says something like ‘He didn’t even hurt me as much as he could have’ but she says it the EXACT same way Anakin says that stuff about Watto and something Clicks and suddenly he understands the way Obi-Wan used to look when Anakin would say those things, like he was sick and furious and tired all at once.

While the altercation is happening and the Jedi are turning their attention towards her she’s TERRIFIED she’s going to get in trouble

phoenixyfriend: Ginger hustles her off because she needs a SISTER right now and Ginger's the one in residence and the Jedi need to deal with Krell WITHOUT his Aniclone getting in the way. Ginger uses the Aniclone brain radio to summon all sisters on the planet to come Support The Sad One.

But Krell’s Aniclone shouts while she’s being forced out of the room that it’s not his fault, it’s hers, and Krell just gives her this look like yes, it is all her fault.

phoenixyfriend: Aniclone needs help but also this incident results in Anakin having a breakdown of his own on Obi-Wan in their rooms while Ahsoka and Addie look on in concern? And then Addie runs off to join The Sisters.

I think—and this is just a maybe, but hear me out—that maybe after the war Krell’s gets really into exploring? Like she heads out to the outer rim to land on planets and travel and then later goes into wild space to explore even further and I was thinking that maybe she’s just going by the letter that starts her designation (R, or something) until she lands on a planet and it’s beautiful and there’s a funny little plant under a tree in the tiny spaceport she’s landed in and she asks someone what it is and names herself after that plant

Honestly I didn’t have a specific name in mind, but now I’m thinking Fern.

It was more the idea of the sisters naming themselves because their lives changed and they felt like they’d grown beyond who they were on Kamino and this is the first time Krell’s feels like she’s actually beginning a new life

phoenixyfriend: Ooooh what if after the Krell thing comes to light, Harpy or Belle volunteers to give up her spot with the CG so Fern has somewhere safer to be, except everyone has Bad Vibes About leaving her near Palps. Oh, to avoid the Palpatine situation, Fern gets assigned to Vokara or Jocasta? And that way Ginger gets to keep an eye on her and donate all the cuddles and point her to help out in the creche.

I love the idea of Fern with Jocasta. The archives are quiet and cool and full of light and nothing like the warships. She reads and she organizes and she looks at pictures of other worlds.

#Anakin Skywalker #Shmi Skywalker #Obi Wan Kenobi #clone wars #star wars #the clone wars #cloning #Phoenix Posts #Skysisters AU #I have mental visuals for most of them #you just KNOW that Pixie has a pixie cut

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