Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
Sometimes family is a righteously angry little girl, her supportive brother, a random stranger with a thirst for chaos and justice, two foreign grandmas, and The Rest Of The Plane.
I started a new remote job last week, and I’m the only genderqueer person at the company (and the first person who uses neo pronouns that anyone on my team has ever met, apparently).
So far:
Manager carefully wrote down spelling and pronunciation of my pronouns and told everyone on the team to respect them.
Coworker apologized privately for misgendering me (I hadn’t told her yet) and said she will practice.
Guy on another team valiantly tried to use my pronouns and ended up saying something like zirzs-zhizz (I DM’d him and thanked him for trying and linked him to a practice site).
Teammate told me he has written out my pronouns and how to use them in a sentence and literally taped it to his monitor so he can practice.
Teammate also referred to me as compañere after I linked to a comic about gender-neutral endings in Spanish (whole team except me + 1 other person speaks Spanish as first language and they held all meetings in Spanish before the two of us started).
I am so stoked that people are actually trying. 💜🤍💚
It’s important to remember this kind of stuff, especially with the world the way it is now. When i started my current job and i told HR about my name and pronouns, she called me to ask which locker room i wanted to be in and told me where all the neutral bathrooms are (which is all of them except the locker rooms).
I’ve had to come out to my team a couple times because of new hires and whatnot but every time it has gone well. People aren’t perfect but they try and they correct themselves. I usually just get nods of understanding and a couple of times people have asked me questions to understand better.
When one of my employees misgendered me despite me directly correcting her and I documented it, the site director texted me at MIDNIGHT to apologize and assure me that he and HR would handle it. The operations manager sent me a similar email the next morning.
We aren’t alone. People care. People understand us and are on our side.
i was starting a new job, and before i went in for my first training in the afternoon, i talked to my mom on the phone. she was very excited because a nonbinary person who used they/them had just starting coming to her kungfu classes. “i got their pronouns like a pro because of you, so i got to surprise them with this 60 year old lady being super smooth with their pronouns.”
later at my onboarding, a younger coworker surprised me by asking for my pronouns (i hadn’t yet considered whether i wanted to be out at work) and i automatically replied they/them. my new boss, standing next to me, went “oh excellent! my youngest is nonbinary, i got this.”
not only is people making the effort for you special and beautiful, you’re also making life easier for those who come after, in a beautiful pay-it-forward loop-de-loop of pronoun teaching
How to treat your employees: like they’re human beings with families and lives: a masterclass courtesy of Bakersfield, CA’s Chef’s Choice Noodle Bar.
My sister genuinely, for real, met her girlfriend at a meet up for retyping poetry on vintage typewriters above a feminist bookstore, and I just want to say I’m thrilled the manic pixie dream girls of the world are moving on from whiny mediocre dudes and finding eachother instead.
She has just informed me that her girlfriend also OWNS an aquamarine typewriter that writes in CURSIVE and they have a running picnic date at a baby goat farm, FOR REAL, I had no words.
today’s Concept: Julian getting involved with reconstruction efforts and medical relief on Cardassia, occasionally getting summoned to Prime and getting put up in one of the remaining luxury hotels in the capital that hasn’t been repurposed for housing. at first, Garak joins him to hang out in the hotel bar and then later on, his hotel room, to save Julian the stain of being seen coming and going from Tain’s mansion in the administrative sector where Garak has been living. eventually this turns into Garak, who isn’t getting much more than four hours of sleep a night while trying to write the new Cardassian constitution, passing out on the bed and Julian leaving him to sleep. Garak wakes up at 0300 as the little spoon with Julian’s hand clamped on his hip and has an entire existential crisis about enjoying it. he wakes up again at 0700 hrs and says nothing about it to Julian. lather, rinse, repeat until they realize they’ve been playing relationship chicken for a year and Julian’s been offered an eighteen month contract on Prime to help the Ministry of Health build a nationalized pediatric well-baby and well-child program. they have sex in a fancy shower. the end
It would be fun to write a ghost story about a protagonist that disbelieves in the paranormal so hard that it stop existing around them.
They pick a soaking wet teenaged girl ghost in their cab and take her home. They pull up to the house and ghost girl looks longingly out before resigning herself to be sent back to the roadside.
Protagonist is just like, “so that’s $14.50.”
The ghost is surprised, she’s still there. She fumbles for cash but she didn’t die with any.
Does she feel oddly warmer than normal?
The seat more solid against her skin?
The protagonist sighs, “of course.”
They couldn’t just leave a teenage girl out there on the side of the road in the middle of the night, something bad could have happened to her. But he still had bills to pay.
