#Kansas is pretty in it’s own way but it doesn’t need to be that big

[roylustang]

I’ll post some pics at a time when I have more reliable service but checking in just to say my life is fucking awesome now lol

[boldlyvoid]

State of Grace - Part One

summary: While trying to find herself after college, Y/N moves in with her aunt in D.C for a while. Falling in love with the city, her aunt's job and the cute co-worker she's heard so much about

overall warnings: depression, mentions of Maeve and broken hearts, post-college blues, mentions of Alex's son and his genetic disease, strangers to lovers, opposite of a slow burn

word count: 4.2k

Masterlist

"love is so short, forgetting is so long." Pablo Neruda

Her favourite aspect about her father is the fact he has a twin sister.

Alex is the coolest aunt anyone could ask for. She was her safe house, her getaway car, her sidekick, the person she’d call to help hide the body, and they’ve been that way since Y/N was a baby.

Her father met her mother, had her and followed Alex to Virginia for a few years. Alex lived with them during that time, only moving out when she got into the academy and yet she was still over all the time. Then the evil bitch ruined her career and she left Virginia, leaving her family to decide it was also time to move…

She remembers very little about Virginia, she remembered how the leaves changed colours in the fall and having no idea why they did that, thinking it was pretty and then packing boxes to move to Kansas City. Being so far away from Alex, calling her on the phone most nights. Flying out to see her for Christmas and to meet her new cousin.

She spent a large majority of her life in the sky, on her way to her aunt Alex’s doorstep.

Now, Y/N’s 23, packing a bag to live in her guest bedroom in DC while she attempts to find herself. Fresh out of college, no aspirations left and a heavyweight that the world set on her shoulders in the name of growing up.

Sometimes she really wished she never grew up.

“Honey, are you sure you want to do this?” Her dad asked carefully from her doorway, “you’re mother and I really don’t mind you staying here for a while?”

“I know, but I need to feel like my own person, not just your daughter, and as long as I’m here I’m not going to be able to do that,” she explained it for the hundredth time, hoping he’d understand eventually. “I just need something new, and Alex is never home so it’ll be like I have my own apartment where I don’t have to pay rent.”

“Just be careful,” he begs. “I have 1 little girl, and no matter how big you get, I will always want to take care of you.”

“I know dad,” she smiles, handing him a bag, “if you really feel that way maybe you’ll help me move everything to the car?”

“Of course, kiddo,” he smiles, taking her bag and heading down the stairs first. “You want it just in the trunk?” He calls back up from the bottom of the stares.

“Yes please!” She yells back, shaking her head with a smile.

As excited as she was to finally leave her family home and find her own way of life, she was going to miss him. She was going to miss how he came home from work and told her all about his day, taking her out for lunches when he had days off and always bringing her home something when he went shopping with her mom. She’d miss her mom's cooking and late-night conversations in the kitchen about what anti-depressants they’ve both been on and what works best… just casual mentally ill family things.

She had an interesting relationship with both of them, they were more like friends than parents, they weren’t strict or expectant of much.

They loved her dearly, and they never pushed her… now that’s partially the reason why she doesn’t know how to fly yet. Standing at the edge of the nest, looking out at the world and having no fucking clue if her wings even work.

She had a degree in English Lit, no idea what to do with it and no real drive to look. She wanted to be like her aunt, she wanted to be cool and worldly and experienced but she had no idea how to achieve it? She didn’t have real friends, she didn’t have a life partner who understood her and let her be free, and she didn’t have a wicked cool job that actually felt rewarding. Alex had all of that, and Y/N desperately wanted to be like her.

After many late-night conversations, hearing all about the little group of people she worked with and now mingled with outside of work, Y/N decided she’d like to try. She thought if she lived with Alex if she met her friends and made her own that maybe, just maybe, she’d feel like she was on the right path for once.

After a week of packing and preparing, her father drove her 45 minutes to the airport, waving her off before she boarded for DC. She let out a deep breath she didn’t know she was holding in as soon as she sat in her plane seat. For just 2 hours, she was able to stare out the window and think about the endless possibilities

She lands, finds her bags and then she sees her. Her aunt holds a big sign with her name on it, a smile plastered to her face and her arms wide open. Y/N runs other, holding her close, never wanting to let go.

—

He just stares for a minute, watching Alex talking to someone at the main doors, pointing around like she’s giving a tour. It’s not that weird for his co-workers to show people around, what’s weird for him was the fact the girl she was talking to was stunning and he suddenly felt like he couldn’t breathe. It was only 8 in the morning, it was way too early for him to be having heart palpitations because of a pretty girl.

“Pick your jaw up off the floor, kid,” Morgan teased him. “Did Blake not tell you she’d be showing her niece Y/N around today?”

He shakes his head, “no. I-I have no idea, but wow…”

Morgan just smiles, “She was asking me about renting around her, if her niece likes it here she might stay. She’s 23, fresh out of college with an English literature degree and very, very smart. Blake said they’ve been best friends since she was a baby.”

“Huh,” he nods, listening but still staring off at them when Alex starts to walk over. “Shit, shit,” he turns around and pretends to be working on something, shuffling papers and standing, he hands Derek a blank paper, “here you go Derek thanks, bye.”

Derek just laughs, leaving him to be his normal weird self.

“Spencer,” Alex’s voice interrupts his scrambling. “I’d like to introduce you to my niece.”

He turns around, face flushed as he takes a deep breath, “hi,” he waves awkwardly, “nice to meet you.”

“I’ve heard a lot about you,” she smiles at him and Spencer feels his heart swell in his chest, it beats loud enough to ring in his ears and knock the wind out of his chest.

“G-good things I hope?” He swallows sharply, pulling at his tie and loosening his collar.

She nods, “Alex said you’re her best friend here which means you’re now my competition, buddy, so watch out.”

She’s automatically playful and Spencer actually laughs, unintimidated and fully enamoured with her being, she’s like Alex but younger and stunning and he’s completely attracted to her. Like a magnet that’s never been stuck to anything before, he’s never known how good it feels to have something you belong to. Her charge is so strong, he’s being pulled in and by the smile on her face, he hopes to whatever god there is that she feels it too.

“Or we could just become best friends as well?” He’s not sure where the confidence comes from.

Neither does Alex, but she smiles, “why don’t you two go get some coffee from the cart outside and talk about how much you love me, and I’ll do some of my paperwork so we can leave early tonight?”

“I’d love that,” Y/N nods, shooting another smile to Spencer and reaching out a hand for him, “so what’s your favourite thing about Alex?”

He grabs his coat, throwing it on quickly before actually taking her hand, “well, because she’s standing right there I’m going to say everything.”

Alex laughs, patting him on the back as they pass, “have fun, kids.”

—

In the elevator, he’s holding her hand and it’s starting to get a little sweaty, but she smirks, it’s been a very long time since she’s felt like this. Giddy, like a schoolgirl, she’d hold hands with a boy she doesn’t know to get a coffee and talk… she feels like she’s on a high school date.

“So,” she looks up at him, he’s so tall and pretty, she had no idea he was so handsome. “How long have you worked here? You look too young to be so important?”

“I’m 33?” He laughs, “why, how old do I look?”

Her eyes widen in shock, “33?” He nods in response and she shakes her head, “I’d say maybe 27 at most… but 33 makes sense. You’re a doctor right? I think I remember Alex saying that.”

“I have a high IQ,” he presses his lips together awkwardly, “I blew through school, I’m not really sure how I ended up here.”

The elevator dings and opens, she lets him lead but she continues the conversation. “What’s that like? I have no idea what to do or how to even start my life.”

“I feel like I was just doing what was expected of me, what was asked of me, and never what I wanted. If I followed my dreams as a kid I’d be a space cowboy now,” he shrugs, not realizing how funny he is.

She laughs at him and he shoves her with his shoulder, pulling her back in thanks to their interlocked hands and bumping her shoulder again. They instantly click, it’s cute and innocent and sweet and she’s so happy suddenly, like he’s instant serotonin, just being near him is enough to change her day around.

“So I hear you’re an English lit major?” He asks next.

She sighs, “yeah, don’t know why.”

He leaves it at that until they have their coffee, which he pays for and then escorts her to his favourite bench. Sitting right beside her, he turns his body to her and puts all his attention on her and it feels amazing. “What do you do for fun?”

She laughs awkwardly, “I don’t know what fun entails.”

He looked sad and confused, “you’re very funny, I’m sure you’re a fun person.”

“I’m here because I want to find myself… I don’t even know where to start?” She rants to him. “I want to try new things and find my passion and do something useful with my life, but I have no fucking clue where to find myself?”

“Strangely enough, I’ve had this job for 10 years now and I still have no clue who I really am?” Spencer agrees. “I took this job because the only person who I could identify any fatherly love from was my mentor, and then when he left I stayed because I didn’t know anything else… I didn’t have anyone but this. I still don't?”

“Which is exactly what I don’t want to happen to me,” she’s never opened up like this to anyone but her therapist. Feeling a few tears well behind her eyes. “I already feel so useless and boring, I don’t want to be 40 and have nothing to show for it… even though I know that I should just do something for my benefit, ‘do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life' and all that bullshit, you know?”

He nods, “actually… and this might be insane but—

“I think I need a bit of insane,” she cuts him off with a smirk.

“I’ve never been to New York for a non-work-related reason,” he says. “Would you like to go for a weekend and visit some museums and things and live a little? Maybe we can start there, and find ourselves together?”

She nods, “I’ve always wanted to walk in Central Park, and the fall is the best time to do that.”

“I love trains,” he adds, “would you like to take the train up and we can book a hotel or an Airbnb or something?”

She nods, “I’ll cover the hotel if you cover the train tickets?”

“I’ll find a weekend that I can take off soon, and then we can really plan, okay?”

“You know, normally anyone would tell me not to go with a random man to New York, but given you catch murderers all day I guess I don’t have to worry about you murdering me, right?” She teases him.

“Well, actually, profilers would make the best killers,” he teases back. “No one would ever know I did it.”

She shoves him, “I can tell why she likes you.”

“Yeah?” His face changes, smile fading as he thinks about it.

She picks up on it, “is she the only one?”

“No, no,” he shakes his head, still not making eye contact with her. “The team is like my family, I just know that the people who love me the most always leave, and I think she’s coming to the end of her time here… she seems out of it lately.”

“Well… it’s November.”

“What happened in November?”

“My cousin died,” she whispers. “She had a son named Ethan, he died from a really really rare disease when we were little and it was genetic… I got tested for it and didn’t have it but it scared her and my parents into never having any more kids and now she’s like my second mom but also my cool older sister?”

“Oh…”

He had no idea and she felt terrible, “she won't talk about it, she pretends she never had a son so don’t tell her that you know, and don’t bring it up unless she tells you first. It’s not something my family talks about, but it’s fucked us all up.”

“I don’t think anyone has a normal family,” his voice is barely a whisper.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers back, placing her hand on his knee and sending him a soft smile. “It’s your turn with the talking stick now, tell me about it?”

His brows raise and his head tilts, he stares off, thinking about it quickly before opening his mouth and closing it again. He lets out a huff of air through his nose and presses his lips together like he doesn’t know where to start.

“My mom has schizophrenia, it was hard,” he leaves it at that and she understands. “But I’m here now, I live in this moment and I’m trying to make it good.”

She smiles so hard her cheeks hurt, “you’re a wonderful person, you know that, right?”

He shrugs with a small chuckle, “I’m trying extra hard for you to think so.”

“She told me you were cute and kind, incredibly smart and that we’d make great friends,” Y/N admits. “She didn’t tell you I was coming to stay with her because she didn’t want you to get stressed out and say no.”

He nods along, “so she’s told you about Maeve as well, I’m guessing?”

“I know you’ve lost someone recently, and I know Alex loves you like a son and she wants to see both of us happy…” she stares into his eyes, watching them soften at the realization she loves him. “She’s not playing matchmaker on purpose, she wanted us to be friends more than anything because while she lost a son, I lost a friend.”

