Help I can’t stop thinking about a chronically ill transmasc Dean Winchester.
In my head, he will periodically have these spells where he gets really lightheaded and nauseous and cold. It’s not just like a little cold, it’s like chilled-to-the-bone cold. No matter what he does, he can’t stop shivering, and when it gets really bad, his limbs jerk and his teeth chatter. Now as an adult, he knows that feeling cold is his tell for when he isn’t feeling well. He takes it as a sign that he needs to go slower or to chug his Liquid IV.
Maybe the first few times, John took Dean and his illness seriously. The three of them were preparing for a funeral for some hunter, and as he’s going into the shower, he passes out. He’d been complaining of feeling strange long before that, but John hadn’t wanted to listen at first. Upon finding his son though, he cancels his plans and rushes a 7 year old Dean to the hospital, with Sammy in tow. And despite the bloodwork and the brain scan, no one has any answers. Inevitably, it happens again, and after a couple similar visits, John starts to dismiss Dean’s problem unless the boy is passing out in front of him again. It’s always gone away before, right? Just go to bed, quit your whining.
When Dean starts to get his period, the shame of it nearly consumes him. This is a way that he was different from his father and brother, and he couldn’t help but feel like the blood he found in his underwear was also staining his hands somehow. But to make matters worse, his episodes come back tenfold during that week. There were so many times where he was incapacitated for the most of that time, plagued by intense vertigo and sometimes vomiting. The focus of his chronic illness shifted, at least with Dean’s brother and father. It became a “woman thing” and that made it some sort of inconvenience to them. It doesn’t help that during this time, he was still expected to care for Sammy to the best of his ability. John would be furious if his little brother wasn’t cared for, even when he was doing his best with their limited food and money.
By the time Dean starts transitioning, John is not in his life anymore. They have a falling out, and the young man decides to go out on his own. For a while, he considers himself to be a different person than the one who had been so weak and helpless and sick earlier in his life. The testosterone gel he uses eventually takes away his periods, and he begins to pass out and feel unwell less and less. As his condition improves, doesn’t want to remember the horrors of his past, so he shoves them down. He parties and has fun, enjoying his new life as the person he’s been all along—Dean.
Somehow, Dean and Sam reconnect and become part of each others lives in a big way for a brief amount of time. Maybe Sam needs a place to stay the summer between his last year of undergrad and graduate school. The gender change is a shock, but Sam recovers pretty quickly. It hadn’t been like his older brother had been the most girlie person he’d known, and Sam can tell that he’s more himself than maybe ever. Dean is in his mid twenties now, and he is having a hard time running from his past when the baby brother he’s been forced to care for his whole life is in his grown up space. Of course he’s happy to see his little brother, but even with the trans thing aside, it’s hard. One day over breakfast, Sam asks, “do you ever pass out anymore, or have you outgrown that?”
This sends Dean into a spiral because he’s forgotten about that whole weird thing that had happened. Of course, it still didn’t make a whole lot of sense to him—it hadn’t at the time either—but he decides to just take this information at face value: he used to pass out sometimes, but that was behind him now.
Dean is approaching thirty when the symptoms come back again. In the meantime, he and Castiel met. They began dating, then moved in together. At this point, the two of them have been living together for three years. Dean has just gotten over being ill a couple of weeks ago when the bone-rattling cold comes back. There was very little warning, and he and Castiel had been eating dinner. They had to stop so that Dean could lie down. The violent shaking made Castiel concerned, and he pleaded with Dean to let him take him to a doctor. Dean refused, remembering vaguely that he’d been here before and that he would be okay probably. As he predicted, it passed.
As months passed after that time at dinner, Dean found himself feeling more frequently unwell again. He hadn’t passed out again, but the shaking was ramped up. He began to feel a little disoriented when it happened, too. Castiel encouraged him to see a doctor, and they began the process of narrowing down what the cause was. In the meantime, they figure out that LiquidIV takes his symptoms down a notch, and he begins hoarding the stuff. Despite the fact that things feel out of his control, begins to be able to manage what is happening to him to an extent now.
