In honor of pride month, here are some canonically queer characters from our verse!
Jesse Turner - Demisexual, Panromantic
Jesse doesn’t really think of his sexuality in terms of labels (who has time when you’re running for your life?), but his heart will throw itself into battle for anyone with a pretty smile long before he thinks about sexy touching. By sheer chance, he’s fallen for more guys than any other gender, so he probably thinks of himself as “gay but I like girls too??” when he even thinks of it at all. Please someone hug this man.
Ben Braeden - Bisexual
Ben, bless him, probably has the most healthy relationship to his sexuality of anyone on this list. No one in his immediate family or friend group at school gave him any flack about it when he came out, partially because Katie had already paved the way by being so aggressively out once she left her mom’s place. Ben happily dated and/or hooked up with about 90% of his friend group in high school without much pushback, and because he never learned to feel insecure about that part of himself, his reaction to homophobia and biphobia is usually just an annoyed eyeroll rather than the strong reaction one might get out of Katie. The only important people in his life who he hasn’t officially told are Sam and Dean (though, especially after meeting Jesse, there’s no way they don’t suspect).
Claire Novak - Aromantic, Queer
Like Jesse, Claire doesn’t think much of trying to find a good word for her own sexuality. She utterly fails to comprehend the difference between being close friends with someone and being in love with them—if no sex is involved, it’s friendship; if you want to bone them, it’s romance. But Claire mostly hates feelings, so she has anonymous sexual encounters with dudes that she could not care less about whenever she needs to scratch that itch. She also tries to find guys who are down for her preferred activity of getting someone else off in quasi-sadistic (though ofc still consensual) ways while mostly keeping her own clothes on and not being touched. In Claire’s mind, sex is something you do to someone, not with someone, and she wants to be the one doing it. She feels a little strange when she thinks of being that ruthless in bed with the few people she is both physically attracted to and genuinely does let herself care about. For what it’s worth, Claire is interested in girls too, but feels equally weird trying to use her usual hookup persona with them—there are plenty she’s happy to eyeball, but she’s never acted on that attraction and doesn’t intend to.
Katie Doolittle - Lesbian
Katie is a big ol’ lesbian, and she wants everyone to know it. Katie has struggled with homophobia more than anyone else in our verse—her mom and dad divorced because her dad realized he was gay, and the little basic human respect Annette afforded for queer people flew right out the window. She thought of Katie as one kind of monster or another for as long as Katie lived with her. After Katie left home, she has viciously, spitefully lived life as out & proud as humanly possible. Every year in June she dyes the ends of her hair rainbow for Pride Month, and then chops it off when it starts fading so she can wear her trusty Wonder Woman costume for Halloween (she does not have the patience or cash to maintain it year-round). Katie’s biggest rule for herself going forward is that she’s not giving the time of day to any more homophobes, which is why she tries at all times to make it obvious at a glance that she’s a lesbian—thus the rainbow Superman-L tattoo on her wrist. Hopefully, if people immediately know what she is, a bad reaction will let her know what they are too. (She absolutely refuses to admit this was inspired by Ben’s monster-detecting bracelet.)
Emily Jorgeson - Gay
Emily doesn’t have a problem with the word “lesbian” or it being applied to her, she just tends to prefer “gay” for everyday conversation. She kept a lot of things to herself while living with her aunt and uncle in Indiana, her attraction to other girls among them, and they were happy enough to ignore any overly-friendly gestures Emily made to her girl friends and go right on saying things like “someday when you have a husband” and “when you meet the right boy.” It didn’t bother her as much as it should have—they never actually tried to get her to marry or date anyone she wasn’t interested in, and she liked life where she was, so why rock the boat? But after nearly being sacrificed with Dean, she sometimes wondered if it wasn’t a factor in deciding who in their little town got left on the chopping block. In college, she ran into a coven of real witches who were really gay and really didn’t care what other people thought about it and they helped her embrace that side of herself in a more positive way.