Without asking, he pulls her in for a hug and holds her against his chest and she’s quick to wrap her arms around his middle and hold him just as tight. “Thank you.”

“Thank you,” Spencer replies softly, still holding her, seemingly without any plans to let go.

She hasn’t been hugged by someone she isn’t related to in years. He’s warm and soft, he smells good and he’s so cuddly. He’s kind and everything Alex said he would be and she can see him being in her life for a while. Hell, it feels like he has been in her life for years already.

When she starts to pull away, she’s quick to press a kiss to his cheek, feeling her own cheeks heat up as she smiled. “Do you want to hang out later, when you’re done work?”

He nods, standing and reaching out his hand for her. He helps her to her feet and presses a kiss to her forehead, still holding her hand, “I’d love to.”

—

Y/N stays in the office, sitting with Alex and mingling with the rest of his co-workers. Many joked that having her there felt like it was “bring your child to work day” for Alex. She showed her off like a proud mother, Y/N on the other hand sat there embarrassed while staring over at Spencer every few moments.

His mind was wrapped up in thoughts of her for the rest of the day, by noon he realized he was at least 4 cases behind what he would normally have accomplished in the day. She was a distraction, a very beautiful one at that, and everyone in the office could tell.

Derek, thinking it was fun to pester Spencer as if he was his younger brother, sits on the edge of his desk and starts, “you haven’t been this distracted—-

“Since Maeve,” he cuts Derek off, looking up at him with an expression that screams “not fucking now, dude.”

“Sorry,” he apologizes right away.

“It’s okay,” Spencer brushes it off and replaces his look with a soft smile, “Alex wants us to be friends.”

“Friends…”

“I know,” Spencer rolls his eyes, shaking his head slightly, “how am I supposed to stay friends with the most fascinating person I’ve met in months?”

“I’m sure Alex is one of those cool aunts who won't mind if her co-worker is banging her niece…” Derek teases, “just make sure Alex isn’t around, have a little respect.”

“No shit, Derek,” Spencer smacks his knee lightly, laughing with him. “She’s really cool, we’re going to go to new york together soon…”

“You met her this morning?” Derek’s shocked and amazed.

“She’s here because she wants to find herself, I told her I’ve never been to New York and now we’re going together,” he shrugs like it’s easy. “I need to have something outside of here, you know that. You’ve been pushing me to do it, for like 9 years? I need to enjoy life and she wants to find what she enjoys, it’s a good thing.”

Derek’s proud of him, reaching forward and ruffling his hair, “I can take 2 of your files if you want to go talk to hotch right now and ask for some time off?”

“Really?”

He nods, ��go on lover boy, get the girl.”

—

They take the metro home, Spencer taps his card and lets her thought he gates first, following her after another tap. He takes her hands again once they’re both through, she sits beside him, leaning her head on his shoulder and sharing small conversations between all the stops.

She didn’t know that she could ever feel so strongly about someone so fast. It was terrifyingly exciting, going from not knowing someone to feeling like they could change her life.

He rested his cheek against the top of her head as she rested on his shoulder, holding her close and enjoying the company. If she could read minds she would say he was feeling the same way as her, his internal thoughts were probably the same shocked monologue of never believing this could ever happen to someone like him. By the way he held her like she could run away, the way he looked at her like she might disappear, she felt wanted and appreciated and it was so early.

Love at first sight always sounded like a hoax to her.

She’s loved people before, people who didn’t speak her love language and her feelings got lost in translation. She remembers how love felt in the past, how it was heavy and paralyzing, stealing parts of her and hiding them away behind locked doors in her mind and stealing all the keys. Feelings that only exist in memories and echos, in the smell of chimney smoke and his laundry detergent. Memories that feel like her chest being ripped apart and crushed and stomped on… it’s only now that she realizes that love doesn’t have to be like that.

Sometimes love is meeting through a mutual friend, shared coffees and life stories and sadness. It’s a feeling of excitement, not because she finally has someone but because someone finally wants to have her too. Spencer holds her like he’s a collector that just got his hands on something he’s been looking for his whole life, a prized possession that was only ever a dream, but now it’s his.

She pulls back enough to look over at him, smiling as soon as she sees his smile, “are you okay?” He asks.

She nods, “I haven’t felt excited for tomorrow in a long time. Thank you.”

For the first time in her life, she had something good to lose. She was so used to having everything already listed as lost, lost friends, lost family members, lost causes, lost ambitions… she was fine with all of that now because it helped her find him.

“It’s been almost a year since my last girlfriend died, I know you know that, but it’s been about that long since I’ve looked forward to tomorrow as well.”

“I haven’t dated anyone since I was 13,” she replies, pressing her lips together awkwardly. “I dated a guy 2 years older than me, he broke my heart and made my life a living hell and I’ve kinda been alone since.”

“Love is so short, forgetting is so long,” Spencer whispers. “Short stories are some of my favourites…”

“If you end a story with they lived happily ever after, it can continue past the last page,” she teases him. “I should know I paid 120 thousand dollars to read books.”

He laughs, “yeah I have 3 Ph.D.’s.”

She just shakes her head, “you get better and better by the second, you know that?”

He nods, “I could say the same thing about you.”

They approach their stop, standing together, still hand in hand and impossibly close to one another, completely enamoured and enthralled with each other. Full of smiles and giggles, playful shoves, hugs on the escalator, brushed shoulders in the streets… he was very hands-on.

Inside his apartment, she feels it tenfold.

“Have you ever felt homesick while sitting in your own home,” she whispers over to him as he takes off his coat.

He nods, “most of my life.”

“I just felt it leave?” She looks like she’s seen a ghost, shocked yet calm, “like I’m supposed to be here?”

He takes a deep breath, staring off at the floor, he tilts his head, “I think it’s gone for me too?”

“Huh,” she walks into his space and wraps her arms around his middle. “You’ve changed everything for me, Spencer Reid.”

“It’s so strange how I don’t know you at all, and yet I feel like you’ve been in my life forever?” He whispers back. “How does that happen? I’ve never felt instantly comfortable with anyone?”

She presses her lips together and thinks about it for a quick second, not wanting to scare him off but also knowing there’s nothing to really lose yet. “Do you believe in love at first sight?”

“I didn’t yesterday,” he whispers back.

“I never expected to find someone else while looking for myself. It’s not something I expected, I’m not stable—

“I’m not stable either,” he cuts her off. “I’m a fucking mess. I’m literally a wreck, I haven’t felt normal ever, I am so sad and lonely the majority of my days and if you had’ve asked me last week if I was looking for someone new in my life I would have told you’ve I’ve given up on finding the one.”

“Okay,” she accepts it all then and there, “I know nothing about you. You know nothing about me, this is a fresh and clean slate where we get to begin this journey together. And I think we could build something beautiful together if we tried… I think Alex knew that too.”

“What am I going to do when you leave?” He whispers. “How can we make it work long term?”

“Alex joined the FBI at 24, I’m going to be 24 soon… JJ’s job looks like it could be interesting, maybe I’ll stay around for a while?” She suggests. “I’ve always wanted to be like my aunt.”

“I don’t have an MD like her husband,” he teases.

She shoves him with a smile, “you’re not even my boyfriend yet.”

“I’d like to be,” he says, “would you like to go on a date and see if we can make this work before we go to New York?”

“I’d love that.”

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[one-more-offbeat-anthem]

If the inspiration takes you, would you be able to write a lil something about a misunderstanding and miscommunication? Light angst ficlet with a happy ending? I love your fics, thank you for sharing your talent with us and choosing this fandom!

okay I had to think about this one for a second, because as y'all know I don't normally write angst, but here we are! also thank you for your kind words ;-; although I'm not really sure I chose spn I think I just got sucked into the vortex and here we are.

I hope you enjoy this ficlet! (also imagine this is a fake season 9. where dean doesn't kick cas from the bunker and they go on hunts <3) (also this got way out of hand I'm so sorry)

*********

It was supposed to be a milk run.

Of course, half the time that they get a case that's "supposed to be a milk run," it ends with one of them almost dying, just for the hell of it, and today's no exception.

Sam's off on a different hunt in Colorado, so it's just Dean and Cas, which is no problem. Dean trusts Cas to watch his six, to watch everything.

Or, at least, it isn't a problem until their "milk run" turns into a really pissed-off poltergeist (to be fair, Dean'd be pretty pissed if someone was shooting at him), and then Dean gets hurled halfway back to Kansas, it feels like, and by the time he comes to with a pounding in his head and a searing pain in his shoulder, said poltergeist is gone and Cas is standing over him with a big, bleeding gash across his face.

Every time Cas gets hurt these days, it's like a fucking train wreck. He tries to heal himself, and then he can't, and he gets all moody and sullen, which, like, Dean can understand, but it doesn't make it any easier, and to make matters worse today Cas tried to heal Dean, and now they're sitting in the Impala in complete silence while Dean drives, trying to ignore his aching right shoulder.

"Where're we going?" Cas finally asks, picking at his sweater's sleeves. Dean's already mentally going over what might be best to get the blood out of it--lemon juice? Vinegar? He read in a magazine that hairspray is good for stains, oddly enough, but of course he doesn't own any--

"The hospital," Dean answers.

"So you can dump me there?"

"So I can--what?!" Dean takes his eyes off the road for a second to look at Cas, staring out the windshield. He's got one hand messing with his sweater and the other holding Dean's flannel over his still-bleeding face. "We're going 'cause if I try to stitch up that cut, I'm gonna end up stabbing you in the eye."

"You have very steady hands."

"Not when I'm worried. Let's go back to the dumping thing." Dean glances at Cas again. "Why would I leave you in a hospital?"

Cas shrugs. "I'm not useful anymore. Without my grace."

"That's a crock of shit, and you know it."

"Do I?"

Dean lets out a sigh and pulls the car over, trucks honking behind him. He doesn't think Cas is going to bleed out, and if this flannel gets soaked, there's another in the trunk.

"Look." Dean turns his body to completely face Cas, which crunches his legs, but this is important. "I know I'm shit with words, but you gotta hear me. First of all, I've been hunting since I was a kid, without an angel, and I'm still alive."

"Actually, you died and I--"

"Shut up. Second of all, I know in your head you're an angel first, but in my head, you're Cas first. You don't stop being Cas just because Metatron took your grace."

Cas doesn't respond, and it's actually kinda hard to tell what he's thinking when half of his face is covered in a bloody flannel, so Dean reaches out a hand to tug on Cas's wrist and pull the fabric off.

Okay, that's a lot of blood.

"You get me?" Dean asks, and Cas nods. Dean slides back to his seat and starts the car.

"What'd you mean about being worried?" Cas finally asks.

"What?" Dean turns to see if there are any cars coming and then pulls back onto the highway.

"You said you didn't have steady hands when you're worried."

"Put the flannel back on," Dean says. "I'm worried about you, dumbass."

"Because I'm--"

"Yes, because you're bleeding out of your face!" Dean curses and pulls over again. "For the love of god, Cas. What am I gonna have to do to convince you that I care about you?"

Before Dean even asks the question, though, he knows the answer. He's known the answer for a while, since last year in purgatory. Since he prayed to Cas for year, killed monsters to find him. Since Cas didn't make it out and Dean saw his face everywhere. Since Cas appeared behind him in a random motel, covered in dirt and grime.

Since he found Cas lying dead in an armchair, shirt ripped and stomach sliced open, since he lied to April to bring Cas back.

When humans want something really bad, we lie.

Well, Dean's gonna be truthful for a second. He's tried to say it before, in different words, words like that's the hardest I've laughed in a long time or I'd rather have you, cursed or not or nobody gets left behind or I need you.

He might as well say it straight.

"We're never going to get to the hospital if you keep doing this," Cas points out helpfully, and Dean just about rolls his eyes.

"Well then shut up and listen. I like myself, and the world, a whole lot better when you're around. And I like you."

"You like me."

"I love you."

Okay, he didn't mean to say that.

Yet.

