jemariel

[jemariel]

Everyone but Dean thinking Cas is Just Okay Looking is funny and all except that he's canonically described by everyone from Random Christian Mom #3 to the King of Hell as sexy, dreamy, etc. A woman found him wandering naked by a river and said That's Husband Material. Amelia Novak let that face through her front door after he ditched her and their kid for over a year. He led half of Heaven in a rebellion on a scale only thee Devil himself had ever managed before. He's so hot he made Meg switch sides. Even after his Third Epic Fuckup most of the angels were down to follow him. The scribe of god took one look at him and said if Dean is God's main character, You are Mine, I will kill him to give you a Tragic Backstory.

Only Amara, terminal Deangirl and Sam, terminally heterosexual, have ever thought Castiel was anything less than the hottest motherfucker in the garrison.

[jemariel]

Sick fic and werewolf au for the prompt list? Hit me with that hurt/comfort pretty please 😘

Chicken soup isn’t exactly a traditional breakfast food, but sometimes you do what you have to do. Dean’s used to the smell of rich, herby broth on the mornings after the full moon, soup mug clinking against the two empty coffee cups two empty mugs on the tray as he carries them along the garden path toward the shed. The steam billowing off the soup joins the morning mist, making silver shafts of sunlight between the pine trees. Dean’s glad that it’s bright, now, by the time the moon sets, because doing this in the dark had sucked.

He doesn’t like to leave Cas waiting long after the change has happened.

There’s no sound from the shed as he approaches. They call it a shed, but it’s a lot sturdier than that, and that’s a good thing. They’ve reinforced the beams, barred the windows, added heavy locks to the doors. Some months, it’s not so necessary. Some months, Dean spends the whole next week treating bruises and scrapes from where Cas has battered himself against every available surface, trying to escape.

But the fact that it’s quiet is a good sign. Dean shuffles the tray onto the wicker table by the door, shifts the bag on his shoulder, then digs into his pocket for the keys. Before unlocking, he raps two knuckles on the heavy frame. “Cas?” he calls out. “Bark once for wolf and twice for human.”

There’s a shuffling from beyond the door, then a human-sounding grunt. Good enough for Dean; he starts unlocking the heavy padlocks, sliding back the thick iron bolt. The door creaks on its hinges as he carries the tray into the shed.

It’s dim inside, and marginally warmer. The sunlight slants low and broken through the bars on one of the windows, striping up the wall over the bed in the corner. There’s not much furniture in the room — how could there be? — but there is a Cas-shaped lump in the blankets on the old, frameless futon mattress.

It’s an old, familiar ache, seeing his beloved like this. He used to try and insist that if they just moved far enough out — “No. I would run into the woods and never come back.” — or had a heavy enough lock on the door — “You wouldn’t hurt me, Cas.” “I’m afraid I would.” — anyway. He’s learned not to argue about the shed.

“Hey babe,” he murmurs, careful of a need for quiet, as he crosses toward the bed. “You made it.”

The lump of blankets shifts, unwinds a little. Cas’s dark hair emerges first, raked up and twisted by transformation. Then his face, dark circles under blinking blue eyes. Pallid cheeks and trembling lips, still exhausted from the night’s exertions.

He’s a sight for Dean’s sore eyes. “Look who’s awake,” he says. “Hungry?”

Cas nods, then flops his head back down on the mattress. Dean sets the tray down out of the way of the bed and burrows his arms into the blanket cocoon to dig out his husband. Cas is barely better than dead weight, naked under the covers. Dean will assess the extent of the damage in a minute. First: soup.

Once Cas is propped up against the wall, looking chalk-white and bruise-blue, Dean goes back to the tray and scoops up the bowl of soup. It’s cooled a little, but just enough to drink. “Can you hold it?” he asks.

A little crease appears between Cas’s eyebrows, wrinkling his nose, and he shakes his head.

“Okay.”

It’s a careful dance, but Dean has learned how to tilt the mug so that Cas can sip at the broth before his hands are steady enough for its weight. He watches Cas’s color slowly turn from gray to green to yellow to a healthier pink, watches for the flutter of his eyelids and tilt of his jaw that means he’s ready for another sip. They sit like that as the stripes of sunlight slide down the wall toward the floor, golden on the dust motes in the air. At some point, Cas’s hands emerge from the blankets and cup around the slowly-emptying mug, mostly noodles and chicken now. Dean lets him have the mug, then shuffles forward on his knees and slowly peels away the blankets from Cas’s shoulders. Cas lets him, hardly raising his eyes.

It’s not so bad this time, but he never gets out without at least a few bruises and scrapes from the wolf’s attempts at escape, shallow lacerations where he’s chewed his own fur in frustration. Dean fetches the first aid kit from the bag, frowning as he dabs at the scrapes with disinfectant and cotton. Cas shows his first real sign of life when Dean swipes the iodine over a particularly deep scratch on his shoulder — a sharp hiss and a cringe, clutching the soup mug closer.