Hunter Birch - Genderfluid
“Genderfluid” might seem like an obvious choice for a shapeshifter, but Hunter actually went through a long period of trying to shift only into “boy” bodies, and insisted on being called “he” even when they didn’t get the form they wanted. Aaron was determined from the beginning to let Hunter decide for themself as much as they could—he wouldn’t question whatever choices they made about their gender or appearance or what they wanted to be called (they even named themself). So it took him awhile to notice the little longing looks they gave dresses and hairbows and dolls and anything else they thought of as girly. Finally, he caught Hunter in the Halloween aisle in a dollar store reverently stroking the fabric of a pink ballerina costume, and it all came out. Aaron bought it for them, and later they had a long talk about how it was okay to be a girl some days, too, if they wanted to be, even though Aaron was a boy (and Hunter wanted to be like him to make them more like a “real” family). Now Aaron calls Hunter “she” on girl days and “he” on boy ones, and “they” in general or when he can’t check with them first. The gender Hunter picks doesn’t always match up with the sex they might be assigned based on their body, and for all Aaron knows they might wind up sticking with one gender someday and they might not—he loves them regardless of what face or gender they have.
Ben Collins - Asexual & Aromantic
Because he’s never romantically dated anybody, Ben has definitely heard concerns from well-meaning loved ones that worry his life lacks intimacy, or connections with others. Thankfully, to the people that matter most (Haley and Tommy), he only had to explain it once for them to get the idea and stop worry-nagging him. (After all, you can hardly want for intimacy when one of your jobs involves touching souls.) One of his favorite jokes is telling anyone who asks that they aren’t his type.
Billie - Asexual & Aromantic
Not every reaper is aro/ace, but Billie is here to do her job and very little outside of it catches her interest. While she has some affection for her fellow reapers and the souls she sees to the other side, her closest friend is Ben Collins, however much she likes to pretend otherwise. Billie has been bound to him for the rest of his natural life, so luckily they make a good pair, but their relationship is strictly platonic. Her favorite joke is how Ben, specifically, is not her type.
Meg - Trans
Assigned male when she was born in New Babylon, Meg joined her father and brother in secret arcane rites that got their whole family burned at the stake before she’d even turned twenty. Millennia in Hell has been…unpleasant, especially during the old days, but the one upside to Meg becoming a demon is that now she can choose to wear whatever kind of body she wants. After centuries of being nameless, she chose the name Margaret for herself, after the medieval Catholic saint of expectant mothers—it has always been Meg’s secret wish to bear a child. When given the option, she always chooses hosts that are named Margaret or some variation thereof, and when the plans were being made for a demon to give birth to Lucifer’s cambion, she jumped at the chance.
GUYS what are some background character headcanons you have??? any stuff you can't fit into the fics but want to tell us about???
HI sorry this took ages to answer we have. a lot. first, obligatory plug: there’s the fun facts tag for some of them! but we have a lot we haven’t posted yet cause we haven’t done a proper fun facts post in ages. okay here we go!
missouri and tamara are pals. there was no good way to mention this in synchronicity without it feeling really random and shoehorned, but tamara always visits if she passes by lawrence. they probably met before isaac (tamara’s husband) died, early in their time in the states—maybe missouri was even the one that introduced them to the truth, like she did for john winchester.
lisa and marie are biracial! both of their parents were jewish, but their mother was of israeli descent and their dad was european. interestingly enough, our fancast for ben, steven r. mcqueen, also has one biracial parent (his paternal grandmother was filipino), though we didn’t know that when we picked him.
jesse is left-handed, which is part of why his handwriting is so horrible. emily is ambidextrous. katie finds this competence hot.
emily loves funny hats. witch hats on halloween, santa hats on christmas, bunny ears on easter, the funny little light-up antennae during parties, the works. any time you can get away with wearing a funny hat/head accessory, she will wear one. she has a growing collection that she loves dearly and getting her a new one is the easy way to take care of birthday and christmas gifts.
ben collins, haley and tommy’s younger brother, was completely unplanned, which is why he’s so much younger than them. luckily, he finds it funny instead of mortifying. haley and tommy were always more like an extra set of parents to him than siblings, especially considering their biological parents died when he was very young.
part of the reason katie’s mom went crazy and stayed crazy even after the changelings were gone was because changelings suck up life energy, i.e. souls, and enough soul damage causes horrible nightmares and even hallucinations (we all saw what happened to sam). annette was the first victim and was with the changeling for longer than any of the other mothers, so she got much more damage than, say, lisa. it never went away or got better; she had days where she truly believed katie was a monster for the entire time katie lived there.
the reason katie’s parents got divorced was because her dad was gay. annette never had a super positive opinion of The Gays, but it definitely dropped another notch after that, and it meant finding out her daughter was gay too was no fun for either of them. even on the days when annette didn’t think katie was a literal monster, she came close to feeling like she was an entirely different kind of abomination.