Cas's reaction happens slowly and then all at once. One second, he's staring at Dean, almost blankly (although it's hard to read his expression because, once again, flannel on his face), and then the next second he's dropped the fabric and is kissing Dean.

It's actually kinda gross, because of all the blood, but Dean's mind has also stopped working so he doesn't notice that much. There's been dozens of times over the years that he's wanted to do this, more than he can count, and the shock doesn't recede until Cas is pulling away.

"My head hurts," Cas finally says.

"Okay, we're going." Dean pulls back onto the highway for real this time, although he takes one hand off the wheel and finds Cas's free hand on the seat.

(Their second kiss, after Cas has gotten stitches and one of the other nurses at the emergency room helpfully relocates Dean's shoulder, is a lot less bloody.

The rest all run together.)

[tempura-tickles]

Tied Up

A/N: This is my first fic, it’s not even long, and it took me nearly a day and a half to write 💀 But anyways, enjoy a lil drabble of Bruce getting his shit rocked

The situation was serious, as ridiculous as it would appear. Clark tried to remind himself of the fact that Bruce’s identity was at stake here as he took to the skies to his friend’s rescue.

Normally, this wouldn’t be such a big deal. Batman needs backup, he has his own tiny malicia of raven haired kids that knew their way around a fight. But said kids were currently entertaining guests at Wayne Manor. At a party. A partyBruce was supposed to begin to host an hour ago.

This is serious, Clark repeats, even as he lands and stares down at a restrained, on his knees, and thoroughly pissed off Batman. Thankfully, whatever goon had chained him up had left his cowl on and spared him the death threat of exposing Gotham’s most recognizable face on full view in the alley. A thick, military grade leather bound Bruce’s wrists together so the palms met, connected to a steel chain that ran its way and secured itself to an air conditioning system. The risk of trying to pull away and get blasted with dangerously hot air was one Bruce would rather not take.

It wasn’t the unfortunate pose that sent Clark over the edge, though. It was the bright clown makeup that was painted on Bruce’s lower face, giving him a giant goofy grin that stretched across his entire jaw. That, paired with the infamous bat-glare?

Oh, this was hilarious.

Bruce looked up at the other, growling when Clark grabbed the ears of his cowl and tugged it off. “The metal should be able to be melted by your lasers, just try to avoid zapping my hands off-”

“Ehe…hehehehe..”

Bruce stared in dismay as Clark quickly covered his mouth, looking away to hide his amusement. “Are you serious right now?!”

“Oh come on, Bruce, you’ve gotta admit it, this is funny!” Clark barked out another chuckle, not even trying to hide if this time. “Relax, we all have our rock bottoms, it could be worse.”

“Rock- rock bottom?” Bruce’s voice heightened in pitch. Since when was Clark so vicious in his teasing? “I’ll show you rock bottom you son of a-” He stops, scowling when Clark fell into another fit of laughter. This was hopeless. “Just untie me!”

“Okay okay, just let me do something,” Clark pulled out his phone, standing back and pulling up his camera, “for Diana, come on, smile!”

“Fuck you.”

Clark pouted, looking over his phone and giving Bruce his baby blue puppy eyes. “Pleasee?” The trio had been dating for at least a month now, and much was to be learned about their stoic middle. For one, he hated salads, absolutely despised them. For another? Batman was surprisingly weak to Clark’s golden retriever gaze.

Bruce huffed and looked away, puffing his cheek. “I said no.”

“Pretty please? With a cherry on top, even?”

“Kansas style begging won’t work on mEHE!” Lurching forward with a surprised gasp, Bruce looked slowly at the hand that had delivered a round of squeezes to his hip. “Clark..” he chose his words carefully, inhaling slowly, “do. not.”

“Don’t do what, Mister Wayne?”

“Please.” His voice is nearly a whisper, barely audible to anyone that doesn’t have super hearing.

As if Clark would listen anyway.

Bruce threw his head back once a pair of hands settled on his hips and squeezed, thumbs rubbing firm circles into the soft pockets connecting his thigh to his waist. Deep inhales was all he could use to steel himself, lips wobbling as they tried their best to restrain the threatening smile and laughter. “Don- nngh! Dohon’t!”

Clark scribbled his fingers up and down his sides, revelling in the way Bruce arched and twisted side to side.

“Nonono- paha! Cla- clahaaahaha- rk!” He wailed, shaking his head back and forth quickly in any attempt to take control of his body. Every scratch and wiggle of the other’s fingers sent Bruce up the wall, ripping laughs and snorts from him. He gasped between bouts of laughter, cheeks a bright pink in the cold night air. “Fuhuhuck you!”

“Not right now, maybe later.” Clark mused, tapping his fingers on either side of Bruce’s neck, almost bursting into laughter himself when the poor man squealed. “I’m glad you’re finally finding this funny.”

“Ihihim laughing cause- because you’re torturing me!”

Clark delved into that soft, pudgy spot on Bruce’s lower belly that not even the suit could protect, delivering poke after poke to the delicate pouch.

Screaming laughter could be heard from that alley for at least another fifteen minutes, but anyone who eavesdropped wouldn’t dare investigate the bubbly giggles and snorts.

Must be a couple of kids in love teasing each other past curfew.

[stardustnfreckles]

To celebrate the DeanCas100k on ao3 here's a list of my all-time favourite Destiel fanfictions:

CANON VERSE

A turn of the earth Dean’s your typical half-orphaned, monster-killing 22-year-old until a trenchcoated stranger crashes into his back windshield one September night, claiming he’s an angel that knows him from the future and that he’s on the run.

Early seasons!Dean keeps meeting Cas at the most random moments, till he isn’t anymore... Definetly a must read.

In the shadow of your wings

Set after the S11 finale. Dean kinda breaks Cas’ heart. Because sometimes he can be thick SOB. The Cas finds a new shiny and witty italian boyfriend and Dean’s not happy about it. and now Sam is missing, Mary is back and Dean has a mixed bag of feelings he has to deal with. Probably my favorite canonverse ever.

Like moses and batman and James Dean dean used to turn tricks. over a decade later, he met cas.

A masterpiece in characterization by saltyfeathers. I loved everything, The dialogues, the flashbacks, the way Dean and Cas emotions are portrayed. There’s angst and internalized homophobia but also confort and IT IS JUST SO GOOD OK?

The best bang for your buck It’s not like Castiel knows who this GotImpala67 person is. There’s no personal information listed on their profile. Except that they’re male, thirty-seven, from Kansas and, apparently, they like inserting things inside themselves.

Cas plays dumb even tho he really is not and I love him for it. Dean is the kind of buyer who leaves detailed reviews of the products he buys (which is the best kind if you ask me) I love the writer’s style and their sense of humor. It’s short although I never get tired of re-reading this one. Also Bring up the deep & Till the juice runs from the same author are with mentioning.

Kisses by sunflowers beds by fanforfanatics & Watched by K_K_TiBal

This two fics have a on thing in common: At the end of both you’ll be asking yourself how can less than 5k hurt you so much?

I cried, then I smiled and cried some more. This fics will crush you in the best way possible.

Take me home country roads The most IC Deamon!Dean I’ve ever read. It’s a rollercoaster of emotions.

What’s missing is found (our souls can exhale now) by sobsicles aka queen of post S15 fix-it fics

That black dog ache A simple case turns Dean upside down as he attempts to deal with the effects of a particularly strange love spell.

The perfect gift Castiel has a big problem concerning Dean... thankfully, Sam is always around to help

Really short Crack!Fic about Cas being clueless and adorable.

So says the sword by komodobits

Actually I suggest to go on their ao3 profile and read EVERYTHING.

The profet must die

Dean starts reading Chuck’s book out of curiosity and ends up having a epiphany about his apparently not so much platonic relationship with a certain angel of the lord.

A room of one’s own All Dean wants is a little privacy. Cas doesn't understand.

It mostly smut with a bit of healthy angst and great amount of humor.

My Roots Take Flight After forty years in Hell, Dean’s more than willing to accept the offer: become a guardian angel and earn his freedom. But his new ward seems destined to hunt alongside Sam, and there are secrets in Heaven that the angels don’t want found out. Dean’s going to have to choose between his duty and the people he loves- and to work out just where Castiel fits in.

Reverse!Verse set in season 4. It’s interesting to watch their relationship develop even if the roles are reversed.

The hands that bind me Dean is struggling with adjusting back into the civilized world after a year of fighting for his life in Purgatory. He's going to need some angelic assistance reining in his darker impulses.

If your’re into BDSM/Sub!Dean/Dom!Cas/Hurt/Confort/Dark themes then that’s the fic for you.

What has eight tentacles and isn’t allowed to eat pie? Dean is an octopus 🐙 and it’s weird but also kinda sweet.

Cuckoo and nest For a long time, Castiel thought that every earthly possession other than the immediately necessary was excess to requirement. But Dean – Dean who named his car, who keeps a photograph of his mother in his wallet, some thirty-plus years after her death, who still has the crumpled ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign with a sleeping pelican emblazoned on it from the Microtel outside of Roanoke where he first kissed Castiel, clumsy and unsure, under the unsteady fluorescence of an exhausted bathroom bulb – is sentimental. it puzzles Castiel, where Dean draws the line between what is meaningful and what it is worthless.

Established relationship/ they’re really bad at communication/ fluff / hurt confort

Put up your dukes Dean can't sleep. Cas offers to tire him out.

Along my restless palms Ever since Cas started staying in the bunker, Dean’s been having these crazy dreams—dreams that feature him and Cas in absurd, tawdry scenarios like something out of a filthy paperback. Dean chalks it up to exhaustion, or some monster messing with his head, anything to ignore the real cause: Cas in his personal space, in various states of undress, and, wow, way more muscular than Dean would’ve expected. But if it’s just physical lust that’s the cause, then that’s an easy fix, right? No big deal. There’s definitely nothing else that his subconscious is trying to tell him. Absolutely not.

last but not least Pretty much anything by xylodemon. The atmosphere and the way characters are portrayed are *chef kiss* There are a lor of case fics and they really feels like actual episodes from supernatural just way less omophobic and more fun.

[zmediaoutlet]

in support of Texas relief, @padaleckimeon donated $100 and requested Dean Jr. meeting Sam and Dean in heaven. Thank you for donating!

to get your own personalized fic, please see this post. (no longer taking prompts) 

(read on AO3)

When Dad dies, Dean takes a week off. It wasn’t sudden, or a surprise. Dad had been sick for a while, his body starting to fail him. At first Dean had been scared, and then he’d been angry. He was only twenty-four when Dad got the diagnosis and it wasn’t—fair, in some stupid but essential way. He’d barely graduated from college and, yeah, Dad was kind of old, older than a lot of his friends’ parents, but—he thought, somehow, that him dying just wasn't… applicable. Dad was just—there, always. Solid, supportive, kind of boring maybe but also stronger than anyone Dean had ever known, or would ever know, and it wasn’t right that he could just be sitting in his apartment midway through a novel and get a call and kind of sigh, because he was in a good part in the book, and then to sit up straight with his hair standing on end to hear Dad say, quiet, I'm sorry, buddy. We need to talk about something. That’s what he said, first. That he was sorry.

There were treatments, but not many. Dean had flown out and gone to a few of the appointments with the oncologist and Dad had been quiet, listening to the options. He’d researched a lot of this on his own, because Dean had done the same thing, and they’d both been nodding along during the options. Injections, radiation. Chemo. Dad had asked, polite, what the life expectancy was for each option, and Dean had watched the side of his face and not the doctor, and when the answer was given Dad had closed his eyes briefly, and then looked away from both Dean and the doctor, out the window at the snowy day, and Dean had known, then.