“Shh, it’s alright,” Dean soothes, and Cas blinks up at him. Dean can see the lights coming back on inside his head, his human brain fighting through layers of exhaustion and animal simplicity. Castiel had once told Dean that he recognized his mate on instinct — which is why he was allowed near at all — but didn’t really know him as Dean until the moon had been set for at least an hour.

They must be at that mark now, because Cas relaxes all at once like a rag doll, rolling forward. “Dean,” he sighs, and leans hard into Dean’s shoulder.

Dean rescues the dregs of the soup and places the mug behind himself on the floor, one arm tight around Cas’s shoulders, then draws him into the whole of his embrace. Rocks him gently, shushes soothing nonsense into his hair while he shakes out the last of the night’s terrors into his chest.

Eventually, Cas pulls back with a brave, watery smile, and Dean takes his cue. He scoops up the bag with the first aid kid and the coffee thermos and heads out to the little table by the door. He pours two steaming cups in the warming chill of morning and sips as he watches the robins chirruping, digging for worms. Cas emerges a little while later, dressed in his flannel pajama pants and favorite worn-soft maroon hoodie. He squints in the sunshine and flops into the second chair, focused entirely on his coffee.

Dean just watches him. Watches the creases in his brow, the laugh lines around his eyes, all crinkling as he sips and smoothing out with his satisfied sigh. He studies the wreck of his hair, the worked and weathered solidity of his hands

Dean clears his throat, froggy from disuse. “How you feeling?”

Cas thinks, sighs, meets his eyes. “Better. Thanks to you.”

Dean lifts his cup to his lips to hide his smile, but Cas reaches out a hand to clasp Dean’s where it rests on the table. He doesn’t say anything, but when Dean meets his eyes again, he looks so soft and earnest that Dean doesn’t need to hear the words.

There had been a time when Castiel hadn’t let Dean see him like this. Now, it’s a ritual, something they both rely on. Dean would take away the pain in a heartbeat if he could, but the wolf is part of him. And Dean wouldn’t change him for the world.

“Any time, Cas,” he says with another sip of coffee and a squeeze of his hand. And he means it.

.

.

.

Tagging some nerds: @nickelkeep @daughter-of-the-rain-and-snow @weathergirl83 @reallyelegantsharkfish @elanor-n-evermind @maggiemaybe160 @hartlessfiction @jasminrogue @cassbutt-and-the-righteousbi @pallasperilous @suckerfordeansfreckles

[jemariel]

Happy Hogswatch, everyone!

(Just be thankful you’re not getting the full song - Nanny’s interpretation of the line “a shoulder to cry on” is NSFWOAE, as in: Not Safe For Work Or Anywhere Else.)

[jemariel]

@ the person who has a castiel cutout in their window opposite me i love you i'm ordering a dean cutout so they can stare at each other from across the road

[jemariel]

NON-freaks dni. This is a freaks only zone

[jemariel]

“Is it bad that I used to watch over you while you slept?” Cas asks. He nestles up closer to Dean in bed, wrapping his arm around him.

“Mmm? Nah, I mean I know I always said it was creepy,” Dean mumbles. “Probably, it was. But I kinda got a kick out of having my own guardian angel. Even back in the beginning.”

“I don’t mean when you could see me.” Cas frowns, giving Dean his best mournful gaze, asking apology. “I mean, when you didn’t know I was there.”

“Oh…?”

“Uh…not always,” Cas says. “But when things were going very badly, I’d stand centurion and wrap my wings around you for protection. Especially if you were sleeping in the car. You didn’t know I was there.”

“You wrapped your wings around me?” Dean whispers. He traces a finger up and down Cas’s arm, hardly aware he’s doing it. “While I was sleepin’ in Baby?”

“I don’t know if it made any difference.” Cas kisses his shoulder. “I was always so worried about you, I didn’t know what to do with myself.”

“Do wings…?” Dean chuckled shyly, resting his hand on Cas’s arm, his thumb grazing back and forth. “Can they protect…like...your mind?”

“They can offer a degree of psychic protection,” Cas said. “Not commonly. But…with the bond we’ve shared…”

“I just wonder… I didn’t get all the nightmares about hell I thought I would,” Dean says. “Sometimes, I did. And then a lot of times, my sleep was so peaceful. Like when you came into my dream and I was fishin’ on the lake.”

“That was me,” Cas murmurs. “I was always afraid to tell you. It seemed invasive. But I didn’t think you’d accept the help.”

“Probably not.” Dean takes his hand, and kisses his palm. “Thanks.”

[jemariel]

if you see this post you are obligated to reblog and tell me something good that happened to you this year

[jemariel]

bro im gonna CRY i didnt know this 🥺

[jemariel]

he named the burger he made dean deluxe

[jemariel]

So today I want to talk about puberty blockers for transgender kids, because despite being cisgender, this is a subject I’m actually well-versed in. Specifically, I want to talk about how far backwards things have gone.