meg is trans! this was revealed during enter night (we even tagged it with “trans meg masters” just in case it wasn’t clear), but in case you anyone skipped that fic: very definitely she is trans. margaret was the name she picked for herself while she was alive but everybody was too busy burning her at stake for heresy to care about anything like that. after she became a demon, she specifically chose hosts named margaret (or, as that name fell out of style, meg). even when she was alive, some part of her always wanted to be a mother, but she died fairly young and never had any biological children until jesse.
jesse’s middle name, aidan, means “fire-born.” meg being burned at stake meant her demonic self was fire-born too.
taylor simms—the cousin that attacked jesse in his sleep, who he accidentally killed—was really close to both oliver and elias, and her death was the tipping point for both of them when it came to whether or not jesse deserved to be hunted. we tossed around an idea a few times that taylor was actually secretly Team Leave Nondangerous Monsters Alone, and went to find jesse (either with or without telling elias/oliver) in the hopes of talking sense into him. whatever the case, she unfortunately startled jesse out of sleep when he was already running on paranoia and hypervigilance, so he ashed her. rip taylor.
Synchronicity (Claire/Ben, 39k)
by @thegeminisage & @callowyn
For almost half a year, Ben Braeden's search for the missing Sam and Dean has been as difficult and fruitless as it has been lonely. It's only when Ben runs into Claire Novak, who claims she met the Winchesters herself once, that things begin to change. Claire is sharp, distant, and impossible to read, but she and Ben have more in common than either of them realize, and slowly, they begin to find their places in the hunting world and with each other. But Claire keeps a lot of secrets—most painful, some dangerous...and some that might tear them apart.
IT'S FINALLY HEEEEERE! Today we're proud to present to you the reduxed version of Synchronicity, a Ben & Claire adventures prequel to Cambion. The original version of this fic was published on August 5th, 2011, and only about 5.5k words long, something Liz banged out in a few hours. This version is much longer and we're happy to say includes many more characters in the wider scope of the verse! Additionally, like our last published fic, Enter Night, this is happening REAL TIME—the fic ends on this very day in history, Jesse's 19th birthday. He is...not in this fic, but we wish him a happy birthday all the same.
Thanks so much for being patient and sticking with us, guys. We’ve worked so so hard on this, we really hope you enjoy it and that it was worth the wait!
Apply this quote to Marie: I adopted a boy, and he grew up great. He grew up a hero.
YOU KNOW WHO OUR HERO IS? MARIE BRAEDEN. Marie never wanted to be a mother and never expected to be a mother, but when Lisa died, she immediately made it her job to make Ben feel as accepted and loved in her house as he had in his mom’s. All the turbulence of being a teenager combined with the trauma of watching his mom die made Ben a handful and a half for quite a few years, but thanks to Marie’s solid ground, he safely emerged as the warm and caring person we know today.
And don’t forget Marie all but adopted Katie as well (helped her emancipate herself, and then let Katie move in rent-free). Katie might well have ended up on the streets if not for Marie’s generosity—or kept suffering with a mother who hated her, which may have been worse. And sure, Katie’s not a hunter, but she did point a shotgun at the antichrist for her girlfriend, which was brave. She saved herself from an awful broken home, which was very brave. In our book, that makes her just as much a hero as Ben flitting around the country killing monsters. Much as teenagers need to assert their independence, the support of adults in their lives is CRUCIAL when they’re out trying new things, and Marie completely stepped up for these two even though that responsibility was never something she signed up for.
So really, the original line applies just as well: “As fate would have it, I adopted two kids. And they grew up great. They grew up heroes.”
did katie complete high school, or did she leave around the same time as ben (also did they go to the same high school)
Not only did Ben and Katie go to the same high school, they were in the same grade! This despite a three-year age difference, because Ben (who ditched school to go look for Dean) skipped a grade and Katie (who has more sense than Ben and did graduate) flunked one. They both wound up in a grade where they didn’t know anyone at the same time, and between that and knowing about changelings, that is how they became friends.
We have actually slightly reworked the timeline of Ben and Katie leaving Cicero for the redux. Since it may be unclear in the writing (most of it will be covered in the reduxed Synchronicity, which isn’t up yet and may not be up for a good while), under the cut are some our own (modified) notes on the subject; they’re a little rough and rambly, but not likely to change much.