Dad made it past Dean’s twenty-fifth birthday. He had a party with his friends, at his girlfriend’s apartment, and they tried to keep his spirits up but it was a pretty shitty party, all told. The next day, his actual birthday, he flew back out to Dad’s house and he was in good spirits—had a mini-cake, even, with a single candle that he made Dean blow out—but he was thin, and his hair was growing back in snow-white and tender-soft, and when Dad fell asleep in front of the crappy old cowboy movie that Dean had picked just because he knew Dad for some reason liked it, Dean went out onto the porch into the nearly-springtime air and he cried, pissed at himself. Pissed at everything. Then just—unbearably sad, because he liked his current girlfriend but he didn’t think he was going to marry her, and that meant that whatever girl he did marry would be one his dad would never meet—if he had kids, they’d never know how his dad concentrated like a motherfucker on crossword puzzles and obsessed over documentaries and knew every single piece of the inside of that behemoth car in the garage and was just the smartest kindest most stubborn person. Just—the best person. They’d listen to Dean’s stories maybe but they wouldn’t know, because Dad would never meet them, and that was just—unbearable, that night. In the morning, Dad made oatmeal and Dean added a bunch of sugar because Dad’s oatmeal was inedible otherwise, and Dad smiled kind of rueful like he always did when Dean did that, and then Dad said, I’m sorry, again, kind of quiet, and Dean reached out and held his hand—thin, and the bones feeling frail—and he said don’t be sorry, Dad, and four months later, Dad was dead.

Dad was always pretty up-front with him about most everything, especially after he and Mom split up. When he was twelve, Dad explained the supernatural very carefully, telling him that he was safe but that other people might not be, and why. When he was thirteen, Dad told Dean that Hell and Heaven were both real and that there was, definitely, confirmed, a God, and maybe it wasn’t the same God that other people knew but that Dad said he was kind, in his own way. The person in charge of Hell, Dad said, was maybe less so, but she wouldn’t hurt Dean, ever. Dad said he knew that for fact, and he said it so certainly, looking Dean in the eye, that Dean believed him. When Dean turned eighteen, a few months from graduating high school, Dad took him to a tattoo parlor and said for maybe the first time in Dean’s life that something was non-negotiable, and Dean hadn’t cared because what other kid in the senior year was going to walk at graduation with a kickass demonic tattoo?

There were other things, though, that they didn’t talk about. Dad said one day a lot when Dean was little but then, when he was older and it was clear that one day would be never, he just said—I can’t, buddy. I wish I could.

After the week off, rattling around the old house, and the cremation with no service that Dad had insisted on, Dean drives out to the lawyer in Sioux Falls. She’s nice. Respectful but not cloying. The Samuel Winchester Estate that Dean is the sole beneficiary of is—a lot of money. A lot more money than he knew Dad had, or that he could have ever earned. Dad has assigned some of the money to go to charities, and to some people Dean doesn’t know—the lawyer doesn’t say who in the specific, but says they’re kids of some of Dad’s old friends. Dean didn’t know Dad had many friends, much less ones who’d get trust funds in inheritance. Aside from the stock options and the accounts and all the money left over, Dean inherits a list of assets. The house, of course. The Chevy in the garage, with the stipulation that he can never sell it. A safety deposit box, from which the lawyer has already retrieved the contents.

She leaves him alone, to go through the box. Neatly organized, like everything else in Dad’s life. File-folders of pictures, printed out all old-fashioned. Some of Dean when he was a baby. Some of when Dad and Mom were still together, leaning against each other, Dean hugged between them. Some—much older, creased and faded, stored in little plastic sleeves so they can't degrade. He recognizes a few from the framed copies Dad always had in the house. Some he hasn't seen. Most of them—almost all of them—are of his Uncle Dean, who died before he was born, and he looks especially at one that just—hits him in the gut, in this awful way where he has to sit there looking at the soothing taupe paint of the conference room wall before he can look at it again. Uncle Dean's facing the camera, sort of, although he's laughing about something and not really looking into the lens, and there's Dad, laughing too. He looks… young. Younger than Dean is now. He flips the picture over. Dad's handwriting, careful: 2006, Bobby's house. Almost fifty years ago. An entire life he didn't know. He thinks again of his imaginary future kids. These lives they have, grandfather to father to son, that overlap like a venn diagram but—not enough. Not close to enough.

*

What's a life? How to summarize, from beginning to faded end, in a way that would make sense to anyone but who it happened to?

Dad left letters, explaining, but he's gone and the context is missing. There are so many questions Dean wants to ask but he can't, of course, anymore. The first letter is attached to the key to the bunker, where he would never take Dean when he was alive, and on winter break from med school Dean flies from Boston to Kansas and rents a car and drives alone through the snowfields.

Dark, inside. He throws the big switch and the lights crackle, hum on, almost reluctant. He has no idea how it's getting power. Dust, but not as much as there could be. A library, a kitchen. Archives upon archives. Dad had explained, but what little he'd said both in life and in the letters didn't come close. It was home, he wrote, for over a decade. The only one we had with four walls, for our whole lives, although we didn't think of it that way. I didn't, at least. Dean doesn't know what that means but he looks into the bedrooms and sees… emptiness, plain bunks and old desks and funny lamps. I just picked a random room, Dad said, and as Dean's looking he really can't tell which was Dad's. Figures. Their house when Dean was growing up didn't change a bit, no matter how terrible that wallpaper was. It's only when Dean pushes open the door to room 11 that there's any personality, and he flicks the light and stands there blinking, surprised. Guns and knives on the wall. Books, piled up. Empty beer bottles crowded on the little table. Dust, but—not as much as there could be. He walks in, cautious, this feeling in his gut like he's in someone's home and they've just walked out, and could return any moment. A food bowl on the floor. A shirt flung over the chair. On the desk: more books and magazines and a folded actually-on-paper newspaper from 2024, and a job application, half filled out. Dean Winchester, it says at the top, in mostly-neat capitals, and Dean rests a hand on the back of the chair and feels… strange. He tries to picture it—the man from the pictures, Dad's brother, filling up this space. Drinking beer and reading pulp westerns and checking out—oh, weird, magazine porn. Dean shakes his head. Impossible.

In the letters, Dad said: Hunting was all we knew how to do. With everything we knew, it was our duty to use the knowledge the best way we could. I went back and forth on it. Your uncle never did, even if I know there were times he wished he—that we both—could be something else. I don't want that for you. I want you to live exactly the life you want for yourself. No expectations, okay? Not from me or anyone else.

There are printed files that go back a hundred years. More than. Paper files, but old SSDs too, with connectors Dean has to find adapters for. Dad: If you want to know what we did, it's digitized. I know I always said I'd tell you one day, but I never knew how to say it. I'm sorry for that. I always thought I'd be one hundred percent honest, if I ever got a kid, because of how we were raised. I didn't know how hard that could be. Stuff that you'd want to say, but when it came time to just open your mouth and say it there weren't any words.

Dad wrote up all the old hunts, it turned out. Simple notes about where/when/how, the kind of monster it was, the number of people who died and the people who were saved. The people they had to explain things to, who knew now about the supernatural underbelly to the universe. He noted, too, if there were injuries, and Dean reads with his hand over his mouth a long, long litany of Dean W. shot, right arm; Sam W. broken bone in hand; Dean W. concussion; Sam W. strangled. On and on. No wonder Dad didn't make a big fuss when Dean broke his leg in the fourth grade.

He sleeps in the bunker overnight, in one of the spare bedrooms that's not room 11. There's a fan on the ceiling, dusty office supplies on the desk. By lamplight he reads the letters, on his back on the stiff terrible mattress, his eyes stinging and past-midnight tired. Our lives weren't the kind of thing anyone would want, Dad wrote. I spent so long trying to get away from it because I thought 'it shouldn't be this way' – and I was right, you know? It shouldn't have been how it was. But it was that way, anyway, and in the end that was something I was okay with. We were making what difference we could. We were happy. A lot of people have it worse.

'We'. Dad hardly writes Uncle Dean's name but he's in every letter. We, we, we. Dad told Dean stories, of course, the dumb stuff they got up to when they were teenagers, or the (sanitized, Dean's sure) adventures they had as adults, but despite the pictures on the wall at home and the pictures in the deposit box and the whole life that's here, Dean can't—see it. Beer bottles on the table in the bedroom, one on either side of the tiny table. The shirt slung over the chair. We were happy, he says, but—how? Dean can't imagine it.

In the last letter Dad wrote, I think I'm writing this when I've got a month or two left. Dr. Hendricks isn't sure. I wish I had more time, to explain how it was. Who we were. I never told you the most embarrassing thing in the world, but I'm old and I'm not going to be around and not much will be able to embarrass me anymore, so screw it. (Fifty years ago I would have gotten really mad at myself for that kind of comment; more things age can fix.) There are books about us. There's a hard drive, in the bunker. It's labelled BURN THIS. (That's your uncle's handwriting.) They're true, more or less. Written by a really crappy, amateur writer, but he was a kind of prophet, and he knew everything there was to know about us, and he wrote books for about five years, based on our life and the real things we did. Some of it is exaggerated and melodramatic. A lot of it is just how it happened. You'll have to decide which is which. I don't come off too well in some of them but I hope you'll understand that the world… I don't know how to describe it. Somehow the world felt different, then. It was just us, trying our best. I hope it gives you some idea of the life we had. No matter what happened, I'm glad that life led me to you.

*

What's a life?

Dean marries. Not the girl from college but a woman, later. Red hair, blue eyes. Absolutely no sense of humor beyond puns. Hates cooking and has strong opinions on movies from the 1980s. They have three kids, a girl and then a boy and then a girl again. All dark-haired, smart. Dean gives the boy the middle name Samuel and his wife holds his hand, says it sounds great.

He's a doctor. He meets hunters. He sets bones for free and prescribes medication when needed and when it will be needed. A woman, last name Novak, calls him and says you know, your dad was one of the greats?, and he meets people—older than him by twenty, thirty years, with scars and dangerous lives and guns hidden in every corner, and he hears stories. Sam Winchester, who saved the world. Dean knows—he's read the books—but there are more years that the books didn't cover, more people who didn't die because of his dad's intervention. "They were the best," one man says, shrugging, and gets no argument, nods and shrugs from every hunter in the room, and Dean goes home that night and kisses his littlest girl where she's already tucked up in bed, and he thinks: what will she know, about who her grandfather was? Who their family is? What could she possibly know?

Dean's wife dies in her eighties. An accident. A broken hip, an infection following. Still happens, even in this new century. The kids are grown, have kids of their own, and the funeral is big, and there are people at his elbow who say to him we're so sorry and who share anecdotes of her life and who support him to his chair, even though at ninety he's perfectly capable of getting to his chair himself. He's a cranky old man, he realizes. She would've laughed at him. He thinks, inevitably, of his own father's death. Silent and unmourned, except by one. What's a life.

He writes letters, for his children. The estate is handled. He calls the oldest girl and explains to her that she's going to be the executor, and that there are things she has to keep. A key. A car. Pictures, so that her boys will know where they came from. "Of course, Dad," she says, placating a little because he's old and clearly starting to lose his grip, but she'll do it. She's a good kid. Dean learned how to raise a kid from the best.

When he dies, he's expecting it. The trip to the hospital. The monitors. He knows the pain meds even if he's retired and his doctor looks like an infant but she gives him the good stuff. It's—easy. A slipping away. He closes his eyes to sleep and there is a moment where he thinks with surprisingly clarity, this is okay, isn't it, and has the feeling of someone's hand laid on his, and then he sleeps, and doesn't wake up again.

*

He opens his eyes in an armchair, in a house that he doesn't recognize but that feels instantly familiar. Music playing, somewhere, and a gold-tinged afternoon spilling through the window, and tone-deaf singing from the kitchen. His mind feels clearer than it has in… Tears come to his eyes but it doesn't hurt. He puts his fingers to his mouth and smiles, breathing in slow, and thinks—well, this is it. Heaven.