“Come on. This is your parent’s house right? I’ll walk you in.”
For the first time in twenty years the ghost opens the car door and steps out onto the sidewalk.
The protagonist knocks on the front door and her parents, use to the midnight visits, wearyily open the door.
She starts to cry and hugs her parents tight. Apologizing for sneaking out. Babbling about what happened to her. How her friends had egged her into going deeper into the woods. How they had gotten separated. She’d fallen into a river.
Her parents are crying too. She finally made it home. They finally had confirmation of what happened to her. No body had been found so they were never truly sure.
The protagonist awkwardly interrupts, “so there’s still the matter of her cab fair…”
They don’t want to be insensitive but they need to get going and bills don’t pay themselves.
Eagerly her father rummages around in the pockets of his coat hanging by the door and pushing a twenty dollar bill into the protagonist’s hand. He knows it’s more than enough.
They thank the protagonist for bring her home, “keep the change,” they tell him.
As the protagonist gets in their cab and drives away the ghost can feel herself slipping away from life once more. But not back to the river and woods, waiting endlessly for someone to pull over and offer her a ride.
Her unfinished business is complete.
She’s moving on.
To somewhere warm and bright, she can feel it.
Her parents press final kisses to her cheeks as she starts to go. Through tears they whisper, I love you’s.
She’s finally at rest and there are no more stories of vanishing girls picked up off the backwoods roads
Bless you OP for going “It would be fun if someone wrote this” and then writing it. FLAWLESS.
I hope you enjoyed this story! I wrote Comfy as both a graduation thesis and an exploration of positive autism awareness. :) Based on experiences I had growing up as well as a positive message I would like to tell fellow autistic people: you are loved.
Available as hardcover signed books on my site! ellemaru(dot)com/shop (I will drop a link in the comments) Thank you! ^_^
Omg @illusion2me your tags on my other post about Julian’s Augmentation were perfect. I almost responded directly on that post but my thoughts ended up meandering Out of Scope. Because you’re right! It literally isn’t true that all Julian cares about is tennis and medicine. The fact that he’s extremely opinionated about art and culture is one of the FIRST things established about him. UGH.
One of my favorite things about Julian, which really only exists in early seasons (though they bring it up from time to time later) is that he actively enjoys consuming large amounts of cultural content. Julian is one of the only trek characters that we get cultural opinions and comparisons from. I only know that Tor Jolan is the greatest Bajoran composer and that his work is “slightly derivative” of older composers because he tells me. I only know that current media being produced on Earth is repurposing other planets’ stories because he tells me. And both of those things tell me so much about the cultures! Like the fact that humans would take other stories and try to fit them into a human narrative makes so much sense, we do that all the time with other cultures right now.
And it’s great most Trek characters don’t offer comparative analysis! We get descriptions of art or literature or whatever, but no comparison so you can’t really locate it. It adds a lot to both the character and the world and it really is too bad that they didn’t lean more into it when they did the augment stuff. Now we know he can read and consume at inhuman rates but we never get a scene, for example, of him discussing different Klingon operas.
It’s honestly too bad that they basically write this characterization completely out by Season 4-ish. We get hints of it here and there like when he’s describing a biography of Davy Goddamn Crocket (do Not get me started) and describing it to Miles or the fact that he and Ezri are bonding over books. (An aside- I always think its cute that Miles is like you’re exchanging books?? Must be serious! Because he knows how much Julian likes to read- incidentally also making his relationship with Garak more text than subtext but I digress). But both the book Ezri recommends and the book he describes to Miles are both Earth books and it’s too bad. I really really loved how much Julian enjoyed learning about other cultures.
Anyway- I know they decided to make his character, in general, more “serious” in later seasons, and that’s fine I guess- but I wish they had kept that sense of curiosity and cultural passion.
(Disclaimer: I am not a comedian, but I tried my best.)
Garak never could have predicted the line of work his precocious daughter would have gone into. She had been a sharp writer, an artist, and a bit of a loner all through her schooling (a fact, Garak knew, Julian blamed himself for, concerned it was the xenophobic sentiment on Cardassia that kept their lovely daughter from gaining friends on the planet).
Privately, Garak thinks it had more to do with his daughter’s alarming sense of humor. A mixture of Julian’s tart sarcasm, and Garak’s love of theatricality, Mila often says things that were just so slightly off-color.
Still- a comedian. The first Cardassian Comedian. And to make matters much, much worse, she was actually funny.
True, much of his comedy was based on her parents, but certainly, who could blame her? Garak thinks fatalistically. A tailor and a spy as one father and a super-doctor as the other, Mila certainly had her reasons for psychological trauma.