(A note: SPN’s official timeline is wonky at its best, but for this verse, The Kids Are All Right takes place during June of 2007.)
How Marie almost literally adopted Katie:
June 2007: The Kids Are All Right, in which Dean saves Ben and Katie from the changelings. Upon being dropped back off at her mother’s, Katie learns a) her father is dead b) Anette tried to drown the changeling with her face and c) Annette thinks she is still a changeling. Sam and Dean shrug and skip town.
September 2007 to May 2008: Katie and her mom do not get along. Katie has trouble getting to school and has trouble at school for various reasons (behavioral issues, other kids make fun of her because of her mom, etc). She sees the other “changeling kids” sometimes and they’re usually nice to her, but she doesn’t see them often. She fails the fifth grade.
June 2008: Katie is invited to Ben’s birthday party again. Lisa wanted to check up on Annette, probably, but only Katie shows. She talks a little to Ben about how her mom’s been but clams up around Lisa. (Katie does not trust adults.)
September 2008: Ben gets skipped ahead to the fifth grade, the same one Katie is repeating. Suddenly she has someone to sit with at lunch. Katie likes to be places that aren’t home, and for better or worse, Lisa is not cruel enough to call CPS and put Katie in the foster system, so Lisa kind of half-adopts her, letting her stay over often, giving rides to school, etc. Lisa probably feels a bit guilty she hadn’t taken Annette more seriously (though as Katie points out: really, who would have). It takes longer for Katie to warm up to Lisa, but she does eventually.
May 2010: After Swan Song, Dean moves back in with Ben and Lisa, a choice Marie does not approve of even a little. Katie starts coming over slightly less often: Dean, with his angst and PTSD, is not at all fun to be around, and she still holds a grudge against the Winchesters for leaving her with her mom. The solution is eventually moving playdates to Marie’s.
May 2011: Exile on Main Street; the djinn come after Dean, and Dean moves Ben and Lisa away from Cicero soon after. Ben and Katie are both heartbroken; Marie is rather suspicious.
June 2011 to June 2012: Katie is alone again. The other “changeling kids” are still nice enough to her, but they aren’t close, and she gets pretty lonely. Occasionally Katie sees Marie, who then invites her over for a snack or something because she is also pretty lost without Lisa and Ben. Katie gets big into the internet because it’s a good way to keep in touch with Ben, and internet pals make life less lonely. (So do social justice blogging and NC-17 Wonder Woman fanfiction.)
October 2011: Live Free Or Twihard; Dean makes bad life choices and ends up at Lisa’s as a vamp. Lisa dumps him for pushing her kid around and agrees she will move them back to Cicero—but only after the school year is finished. Stuck in Michigan for another eight months and watching Lisa date other people, Ben starts getting pretty bitter.
June 2012: Let It Bleed; Ben and Lisa are hip-deep in preparations for a move back to Cicero when Lisa and Ben get kidnapped. Ben gets out alive; Lisa doesn’t. Ben and Katie see each other again for the first time at Lisa’s funeral. He can’t say a single word.
July 2012: Katie continues to visit Ben day in and day out, whether he talks or not. Dean comes back to check on Ben and offers to take him to Bobby’s for the summer. Marie is 100% against this until Katie vouches for him—not out of any love for Dean, but because she can tell feeling safe is just what Ben needs.
August 2012: Annette walks in one Katie kissing another lady, which is no fun for anyone involved. Katie talks to Marie about getting emancipated.
August 2013: Katie is officially emancipated, moves in with Marie and Ben rent-free on the condition she keeps her grades up.
How Ben and Katie left Cicero and reconciled with each other and Marie:
March 2016: Winchesters vanish; Ben wants to leave Marie’s but Marie and Katie both tell him he’s nuts. He lies about it and leaves anyway. Shortly after he calls them to let them know he’s alive.
April 2016: After he finishes Bobby’s funeral pyre, Ben writes a physical letter to Marie and Katie and apologizes. He does not tell them where he is, but that he’s still going to look for Dean. Marie and Katie are not very impressed.
Between April 2016 and June 2016: Katie moves out with Marie’s blessing and works her way slowly towards California, which she figures will be kinder to gay people than Indiana.