Time is no longer time. Space is—immaterial. There's a house, not their house, but it's roomy and it has what he needs and the bed he crawls into with his wife at the end of a day is comfortable, and that's what matters, as he lays his hand on her hip where he used to lay it always, and she sighs against the pillow and squirms and tucks herself into a fetal pretzel, like she always used to. The spill of her hair red against the pillow. Her warmth, plush against his bones. She smells not of honeysuckle or vanilla but just like warm, human skin, the faint bite of salt-sweat at the nape of her neck, the must in the morning in thin bluish light when she turns over and finds him awake, and smiles. Incredible. The weight of her is real, and the spot between her breasts when he kisses her there is real, and he'd always believed in some distant way that what his dad had told him was true—that there was a heaven, that there would be some kind of justice after death—but it was distant, and academic, because of course there was a life to live and patients to care for and children to raise and a wife to bury and a death to get through. What a thing, to come to. This place, with her hair on the pillow, and her smell. He hadn't forgotten it, in the end, after all.

The house sits in some place that feels like South Dakota. Home, or close to it. A lake among trees. A distance between things. He reads, and plays games he barely remembers from being a kid, and he watches the Ghostbusters movies again because his wife insists and they are, he has to admit, still funny, but he makes fun of the weird museum guy anyway, and she kicks him where her feet are tucked in his lap, and he tickles her in retaliation, and then—well, the movie will be there, later, when they're done.

She rides her bike every day. One day she comes back and says she was just visiting her mother, and Dean sits up and says, "What?" But—of course. What's time? What's a space, between this shared slow heaven and another? She shrugs—his mother-in-law says hi—and he sits there on the couch with his game paused, watching her go into the kitchen and shake her sweaty hair back from her face, redoing it into the practical twist at her neck like she always does, and he thinks—okay. Okay, maybe now.

The bookshelf has every book he could want, and seems to know what he needs to read before he does. Raining outside, spattering gentle on the eaves, and his wife made a huge pot of tea and took it to bed upstairs and left him just a cup, and so he sits at the kitchen table with his cup of tea and opens the book—Home, by Carver Edlund—and reads it, lingering, even if he's read it three times before online, his thumb brushing over the cheap too-thin pages of this physical copy. There's a poltergeist, preposterous. The psychic, odd and familiar. The brothers, united, and he reads the next-to-last chapter very slowly, lingering, as they find the box of pictures, as they get into the car together. Drive off, to meet some new dawning day.

He finishes his cup of tea. Puts on a clean shirt, combs his hair. "I'll be back," he says, to his wife, and she blinks at him from her nest of blankets with her own book and then only nods, and Dean goes downstairs and gets into his car and finds the road, beyond the garden gate, and drives.

He doesn't know where he's going but that doesn't matter. He turns on the car radio and it's playing—oldies, but really oldies, the stuff that was old when he was little. What childhood sounded like. Farms appear, melt away. Trees rising, through hills. He sings along, under his breath, remembering: a roadtrip to his grandma's house, Mom sleeping in the passenger seat and Dad driving through the night, and Dad singing very, very badly, as quiet as he could, and Dean thinking even as a kid that this was some private thing, to see, and he had to be silent and not show that he was awake or it would disappear. That feeling, it crept up on him at the oddest times, when he was an adult, and later. That sensation of the armored tank of the car moving through the dark, and the silence around them, and the quiet music inside, and Dad, in a world of his own, entirely separate from the world he shared with Dean.

Another hill. Climbing a mostly-paved road. Not raining anymore but the sun coming in slanted gold through the trees. Distance, and a curve, and then: a house. Old-looking. Older maybe than the one Dean and his wife share. In front of it, a car. The car.

Dean parks. He gets out, and the air smells washed-fresh, a little fecund. Like summer. He puts his hand on the hood of the Impala and it's sun-warm and he tears up, completely unexpected, and has to sit on the hood and hold his hands over his face, his heart—full, in a way he's felt since dying, but not in this particular way, this way of feeling that he thought had mellowed, a lifetime ago.

So much for putting on a good face. He wipes over his mouth and dashes his eyes clear. A porch, with new-carved railings. A door, painted blue. He knocks, his body feeling empty and clean and young, terribly young, and before he's quite ready the door opens, and it's—his uncle, in a purple plaid shirt and paint-spattered jeans and grey socks, frowning at him, saying, "Uh, hi?"

He looks—almost exactly like he looked in the pictures. Maybe forty, lines beside his eyes and heavy stubble on his jaw. The age he was when he died. Dean opens his mouth, can hardly dredge up what to say, and then he hears a voice say, "Dean?" and Dean and his uncle both turn their heads to see—Dad, young too, completely shocked, standing on the far side of the porch in running gear with sweat slicking his hair back from his head, and Dean drags in air and says, "Dad," and Dad grins at him, that big creased dorky-looking dad-smile that Dean only got once in a blue moon, and he steps forward and they're hugging, then, and it's—heaven. That's all he can think. Heaven, Dad's arms tight around him, his shoulders slotting in under Dad's because—Dad was so tall, and this is where Dean fit and never would fit again once Dad was gone. Here, under Dad's arm. Like being a kid again.

Dad's hand on the back of his head. A startled, shaky, deep breath in, and then hands gripping his shoulders, and being shoved reluctantly back to have Dad look down at his face, serious and worried. "How long has it been?" he says. "Are you—you didn't—?"

"I was ninety-seven," he says, and Dad's eyebrows go high and he smiles, big and glad and real, relieved. He touches Dean's face and Dean smiles back, tears rising again for no reason and for so many reasons. "I look good, don't I?"

Dad huffs a laugh. "You look great," he says, and then his eyes lift over Dean's head, and Dean has to turn around because—

What to call him? Uncle Dean. Standing there with his shoulder against the doorframe, his mouth tucked in on one side. Like from right out of one of the pictures, returning Dad's look. His eyes drop after a second to meet Dean's and Dean feels this odd jolt, in his chest. Bizarre, to see. He's real. All Dad's stories, the wall of memories, the books, and here he is, in grey socks, looking all over Dean's face like he's seeing it for the first time. "Guess you got your looks from your mom's side of the family," Uncle Dean says, finally, and Dad says, behind him, "Nice, dude," and Uncle Dean shrugs, unrepentant, but with an unexpected dimple quirking into his cheek, and holds out his hand to shake, and Dean takes it and has another shock at it, warm, callused, firm, real—while Uncle Dean says, wry, "Well, I guess some introductions are in order, huh?"

Uncle Dean and Dad share the house. It's nice, inside. Old fashioned in a way that feels comfortable, as Dean's come to expect. (He wonders, in a few hundred years—will new arrivals to heaven expect old-fashioned arcologies?) Uncle Dean brings beers from the kitchen and Dad takes his without even looking, drinking in Dean's face when Dean's doing the exact same to him. He looks so young. Younger, maybe, than he was even in the few pictures Dean has of him being a baby, held tiny in the crook of Dad's massive arm—some past time, some time Dean doesn't belong to, but Uncle Dean clearly does. Dad shakes his head after a few seconds, huffs again, rueful. "I don't even know where to start," he says.

Uncle Dean rolls his eyes, behind him, and says, "How about you ask the kid how he's doing, genius." Mean, but he squeezes Dad's shoulder too, and Dad bites his lip, looks at Dean, his head tipping. Asking.

It's awkward, but only in the way Dean would expect. To see his dad after so long—and both of them dead—and to explain… what? A life. Being a doctor, meeting a wife. Children. Grandchildren. "Great-grandpa Sammy," Uncle Dean fake-whispers, "told you you were old." Nudging Dad, half-sitting on the arm of his chair. Looking proud enough he could burst, although Dean doesn't know exactly why.

"Are you going to make dinner or are you just here to heckle?" Dad says, looking up, exasperated, and Uncle Dean raises his hands, says, "Oh, I'm here to heckle," but he gets up, too, says, "You get tired of the inquisition, kid, we've got more drinks in the kitchen," and cuffs Dad around the back of the head before he disappears down the blue-painted hall—and music comes on, after a moment. The kind of music that was on Dean's radio as he drove. Comfort sounds that go deep into some space beyond his bones.

"He's a lot, sorry," Dad says, after a second.

"I know, I read about it," Dean says, and Dad blinks at him, mouth half-open, before he remembers.

They have dinner. Uncle Dean makes burgers, fries, a spinach salad that Dean and Dad both groan at, and he looks at them across the table with his burger in his hands and shakes his head. No salad on his plate, Dean notices. They talk but about—nothing. Uncle Dean asks if the Broncos ever won the Superbowl again and Dean tries to dredge up an answer. Dad asks what his wife did for a living. Dean wants to ask things and doesn't know how. There's time, he knows, but for now all he can do is—watch. Dad leaning back in his chair with a beer, smiling at him while Uncle Dean tells some probably well-worn story about trying to fix the Impala in a rainstorm, and Dad was pissed for some reason and so kept handing him the wrong tools. "It was too dark to actually read the grip numbers," Dad says, patient like it's the hundredth time, and Uncle Dean says back, immediately, "Who needs the numbers? You can feel the weight in your hand!" Old arguments, well-worn, in the well-worn house. The way they move around each other, washing dishes, putting plates away. The way Dad's eyes will jump across the table, half a second before Uncle Dean's even opening his mouth, a smile already waiting to be pushed back down.

When it's night he says he should get back to his wife. "I'd like to meet her," Dad says, "some day."

"Gotta see who's willing to put up with a Winchester," Uncle Dean says, eyebrows waggling.

Dad sighs but nods, too. Dean gets folded into a hug, there under the tuck of his arm, and then he hugs Uncle Dean, too, impulsive and just—wanting to, feeling like a kid. Uncle Dean startles but hugs him back right away. "You're good, kid," he says, quiet against the side of Dean's head, and Dean nods and says, "Thanks," for more than he can say other than that, right then on this particular day, and then he gets into his car and pulls away from the house and looks back to see Uncle Dean gripping Dad's shoulder again while they watch him move away—and when he's home, after a blurring drive that's long enough for him to settle himself, he comes up the stairs to where his wife's warm in bed and slides in beside her and she says, sleepy, "How was it," and he says against her hair, "Perfect," because—it was. It was perfect.

*

Dean comes alone to their house twice more, on days when he needs it and doesn't see a reason not to. He brings his wife, the third time, and Dad's extremely polite and Uncle Dean asks her about engineering and Dean enjoys it, from the couch, while she gets the same interrogation he did, and they're driving home with her at the wheel, his eyes on the passing trees, before she says, "They're an interesting couple," and it doesn't strike him, for what may be a mile of blurring distance, why that sentence wasn't quite right.

It should be a shock. It isn't. That it isn't should, itself, be a shock, but he sits with it for a few days, the easy rhythm of heaven sliding around them.

He goes to see his mother, finally. She's in a place on a lakeshore. Her first husband, kind but remote, giving them space. She presses his hands between her own and he goes through the list of answers to all her questions, smiling, feeling déjà vu, and then says, cautious, that he's been to see Dad. "Oh!" she says, and doesn't seem upset. "How is he?"

"Good," he says. They never married, his parents—Dad had told him, much later, that it just didn't occur to him to ask—and he knew they didn't resent each other, but there wasn't much closeness there. He didn't realize how little until he was married himself. Still, he's cautious as he says: "He and my uncle have a place. Uncle Dean, you know?"

Mom sits back in her chair. "Well, then," she says, soft. She's youngish, too. Fifty maybe, her hair shot with grey. "That sounds about right."

He doesn't know how to ask but there's no way to do it other than just—to ask. "What do you know about him?"

Mom smiles, slow, and looks out at the lake. "Honey, your dad's a good man, but I think you know as well as I do that he doesn't give a lot away." Dean follows her look. A boat, far out on the water. Not close enough to hail. "He didn't talk about his brother, much. That said more than I think he knew it did. All those pictures. Well, you remember." She shakes her head, looking down at her lap. "I resented him for a while. A dead man. Silly of me. But then I suppose your dad could have resented Luke, if he'd—cared more. Sorry. That sounds like I'm angry, but I'm not. There just wasn't much left in Sam, that's all. He loved you and he loved someone that wasn't here anymore and there just wasn't room for me, or at least not room for what I needed. I wished I could've known him. Dean, I mean. I would've understood your dad a lot more, I think, but then—I don't think I would've ever met him, if Dean were around."