This story starts almost 20 years ago, and it’s kind of long, but I think it’s important to give you the full history. At the time, I was working as an administrative assistant for a pediatric endocrinologist in a red state. Not a deep deep red state like Alabama, we had a little bit of a purple trend, but still very much red. (I don’t want to say the state at the risk of doxxing myself.) And I took a phone call from a woman who said, “My son is transgender. Does your doctor do hormone therapy?”

I said, “Good question! Let me find out.”

I went into the back and found the doctor playing Solitaire on his computer and said, “Do you do hormone therapy for transgender kids?” It had literally never come up before. He had opened his practice there in the early 2000s. This was roughly 2006, and the first time someone asked. Without looking up from his game of Solitaire, the doctor said, “I’ve never done it before, but I know how it works, so sure.”

I got back on the phone and told the mom, who was overjoyed, and scheduled an appointment for her son. He was the first transgender child we treated with puberty blockers. But not, by far, the first child we treated with puberty blockers, period. Because puberty blockers are used very commonly for children with precocious puberty (early-onset puberty). I would say about twenty percent of the kids our doctor treated were for precocious puberty and were on puberty blockers. They have been well studied and are widely used, safe, and effective.

Well. It turned out, the doctor I worked for was the only doctor in the state who was willing to do this. And word spread pretty fast in the tight-knit community of ‘parents of transgender children in a red state��. We started seeing more kids. A better drug came out. We saw some kids who were at the age where they were past puberty, and prescribed them estrogen or testosterone. Our doctor became, I’m fairly sure, a small folk hero to this community. 

Insurance coverage was a struggle. I remember copying articles and pages out of the Endocrine Society Manual to submit with prior authorization requests for the medications. Insurance coverage was a struggle for a lot of what we did, though. Growth hormone for kids with severe idiopathic short stature. Insulin pumps, which weren’t as common at the time, and then continuous glucose monitoring, when that came out. Insurance struggles were just part and parcel of the job.

I remember vividly when CVS Caremark, a pharmaceutical management company, changed their criteria and included gender dysphoria as a covered diagnosis for puberty blockers. I thought they had put the option on the questionnaire to trigger an automatic denial. But no - it triggered an approval. Medicaid started to cover it. I got so good at getting approvals with my by then tidy packet of articles and documentation that I actually had people in other states calling me to see what I was submitting (the pharmaceutical rep gave them my number because they wanted more people on their drug, which, shady, but sure. He did ask me if it was okay first).

And here’s the key point of this story:

At no point, during any of this, did it ever even occur to any of us that we might have to worry about whether or not what we were doing was legal.

It just never even came up. It was the medically recommended treatment so we did it. And seeing what’s happening in the UK and certain states in America is both terrifying and genuinely shocking to me, as someone who did this for almost fifteen years, without ever even wondering about the legality of it.

The doctor retired some years ago, at which point there were two other doctors in the state who were willing to prescribe the medications for transgender kids. I truly think that he would still be working if nobody else had been willing to take those kids on as patients. He was, by the way, a white cisgender heterosexual Boomer. I remember when he was introduced to the concept of ‘genderfluid’ because one of our patients on HRT wanted to go off. He said ‘that’s so interesting!’ and immediately went to Google to learn more about it. 

I watched these kids transform. I saw them come into the office the first time, sometimes anxious and uncertain, sometimes sullen and angry. I saw them come in the subsequent times, once they were on hormone therapy, how they gradually became happy and confident in themselves. I saw the smiles on their faces when I gave them a gender marker letter for the DMV. I heard them cheer when I called to tell them I’d gotten HRT approved by insurance and we were calling in a prescription. It was honestly amazing and I will always consider the work I did in that red state with those kids to be something I am incredibly proud of. I was honored to be a part of it.

When I see all this transgender backlash, it’s horrifying, because it was well on the way to become standard and accepted treatment. Insurances started to cover it. Other doctors were learning to prescribe it. And now … it’s fucking illegal? Like what the actual fuck. We have gone so far backwards that it makes me want to cry. I don’t know how to stop this slide. But I wrote this so people would understand exactly how steep the slide is.

[jemariel]

Who is most likely to ... Holiday Edition 🎅🏼

[jemariel]

Ah yes, Castiel's two favorites, Dean Winchester and uh... checks hand scribble... Salami Sandwich

i love it when supernatural says out loud that castiel is doing something for both brothers and then frames the scene like this. sam completely blocked and hidden and dean front and center. i think this is a good metaphor for the way castiel views his actions and his feelings. in his head he’s doing things for the brothers. for humanity. but anyone else looking in can see that ALL castiel really sees when he’s doing these things is ✨DEAN✨

[jemariel]

1.18 — Something Wicked

[jemariel]

So. The Hardy Boys finally found me. Took you long enough.

insp | reference

[jemariel]

the probability of a character being gay if he's never stated his sexuality is like, a good 10%. but the moment someone takes care to write him into an awkward situation where he believes another man is flirting with him and he goes 'oh um ah. no. i'm straight' well haha. let's just say. one billion

[jemariel]

i want to see castiel

[jemariel]

i love you physical conflict i love you violence in place of soft touch that we can never have i love you destiel beating the shit out of each other