Julian, he knows, handles the state of affairs by being relentlessly supportive. He sends Mila dozens of leading publications on attracting larger crowds at venues (a facet of his personality that translates on stage to a neurotically protective parent). He attempts to go to as many shows as his busy schedule reasonably accommodates. When news outlets reach out to ask him for comment, he only ever utters glowing praise of his “brilliant daughter,” who is so “tremendously clever and funny.”
But in the privacy of their home, Julian will badger Garak relentlessly on the apparent psychological damage they dealt their child.
Garak is often quick to point out that any errors they made along the way are too long in the past to be corrected. At least Mila can use her childhood trauma for creative gain.
And, she does still speak to them. She calls regularly, she still tells them about her life, she is still their daughter.
Still- he could do without:
“So, you think your parents are bad?” Mila says, asking the audience, who cheers slightly.
“My parents are… what’s a polite way to say it? Sexually active? Fucking like bunnies? Do you know how shitty it is to be in your twenties and know that your parents are fucking more than you?”
The audience laughs while she continues, “and of course, it doesn’t help that my human father cannot help but discuss his storied youth” here, she drops into an uncanny impression of Julian’s accent. “Oh darling, when I was your age, I used to have these incredible threesomes with my Vulcan roommate and an Orion. But so lovely to hear that you had a nice date with Simon, my human boyfriend and civilian geologist. We’re getting married in the spring.”
The audience laughs and cheers in congratulations.
“I’m the nerd in the family. My parents fuck and commit treason, and I’m stuck doing math homework and going to bed every night at nine. I could tell them about the party drugs I did last night, and they say, "make sure you always have a phaser.”
The audience laughs.
“What’s worse is I think they’re being serious!” She takes a swig of water.
The show continues, the audience laughing and cheering appropriately when Garak appears in his daughter’s dressing room. He knows she hadn’t been aware he was in the audience, and she certainly hadn’t been aware that Garak had her private security key, but if she didn’t realize these facts by now, he had raised an idiot.
“Yadik,” Mila says, barely reacting despite her apparent surprise. Garak smiles proudly.
“The audience liked you,” Garak says.
“You’ve never come to a show before,” she says. And this is true. Garak had only ever heard about her performances second-hand from Julian.
Garak quarks an eyebrow ridge instead, “are you quite certain of that, young lady?”
Mila laughs slightly under her breath, turns, and hugs him. “It is good to see you, Yadik.”
“Your father is concerned,” Garak replies lightly.
“Dad is always concerned,” she says with a rolled eye.
Garak gives her a stern look, “Mila.”
“Sorry,” she says, looking contrite.
Garak was fanatical about the language she used to describe her parents in person. Garak privately wonders how much she realizes this is to protect Julian, who faced such constant disrespect on Cardassia despite his overwhelming value and brilliance. Garak guesses she’s more aware than he wishes she were.
“You have a good stage presence,” he says instead.
“Thank you,” she says and then hesitates before continuing with, “you don’t like what I do, do you?”
“It is not in my nature,” Garak starts, cautiously, “to want details of my private family life, no matter how exaggerated, to be shared publicly. However, I know you are passionate about this. And talented at it. And I am, despite my misgivings, glad to see you so in your element. I suppose it is not so terribly different from my work in the Obsidian Order.”
“Oh?” she says archly, looking so much like Julian with the twinkle in her eye. “Pray tell, how? How exactly is comedy at all like torture?”
“Well, of course, both comedy and torture are about manipulation. The precise choice of words and actions at the right moment. I suppose, in the end, you took much more after me than either of us ever could have anticipated.”
She looks at him in disbelief for a few moments longer before breaking down into hysterical laughter. “At least I know I’ll never run out of material.”
Garak smiles fondly, gazing at the young woman in front of him. Clever, brave, independent, and fiercely affectionate. He thinks about how she looked on stage, sparkling in the stage lights.
He hadn’t been expecting to like his grown-up daughter this much. Love? Certainly. But she had grown into such an interesting and dynamic young lady that he thinks even if he didn’t raise her, he would have wanted to know her.
And then he thinks, quite unbidden, that he and Julian really did a wonderful job.
He shakes his head slightly and says, “I am in town overnight, and- if you are willing to spare a few moments away from your party drugs- I would love to take you to dinner.”
She smiles brilliantly. “I would love that.”
“Wonderful. I cannot wait to hear more of your impression of your dad. You really have quite captured his intonation, and I do so miss him. He’s been in the gamma quadrant for three weeks now.”
She laughs slightly again. “I can always use the practice”
He lets her guide them out of their changing room and feels, deep in his core, despite how different she was than anything he had imagined, deeply proud of the woman leading him.