When he gets home he pulls a book off the shelf. Frail, the spine cracked badly. Supernatural, the first book in the whole series. When Dad was at college and the whole thing started. He sits on the floor by the bookshelf and lets the cup of tea his wife brings go cold on the rug, and reads again and again the scene—coming down the stairwell, finding the car in the garage, going through the details of the voice on the tape, on where their dad (Dean's grandfather) could possibly be, and Dad says there's this interview he can't skip. His whole future, on a plate. In the story, it's Dad's point of view, and he looks at Uncle Dean and Uncle Dean smirks, and Dad thinks, This is exactly what I was getting away from. Dean drags his thumb over the page, looks at the shelf. All those books. All the years in them, and the horrors in those. Hell, and apocalypse, and none of it euphemisms or easy metaphor. All the things Dad wanted to get away from—and then all the years, after, where he stayed exactly where he was. And then—a lifetime later—to come back home to a house, with a blue door, and his eyes not bothering to follow his brother as he leaves a room, because he knows without doubt that he'll be back.

In bed, he asks his wife, "When do you think the kids will get here?" and she turns over and stares at him, and says, "Hopefully not for years?"

He shakes his head, folds his arm under his head. "Duh," he says, and gets her to punch his chest lightly. "Ow. I meant… I don't know. What do you think their lives will be? Like… who will they be? I can't even imagine."

She stops trying to lightly beat him and goes thoughtful. Her thumb finds the little scar on her chin and rubs it, as is her habit, and her eyes slip over his shoulder to the distance. "They'll be—them." He raises his eyebrows, and she shrugs, rolling closer. "I mean, what do you want from me? I knew Abbie for fifty-one years and I still think that girl's a mystery. When she's… probably a grandmother herself, now, I guess. Is she still at Notre Dame? Are she and Andre happy? Are the boys healthy and do they like each other, and did she ever get Jacob to stop drawing cartoon dicks on the walls?" Dean laughs—god, he'd forgotten that—and she smiles at him, props her head on one fist. Says, softer, "Did she live the life she wanted to have? I don't know. I guess when she gets here we can ask her, but we'll never…"

No, they'll never. Dean touches the scar on her chin and she focuses on him, instead of some other world they're no longer privy to. "It's a venn diagram," he says, after a moment. "All of us. Abbie, overlapping with you and me, and then us overlapping with our parents, and on and on, all the way back. I guess we don't get to know what's outside the center parts."

"Even if there's a hundred and four crappily-written books about the other parts," she says, raising her eyebrows, and Dean shrugs, caught. She grins, shaking her head at him, and then squirms in close, tucking in under his chin. Kisses his throat, sighs. "Why not stop at a hundred? Seems random."

"I don't know, maybe the publisher wanted him to stretch it out," Dean says, and she hums, and puts her nose on his collarbone to settle in. He smooths her hair back, away from her shoulder. His favorite book is Swan Song, probably. The final one, as far as most people knew. His dad, the hero, saving humanity and the world, but that wasn't the best part. The best part was the army man, stuck in the door. His dad, looking at that, and meeting his brother's eye, and that being—enough. Just that, and all the life it represented. Enough.

"Venn diagrams," he says, aloud, quietly.

"Yes, you're very brilliant, Dr. Winchester," his wife says, mumbling. "Now go to sleep."

He kisses her hair, and does.

[mde1011]

some quotes i jotted down from that wonderful stream of tommy‘s (some lore spoilers)

“do you smoke sam” “all the time”

“i thought you were talking about the- the speeeeed drug”

“have you ever sold drugs to kids sam?” “......no”

“shecure is a hard word how do you say it? secure? shecure?” “...secure...?”

“we can’t let the girlboss rule because she will gatekeepe my feelings” “that would not be pog”

“THEY DIDNT INVITE ME TO KILL ME???? NOW I HAVE FOMO”

“i’ll load it up king- ive started saying king a lot” “yeah yeah i’ve noticed i like it” “you are admittedly a king sam so”

“strong man” “how does TWIG rhyme with STRONG??????”

“you have obviously taken part in scientology-“ “i have not-“ “you’ve donated to tom cruises cult shit”

“....am i worse than david dobrik?” “are- are we worse than david dobrik?” “oh- oh god”

“cAPTAIN PUFFY IS YOUR LAWYER????” “she IS? I HAVE A LAWYER THATS NOT BIG Q OR BIG LAW?”

“DONT TELLL RANBOO IM UPSET IM NOT UPSET IM FINE IM FINE”

“............howd the talk with the lawyer go.....sounded like it went pretty well” “sam. samuel” “oh god what’s happening you called me samuel”

“gotta go get some la-piss”

“come and hang out i am live it will be nice come and hang out kings” “o-oh you just pinged the WHOLE discord wow-“ “maybe vikkstar will come”

“doNT SAY YOURE LOVING THIS CHAT I AM IN PERIL”

“he has broke one of the rules of the hit best seller ‘the bible’- this kind of looks like a cock”

“well i’ve moved now, KING”

“what is an angsty teen and am i one? because when i USED to hang out with tubbo and ranboo they used the word angst a lot”

“yeah yeah yeah i bench”

“sam i think i’m angsty i think i’m an angsty tik tok teen looking for a community to help me out”

“i don’t think you’ve followed the train of logic all the way-“ “there’s a TRAIN INVOLVED????????”

“i’m like the orange fucker from that animated rom com”

“THIS IS WHO I NEEDED RIGHT NOW IM IN PERIL I AM ANGRY- oh wait that’s wrong that’s wrong-“ “angry is different from angsty”

“i need a lawyer and they need to be big and strong and angry and ready to fight”

“what’s wrong with killing somebody?” “.........HEY nononononono don’t think i forget when you locked me in there you- you PSYCO FREAK” “you should talk to your lawyer about that”

📷

“i can read minds” “what am i th-“ “tits” “what”

“shUT UP PUSSY”

“you just- you just do NOT have blue balls”

“you think this guy will win?” “SHUT THE FUCK UP” “I LIKE THIS GUY”

“STOP STARING AT MY TIE YOU ARE OBJECTIFYING ME” “I DONT MEAN TO-“ “U ARE-“ “ITS A WONDERFUL TIE-“

“i can’t look away it’s just so-“

“i’m under the influence of big cock”

“it’s meeee big cock man”

“i cant look away” “sam please use your twitter alt for this” “he’s horny on maaaainnnnn” “and what’s wrong with that?” “.......”

“you’re a FUCKING IDIOT” “IM NOT A FUCKING IDIOT, BIG COCK”

“i’m gonna call you ‘cockity’ big cock” “sHUT THE FUCK UP SHUT THE FUCK UP-“

“STOP LOOKING AT IT” “ITS SO VIBRANT”

“at least this guy doesn’t have a cock-“ “itS NOT A COCK” “horny on main jesus-“

“is that a cock” “SHUT THE FUCK UP”

“.....i wanna see the inside of it again do a split”

“i heard....i heard there is a big cock in town....”

“why did you say that to me jesus” “did you just come for the cock?”

“nOOOO JESUS JESUS GO AWA-“

“okay sam-“ “tommy that guy wants your cock-“ “no- no he doesn’t sam”

“i- i just looked to my right and the entire chat is just ‘E E E E E I’”

“sam, sam and i need you to hear this....dont. act. up.” “i don’t act up-“ “you were acting up-“ “i-“ “you were caught in 8k.” “but- but we both agree it’s not a tie-“

“please don’t tell me to kill cockity i am overwhelmed”

“why is there an anus in my tie?”

“what are the legal implications of this?” “...i mean besides hell you’re good”

“jack mana-bitch”

“whatre the legal implications?” “i mean usually that’s a no-no but today, today it’s fine” “yeahhh lets go murder his family”

<Foolish_Gamers was blown up by awesamdude> “hahahahgahah” “wHY ARE YOU DEAD??? WHY IS OUR LAWYER DEAD” “that- killing jesus is a big no-no”

“jesus is back ayyyy” “three whole days ayyy he’s back from the cave” “that was three whole minutes” “he speedran it” “why didn’t he do that in the bestseller?” “are you referring to the best seller called ‘the bible’?”

“i’d be an antivax landlord”

“i’m real like are-kansas” “that’s not REAL” “it IS”

“you’re projecting your own problems onto me, puss” “wHAT THE FUCK”

“i just don’t want you to girlboss me”

“i am the girlboss and i will gatekeep” “you are a girlboss”

“we will join vc two and then we’re gonna gatekeep them and the we’re gonna gaslight them”

“that’s such a funny joke man-“ “it’s not a joke. dollywood is real”

“does anyone have cocaine?” “ooooh i remember when you did cocaine last night awesamdude”

“jesus never does drugs” “well- well you turned water into wine king and wine is alcohol”

“can you put on pants i can’t- i cant stop looking at it- sorry tommy i know you said-“ “yeah sam i know you tried-“

“you know i fuck with satan”

“i’m sorry jesus lucifer is just such a good man-“ “oh you- hold me BACK FROM THIS FUCKER HOLD ME BACK ILL SEND HIM TO HELL YOU LIKE HELL-“

“are you jesus or just a man who grew a beard and put on a suit?”

“even the guy with his cock out is telling you to stop-“ “oh jesus, and i mean jesus-“ “shUT THE FUCK UP MAN”

“the best best way to slander him is to stop his offspring; we need to kick him the balls.....no? not a good....? alright us four each take a ball-“

“......jack manifold has four balls?”

“......why did jesus give him four scrotums man🙁🙁”

<Quackity fell from a high place>

<awesamdude> BIG COCK DOWN

[adhdeancas]

12x01 Rewrite with Trans Dean

trigger warnings for minor mention of dysphoria. Also minor/negligent transphobia. 

“Mom?” His heart is stopped in his chest, staring at the face he’s kept in his head for all of his life, the face he’s thought of as the only real home he’s ever had. She looks the same, exactly the same. “I… uh, are you really… real?” 

He reaches out without thinking, needing to just make sure that Amara didn’t bring back a fantasy or a ghost or a sick joke. She proves it without him touching her, flipping him in a neat trick he recognizes from his own training and ending up with her foot on his neck, pressing him into the dirt. “Where am I? Who the hell are you?”

She looks so scared. Dean swallows, his Adam’s apple bouncing against the bottom of her foot. He needs to make her trust him, preferably before she does something rash like snap his neck. “I’m Dean Winchester. I’m your son. I’m… Sam’s brother”

The pressure lets up on Dean’s neck even though Mary’s shaking her head. “No. No, I don’t have two boys. They’re- they’re just kids.”

Dean winces, breathing heavily. This is gonna be a motherfucker for her to understand. Still, Mary lets him up, and he stands and rubs his neck, trying desperately to recall every bit of information he’s stored away about his mom. “Mom. Listen to me. Your name- your name is Mary Sandra Campbell, okay? You were born December 5, 1954, to Samuel and Deanna Campbell. Your father, he bounced around a lot for, uh, work, and you bounced right along with him, and you ended up in Lawrence, Kansas.”

Mary flinches, the facts hitting straight-on. “How do you know all that?” 

“Dad told me.” Dean tells her. He doesn’t tell her that he had to gather the story from slurred words, drunken tears in between stories about the perfect wife. That he recited them in his head like a prayer so he wouldn’t forget her. “March 23, 1972, you walked out of a movie theater - Slaughterhouse-Five. You loved it, and you bumped into a big Marine and you knocked him flat on his ass. You were embarrassed, and he laughed it off, said you could make it up to him with a cup of coffee. So, you went to, uh,” God, what was the name of that stupid place? “Mulroney’s, and you talked and he was cute and he knew the words to every Zeppelin song,” A memory of a smiling young alive Mary comes to mind, and he pushes it away because it hurts. She’s right there. “So when he asked you for your number, you gave it to him, even though you knew your dad would be pissed. That was the night that -” You fell in love with- “that you met -”

“John Winchester.”

