AU Donor House: John: Being A Two Spirit
Written for Elizabeth’s prompt - John as a two spirit. This was a hard prompt to write to, even after I researched this, because it seems that each of the tribes had a different idea of what it meant to be two spirited.
The day John walked down the stairs in the clothes of his chosen gender he couldn’t help wondering what the reactions of the donors and vampires at the House would be. He’d been preparing his explanation ever since he made the decision that it was time, because he’d been there for longer than he thought he would, had become a part of the community, and he believed that they would accept him for who he was. Even though, to begin with, they wouldn’t be able to understand who he was, as they didn’t have two spirited people. Not in the way that his tribe had done, when his tribe had still existed. A man wearing a skirt wasn’t that strange, there were those who dressed as women for whatever reason or chose to change their gender because they had been born into the wrong body, but it wasn’t the same.
John had known, from the time he was very young, that he was both male and female, even though he had been born into a male body. That hadn’t changed when he became a vampire, even though he thought it might, but he’d felt he had no option, before the entered the House, to hide that from the world. Until he met Alice, who’d accepted the differences of the vampires she met without judging them, he didn’t believe he would ever be able to be himself again. Now he finally had a chance to be the person he’d been born, instead of pretending to be someone else.
It was Alice he walked into first, which made him smile, even when she studied the clothes she was wearing with interest. As their eyes met she smiled back. “Tell me,” she said, gently taking his hand in hers. “You’ve listened to me and now I see it’s my turn to listen to you.”
“Within my tribe, and, as I’ve found out recently, some of the other tribes, there were people who were two spirited. This has meant different things to anthropologists at times, but for my tribe it meant that I was both male and female. It is a hard thing to explain to someone who is single spirited, like you or Nick, and I put it off for a long time because I didn’t know how to put what I am into words - I decided that it was time to let myself be who I was born after so long as I can’t keep pushing the other half of me aside. Having to do that the whole time I have been a vampire has been the hardest part of this. Life now isn’t the same as it was when I was human and I’m not entirely certain how to be two spirited in this new world, but it’s time that I tried.”
“How would you have shown that you were a two spirit within your tribe?”
“For each of us it was different. I was male with a female spirit, so I was training to become a medicine man and I was also seen as a matchmaker.”
Alice laughed. “You being seen as a matchmaker doesn’t surprise me.”
Mirrored from K. A. Webb Writing.