June 2016: Ben, facing a birthday alone, calls Katie. Either she’s busy or she has a policy of letting unregistered numbers go to voicemail, but she doesn’t pick up. She listens to Ben’s voicemail, and he sounds terrible, and also like he’s still a dick, and she is too angry to feel sorry for him. Let him spend his birthday alone. She saves his new number but does not call back.
October/November 2016: Synchronicity and To Build A Home; Katie meets Emily, and Ben meets Claire.
June 2017: Synchronicity; Katie calls Ben for his birthday since she was kind of rude about the last one. Ben continues to stay in contact with her, but because Katie desperately does not want to relay messages or mediate fights between Ben and his aunt, she does not mention this to Marie. She also makes a firm no-Marie policy with Ben; if he wants to hear from/about her, he can call her himself, the dick. Nonetheless, Ben & Katie become friends again.
June 2019: Only Human; it all comes out, and now Ben, Katie, and Marie are finally in regular contact again. Ben and Katie apologize for being terrible children.
"Don't tell me you're jealous," Ben says. "It's from, like, the eighties. It'd be a piece of shit to anybody else."Katie makes a face. "Except people with no car at all." She catches herself and adds, "Not that I’m expecting—""You're an idiot." Marie's going to kill him for this, but he can't just leave that look on Katie's face. "The one she's getting you comes with the iPod jack pre-installed."Katie's jaw drops, incredulous grin spreading over her face. "No way. No way! You're—"
So, okay, this wound up getting really long and rambly. Needs a cut.
There! Now, I (Liz) banged out this entire fic in about 2-3 hours in the late afternoon (and Cally turned around and edited it in lightning-speed record times to get it up while it was still August 1st somewhere), when I saw all the Apocalypse Day posts going around. (I would like to note that technically a day or two passes in the episode, which is not explicitly stated to start on August 1st anyway, but close enough, Tumblr!) I really, really, really wanted to write about what was happening in our canon on that day in history and I knew I could make it short, and so I just kind of did a mental check-in to figure out where everybody was. While it was tempting to write about Ben at Bobby’s, I decided to put him at home, partially because I knew that meant I could wave hello at Katie as well.
So: why the car? Well, we’ve mentioned before that Marie is pretty much Katie’s adoptive parent (helped her emancipate herself, then let her move in rent-free), but her relationship with Katie is a little different than it is with Ben, for obvious reasons (NOT less important, or less loving; just different). Marie was there when Ben was born. She helped Lisa take care of him in his early years and she watched him grow up one day at a time. Katie was always older than Ben, physically and emotionally, and Marie didn’t meet Katie until Katie and Ben started hanging out at her place after Swan Song. Here was this prickly pre-teen girl who was suddenly joined at the hip with her nephew, and that girl never did go away, even when Ben and Lisa did. (I’m pretty sure they ran into each other once or twice while Ben and Lisa were in Michigan and said hello.) But when it was time for Katie to leave her mother’s home for good, she was adamant that she be emancipated rather than adopted—she didn’t to be in the middle of a custody battle where her mom put up an awful fight (or worse, didn’t fight at all), but moreover she couldn’t ask anyone to mother her anymore, even Marie.
So it’s a parent/child relationship in practice, but it was really tentative at first. I think Marie always worried it was uneven: that Katie, who wasn’t legally Marie’s child and was so vocal about not needing a parent, would assume Marie felt no parental feelings for her or that Marie only tolerated her for Ben’s sake. To Marie, though, Katie is her kid as much as Ben is, even though was maybe a little afraid to express it in so many words because of how vocal Katie’s “don’t-need-this” attitude was. But even though Katie doesn’t need a parental figure, she probably really wanted one, which would be obvious to anyone who listened to her talk about how much she didn’t need one for five minutes or so. Since Katie is notoriously bad at words and feelings, and Marie on this particular subject always felt a little tongue-tied, she just went ahead and mothered the hell out of her anyway without really talking about it. Nice thoughtful birthday/holiday gifts instead of money in a card, packing her lunches with her favorite things in them, all that good stuff. And Katie’d try to play it cool at first, but she probably lit up every each and every time.
So when Marie decides Ben’s old enough to be getting that old truck Lisa kept after Dean left, she’s faced with a dilemma: how do you give your younger kid a car first without getting your older kid one? You don’t, obviously. So Marie went out and bought a cheap little used car just to get Katie on wheels and was planning to give Katie the car and Ben the truck on the same day, Katie’s birthday. Then Ben showed up in her driveway in the Impala. And you’ve read the rest.