“August 19, 1975, you were married… in Reno. Your idea.”Dean had always thought that was hilarious. He looks her in the eyes again, pleading with her to not dispute the next part. “A few years later, I came along, then Sammy.”

“No, no. My oldest was a girl, Deanna.” Mary looks Dean up and down, taking in his short hair, wide shoulders, and flat chest. He crosses his arms over that now, uncomfortable, hoping she isn’t looking at his long eyelashes or his delicate cheekbones or his hips. All the places he’s insecure about. 

“Yeah, um… that’s me.” He looks up at her, his jaw clenching, waiting for the ball to drop. “I shortened the name a little, and the- uh- hair.” He tries for the old charming smile as he runs a hand through the spiky hair he hasn’t let grow out in 20 years. It doesn’t quite get there, settling at a more delicate need for approval. Mary doesn’t give it to him. “Do you believe me?”

She bypasses the question, turning her eyes away from him to look at the car behind him. Something changes in her eyes. “I burned.” She says quietly, like she’s remembering the heat. Dean swallows. He remembers the heat too. “How long have I been gone?”

“33 years.” His voice cracks. 

Mary looks back to him, and she moves forward, putting two gentle fingers to his cheek, to the freckles sprayed across soft skin. He’s had them forever, even when he was little. “Dee?” She calls him by his old nickname; Dean’s doubly thankful that he doesn’t use his deadname. 

“Hi, mom.” There are tears in his eyes.

------------------------------------------------------

“How did he die?”

Dean bows his head. He’s really not selling himself too good here, is he? First the trans thing, now- “He gave himself up for me.” He’ll be surprised if Mary wants anything to do with him. Surprisingly, she chuckles and sniffles. 

“That does sound like John.” He looks over, and she’s smiling. His brow furrows. Killing himself to save Dean’s ass does sound like John, but not in a way that makes him want to smile. “And he was a hunter? And he raised-” She stutters now, looking at him again and looking away just as quickly. “You and Sam to be-”

“Yeah, he did.” A cold weight is settling in Dean’s stomach, and he tries and fails to not let it seep into his words.

“And you said we’ve met before, when you traveled through time,”

Dean nods. It had been horrible and amazing to see Mary and have her see him, just as some guy. A guy, at all. “Twice. Your memory got wiped, so…” So you don’t remember me telling you I was your kid, and you not believing me. I do.

“And you’re… my daughter-”

Dean coughs. He hasn’t been called a daughter in a long-ass time. “No, I’m- I mean. I was. I know it’s a lot. And I’ll explain everything. I will. But right now, let’s get out of here. Let’s get you home. Come on, Mom.”

She doesn’t correct him, which means she must believe, at least a little bit, that she is his mom. 

-----------------------------------------------------

“You live here?” She looks around the cavernous space and he smiles, looking around too. It really is awesome. 

“Yeah, when we’re not on the road. It’s an old Men of Letters bunker.”

“Men of Letters?” She scoffs. Dean grins a bit and looks at her. He thinks he likes her. “They’re a myth. An old hunter’s story.”

He tilts his head. He’s just gonna keep blowing her mind today, apparently. “Not so much. New duds look good.” He gestures to her clothes. He’d lent her some extra clothes he’d had in the trunk, and he tries not to fixate on how they weren’t that big on her. He’s not much taller than her, and he knows part of that even is the heeled boots he’s wearing. 

“Well, thanks. It’s better than walking around in that nightgown the rest-” Dean’s nodding, about to say something extremely awkward like ‘Yeah, nightgowns are a bitch,’ when he finally looks at what she’s staring at, spattered on the floor of the bunker. “That’s blood.”

 “Yeah.” Dean’s heart leaps into his throat, but he goes into autopilot before he can think about freaking out. He takes his gun out from his pants and cocks it, clearing the immediate area. A blurred sigil on the wall puts another bolt of fear through his chest. “Sammy? Cas?” He winces at how high his voice goes.

He takes the Map Table’s gun out from its hiding place and hands it to Mary. She was a hunter too, and he’s not about to leave her unarmed to clear the place. “Take this. Stay here.” Dean takes off immediately. It isn’t until he’s moving on to check the kitchen that he hears the voice. Mary’s clear as a bell, saying, 

“Hands, now,”

Dean’s in the room before he can think about it. His heart practically comes undone when he sees that dumb familiar trench coat. He puts his body between Cas and his mom’s gun immediately, hoping she will trust him enough not to shoot through him. “Whoa, whoa, whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa! It’s okay, it’s okay. He’s a friend, all right?” He meets Cas’s eyes and sees the utter relief in his eyes, and a surge of warmth fills his chest. “Hey, Cas.”

It’s a lackluster greeting when they both thought they’d never see each other again, and Cas shows it when he steps forward quickly and pulls Dean into a tight hug. “Dean!”

Dean grins and pats his back. “Hey, okay. All right,” He comforts him quietly. 

“Dean, you’re alive?” Cas pulls away and looks him over, like he’s afraid Dean might disappear. Dean nods, understanding; he had done the same thing to Mary, after all.

“Yeah.”

“What about the bomb and the Darkness? What happened?”

“I’ll tell you everything. Where is Sam?”

“He’s not here.” Obviously. Dean could smack him, but his face wants to break into a fond smile instead. He represses both urges.

“Are you a hunter?”

“No, I’m an angel.”

“He’s an angel.” Dean says over Cas. They look at each other and then back at Mary. 

“Come again?”

“An angel, with a capital A,” Dean clarifies. He feels, ridiculously, a little bit like he’s showing off. Showing Cas off. “You know, wings, harp.”

“No, I don’t have a harp.”

Dean laughs. “This is Castiel. Cas, this is… Mary. Winchester.”

------------------------------------------------------

“It’s been kinda weird, here. You know, with mom being back?” And learning that her baby girl is now a full grown man? “It’s like we don’t know how to act around each other, so we just kinda make this small talk, and act like it’s normal, but it’s- it’s so not normal.” Dean can hear the pleading in his voice. 

“What has she said to you?” Cas asks quickly. Dean bites his lip to hide the smile he’s trying to get from hearing Cas get all angry and protective on his behalf. He’s reminded of the time Cas looked him directly in the face and said, ‘Dean Winchester, if anyone is ever transphobic to you, I will smite them immediately and without any remorse.’ And before Dean could make a quip about internalized transphobia, Cas added, ‘Do not make me do that to you.’

“Well, nothing. That’s- that’s the whole point.” It’s the kind of thing most people usually wanna go over, what the fuck gender their kid is? He’s pretty sure no news does not mean good news in this context.

“Okay, what have you said to her?”

“Well, nothing. I’m- I don’t know what to say to her, y’know? It’s like it’s all too much, and I don’t wanna overwhelm her.” 

“Dean, your identity is not ‘too much.’” Cas says immediately. Dean sighs. That wasn’t what he meant, even though he has said something similar before. Something when he was lonely and sad and feeling like explaining his dick to a one night stand was too complicated for him to do to even assuage it that way.

“No- I know. It’s not that. It’s… everything.”

Now it’s Cas’s turn to sigh. “Don’t make things unnecessarily complicated, as you humans tend to do. I’ll call you.” He hangs up. 

Dean lets the phone fall with his arm limp to his side. “Yeah. Great. That’s helpful.” He says to the empty air. “That’s helpful.” Asshole.

-------------------------------------------------------

They’re in the car, and Dean is driving, and there is too much going on. He’s not sure whether he’s happy that Cas is in the backseat for this conversation or not. “So you’re… my Deanna.”

Dean’s hands tighten on the wheel. He looks at them and ignores the voice in his head that says they are petite. Womanly. “Uh, yeah. I was born Deanna Jane Winchester.” He clears his throat and meets Cas’s eyes in the rearview. He gives him a little nod, and Dean continues. “I’m… It’s called trans.”

Dean risks a look over at Mary, and she’s playing with her ring. “So you… wanted to be a boy.” 

Dean clears his throat again. He’s pretty sure he does it every time before he talks, and he’s also pretty sure his voice gets lower every time he talks, too. He swears it’s an automatic reflex. 

“Dean’s soul is- that of a human man.” Cas interrupts, saying it like that clarifies things. The corner of Dean’s mouth tilts up a little bit. Cas did tell him that he could see his soul, and also told him that it was, and he quotes ‘A color more similar to that of a men than women.’ Which, yeah, that tracks. He guesses Cas leaves off the ‘more similar’ part to make things simpler for Mary.

“And so you…” Mary trails off, a finger pointing toward his chest aborting its mission when she realizes it might be rude. 

Dean raises an eyebrow with amusement. “Cut my tits off? Yeah.” He takes a hand off the wheel to raise his shirt, proudly showing off his top surgery scars. Mary trails a hand along them, feeling the raised skin. “After Sammy went to college. It was a bitch of a few weeks, but it was worth it.”

Mary takes her hand away and nods, brows furrowed like she’s trying to wrap her head around it. Dean grins. The grin freezes awkwardly, the edges tilting down, when Mary opens her mouth again. “So you have a-”

Cas coughs loudly in the back seat. Dean meets his wide eyes with a similar expression, and Mary cuts off the question, catching onto the fact she said something wrong. “Don’t think we really need to go there, do we, mom?”

That was a question for him and whatever lucky son of a bitch (gender neutral) ended up in his bed at the end of the night. “Right.” Mary says quickly. She turns her whole body then, asking, “Is that why you like men?”

Dean only swerves a little, he swears. The car coming the opposite direction doesn’t seem to agree, holding its horn long and hard. Luckily, it gives him a moment to stutter less obviously. 

“Sorry, I just meant- since you two are-” Mary gestures between Cas and Dean, and Dean blinks his eyes solidly, trying to convince himself this is really happening.

“No! I mean, we-” Dean doesn’t have the balls (hehe) to look at Cas in the back seat, but he can see the trench coat shifting out of his peripheral. “I’m not-”

“Was John okay with this?”

Dean laughs. It comes out bitter and dark. “Dad didn’t much give a fuck what I did with my body. He’d given up on grandkids about the time he saw how decent I was at hunting, so my long hair wasn’t a personal loss.” He knew I wasn’t gonna live long enough to give him grandkids, not without some self-sacrifice on John’s part.

Mary looks a little shocked at his outburst, and Dean almost feels bad for being so blunt and crass. But then he remembers growing up with John as his male role model, and he tightens his jaw. No, the bluntness and crassness was accurate. “Oh.”

“... Yeah.” Dean bites his lip and risks another glance at his mom. 

“So, you’re okay with this?” He waves a hand at himself. Asking if she was okay with him was just too pathetic, even for him. She looks at him uncertainly, a frown he recognizes as his own on her face.

“I don’t think I’m okay with any of this, Dean. But… I guess I’ll adjust.”

[silhouetteofacedar]

When We Drive, Ch. 1: Cornfields, High School, and Sexual Debuts

AO3 - MSR, rated T (for now)

Interstate 70, somewhere in Kansas

April 1995

They’re driving through Kansas after a case and Mulder is about two grain silos away from swerving their rental car off the road into a ditch. If he can even find one; I-70 is long, flat, and utterly lacking in any noteworthy landmarks or reasons to live. Their case was a bust, and they’re heading back to Wichita empty-handed; the entire state feels like a gigantic waste of time in Mulder’s estimation. Why the fuck Dorothy was so eager to get home to this place?

Scully’s been quiet for over an hour; he thinks she might be napping. He can’t blame her; if he could drive with his eyes closed he would, if only to not have to see another mile of endless corn. God, he hates corn.

She stirs, rolls her head from side to side. So she’s awake, Mulder thinks in relief. He’s sick of hearing his own thoughts.

“Tell me something, Scully,” he says without preamble.

“Hm?” she replies, turning away from the window.

“This is the most boring road in the continental U.S., and I’m slowly going insane. Talk to me; I need something to anchor me to reality.”

“That’s an admission I’d never expected to hear from you, Mulder. I never dared hope,” she says dryly. She absently takes a sunflower seed from the open bag in the center console, cracks the shell with her teeth.

“Humor me. What were you like in high school?”

She balks. “You don’t want to know.”

“Oh, I think I do.”

She chews the seed pensively. “You can’t make fun of me later. This stays in this car.”

He glances at her, wiggles his eyebrows. She rolls her eyes.

“Okay, fine,” Mulder concedes. “This car has a Cone of Silence around it.”

“That’s technically not- never mind.” She plucks another seed out of the bag. “I was a good student, obviously. I had big dreams, wanted to make a difference in the world; make my father proud.”

“So you were a nerd,” Mulder surmises. “I can see it.”

“I tried to hide it, though. I went through some pretty outrageous phases in my teen years. You know about the smoking thing,” she says, “But… I didn’t stick to just cigarettes.”

“Dana Katherine,” Mulder says in mock horror, “Were you a stoner?”

“Oh, no. I didn’t do it all the time. Just when I was out with friends. Occasionally.” She picks a sunflower seed shell off the tip of her tongue and places it in a tissue from her purse.

“That’s not that scandalous, Scully. I smoked a few joints in my time.” He glances at her and smiles. She eats sunflower seeds so carefully, and it warms his heart to see her sharing one of his rituals. He takes a few from the bag, in communion.

“I was kind of a punk,” she says quietly.

Well, that was unexpected. “You? Really?” He glances at her in her uninspired beige suit, red hair in soft waves around her face. “I can’t picture it.”

“Please don’t try to,” she groans. “I couldn’t really commit to the full look, what with Catholic school dress codes. Most days I just wore too much eyeliner and didn’t brush my hair. I’d go to local punk shows on the weekends with my friends, though. We’d tell our parents we were staying at the other’s house, and since my grades were good I don’t think they ever bothered to verify that information.”

“That’s the kind of sordid detail I’m looking for,” he quips, chomping on a seed. The idea of teenage Scully - Dana, back then - in ripped tights and boots, lying to her parents, sneaking around, was intriguing. She would have been way too cool for teenage Fox, and the realization makes his stomach flip inexplicably. He clears his throat. “Alright, next question. When did you lose you v-card?”

“Mulder!”

“Hey, we’ll trade. I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.”

“This is not an appropriate topic of conversation while we’re on a case,” Scully argues.

“Case is technically over, and who’s gonna know? The only other ears for miles around are on the corn.”

She groans. “If you promise not to make any more awful jokes…” she cautions.

“Scout’s honor,” he replies, raising a hand.

Scully shifts in her seat, turns to look out the window again. “I was sixteen.”

He glances at her quickly. “Really? Wow.”

“Wow?” She prompts.

“That’s… younger than I expected for you.”

“Oh, so you’ve given this some thought?” she asks, raising an eyebrow.

Mulder tugs his collar absently. “That’s not what I said. So sixteen, huh?”

“Yes. It was at a party and it was terrible. His name was Andrew and we were kind of friends, kind of more than friends, and very awkward. Not the finest thirty seconds of my high school career.” She sighs. “Your turn.”

Mulder suddenly regrets broaching the subject. “Uh, we can stop playing this game, if you want.”

“Nuh-uh, you’re not backing out now. We had a deal. When?”

He bites his lip. “I was eighteen, at Oxford. I, uh… wasn’t super social in high school.”

Scully hums in understanding. “Who was it?”

He lowers his voice. “You’ve met her, actually.”

Scully’s eyes widen. Mulder can hear her thoughts spinning. She gasps. “Oh! Her!”

“Yup.” He repositions his hands on the steering wheel, suddenly finding the cracked asphalt ahead very interesting.

“Well, that’s… she’s…” Scully flounders.

“It was okay. I mean, I was a teenage boy, I was mostly just glad to be having it. But I wasn’t her first and that made it a little uncomfortable… she wasn’t the kindest person, sometimes.”

Scully nods. “I’ll admit she didn’t make a very good impression on me. I didn’t like the way she talked to you,” she confesses.

Mulder doesn’t respond. The only sound in the car is the hum of the engine, the road beneath the tires.

“One good thing about teenage mistakes,” Scully posits after a while, “Is that you learn from them.”

“It took me a while to learn from mine,” Mulder admits, staring ahead.

Scully, mercifully, doesn’t look at him. She leans her head against the window, watches miles of corn pass them by.

[herstarburststories]

Booze and Boobs

Kinktober Day 19: Boob Fucking

Pairing: Dean Winchester x Reader

A/N: Dean Winchester loves women's bodies and I think this is beautiful... It also turns me on. This fic took a bit longer aka days to be written because piece by piece, but I'm happy because it helped me to get to a certain writing mood again! Also, two nicknames here came from @superbadassnatural smart brain.

Warnings: nipple play, dirty talk, boob fucking

Tenderness is a rare gift when you're a hunter. It's even more sporadic when you are dating Dean Winchester. Not that he isn't gentle with you, no — his tough hands always caress each inch of you as if they aren't covered in bruises, a sweet contrast. Yet, the world is ending every weekend, or a case's showing up, or one of the boys is dying. Therefore, moments like this are made to be burned in the back of your mind, and enjoyed like a lifetime.

Dean's laying on top of you, his hand resting against your chest, arm around your waist. You have one leg intertwined with his as your fingers run through his short hair. The breathing is calm. Surprisingly, not because someone knocked you or Dean out, or you two got too drunk to have a light sleep. Both of you just happen to have a good day, and now are enjoying the end of it in bed, tangled with each other.

Yet, Dean Winchester is Dean Winchester. Old or not, as Jack so lovely points out, he still got the essence. Don't get him wrong, relaxing is definitely something he enjoys doing with you, especially when you play with his hair so good. But there's another part of you that doesn't let him slide into sleep despite how comfortable he is.

Your breasts.

The green eyed hunter always loved boobs. Big, small, whatever. Any color, any size. If a chick got a pair of boobs, he'd be trying his luck with her. Now, Dean doesn't have to run after them, and this position only makes it better.

He's laying on your chest, while you are wearing one of your summer pajamas, the red one with a large cleavage. God bless Kansas nights, he thinks to himself, moving a bit while he glances at your boobs. Your breathing causing Velma and Daphne, as he calls your boobs despite your complaining, to go up and down slowly. Dean can't help but imagine getting between them and making his cock follow the movement— nice and squeezed between your breasts in a good tittie fuck.

The eldest Winchester leans in, loving the heat of your chest against his cheek before he kisses your right boob. Dean's so close to your heart, he can almost discern your erratic beating once he kissed there again. A chuckle leaving his lips, gaining a soft groan from you.

He doesn't stop there, sneak fingers pulling your pajamas shirt down as he starts spreading pecks all over your breast. Sweet kisses soon melting into longing licks, which only appeared to turn into sucking. Dean wants to leave marks, he always does. That man can be possessive when he wants, and the thought of hickeys that he made with his own mouth showing on your skin when you are wearing one of your usual tank tops only makes the crotch in his pants harder.

“Dean.” You moan, both hands pulling his head to your breasts to the point Dean found himself buried between your boobs. This is it, he accepts, I'm in heaven. Heaven of boobs.

He blows on your sensitive nipple, getting a whine of yours back. A lopsided grin on his expression when he notices how much you want him, just like he wants you. His plump lips surround your already hard nipple as Dean sucks your boob, his hand massaging the other one.

The hunter spends time on it, your sighs and moans encouraging him to keep going. His cock's only growing more bothered in his pants, the sweat in the air is as natural as your breathless state. You both need more. You often do. It always starts with a sweet giving until you both feel like owning.

Dean, using all his inner strength, pulls away from your chest. His elbows to the mattress as he lifts his head to look into your eyes.

“We could try a new position.” He suggests.

“What's it?” You furrow your eyebrows, tilting your head to the side. “I'm telling you beforehand, porn isn't real life. No woman or man can do those things.”

Dean rolls his eyes. “Relax, Y/N/N. That one's very possible.” He bites his bottom lip, looking at your uncovered, dirty with saliva chest before glancing at you. “I wanna fuck your boobs.”

You have to fight yourself not to moan shamelessly at his statement. Dean, with those hungry green eyes and plump lips red from sucking your boob, openly talking in his gruff voice about fucking your breasts. God, you just want to beg him to destroy you.

Instead, you look to the side, a sloppy idea welcoming your mind. You smile devilish as you notice that the half full bottle is still on the table next to bed— ultimately, Dean's mess would do you good.

Your hand grabs the whiskey, the mouth of the bottle meeting yours in a double intentioned kiss. You toss the cap away, dropping the liquid over your chest. You and Dean didn't have any lube in hand, might as well improvise.

“I guess this will do.” You smirk, savoring the way Dean's mouth is slightly open in surprise. You place the whiskey on its place, wiggling your eyebrows at the hunter. “What are you waiting for, Winchester?”

Dean groans at your teasing. “God, woman. I love you.”

He doesn't want to waste time, decided to fill up the silent of the night with the sound of his cock fucking your titties. Dean throws his pants away, his length hitting his belly as soon as it's free. You lick your lips, watching the magnetic body of his coming closer to yours.

You feel like a prey, cornered by a hunter; the exact minute you know there's no other way but to give yourself out.

Dean isn't too far from that either. He hurries to get on his knees, approaching you with a whimper. You look better than any porn, soaked in whiskey and ready to get your boobs fucked by him.

You can't wait for Dean to make a feast out of your body. Being with him was like becoming a virgin all over again: each touch of Dean's discovered a new shade of pleasure within you, all you begged to be corrupted.

One of his hands holds the bedpost as Dean finally slides his cock between your breasts. His legs are trembling, mouth slightly open and eyes barely shut; this kind of pleasure, this unique sentiment of being hurried between your boobs is marvelous— and Dean hasn't even started fucking them! You aren't away from that either, pressing your lips together in a dumbfounded attempt to contain a moan. . . As if you could ever control how your body reacts to Dean Winchester.

Dean licks his lips, looking down to catch a glimpse of your face. God, this is perfect: you, sitting in bed naked, scotch all over your chest, hard nipples, titties waiting to be fucked by his length. He can't physically wait anymore, even his bones are hurting to get with you. The hunter's hold on the bedpost intensifies, as if he could crave his fingertips like a lover does with a name. His knuckles are turning white, green eyes watching when his cock starts to go up and down between your boobs like he was fucking your pussy. Heaven.

“God, honey. You take my cock so good with your titties.” He groans, “I love your boobs so much. Always thought about fucking them.”

But then you squeeze your breasts together, trapping his hardness between your titties, Dean realizes how wrong he was. Before was just the golden gates, but this is heaven. He starts moving his hips, increasing the rhythm through each thrust.

“Yeah. Just like that. Fuck my boobs like you are fucking my pussy, Dean. Make me come.” Your words are tangling his arousal, getting a howl out of him as he fucks you rougher.

The smell of whiskey and sweat embrace the atmosphere into pure lust, among your and Dean's pleading groans. You feel full in places you didn't even know that were empty, and Dean can't wait to come all over you and mark this spot as well.

Your shared bed crying is a beautiful melody, too. Adrenaline rushing inside your veins like blood, making Dean go quicker, making you press your boobs against his cock harder. You can feel his precum mixing with whiskey and sweat, and God you can't wait to taste it somehow. He's getting tough, your hands are marking your own body. You both want more of this newness.

“I'm gonna come all of your pretty boobs, Y/N/N. Is that what you want? Get all dirty with my cum?” Dean says breathlessly, his voice cracking at each other. He can barely hold himself from screaming and coming. Yet, he wants you to come first.

“Yes.” You whimper, looking up to him. He's on his knees, but you are the only begging. “Please, Dean. Come on my boobs, make me come just fucking my boobs. Please. I need it, Dean, please.”

Any vestige of self control is left behind when Dean grunts loudly, moaning to your name as he cums on your breasts.

Leave a comment and REBLOG. Feedback is magic! Tags on my reblog; send me an ask or dm if you wish to be tagged. Catch up Kinktober!

[wayward-dreamer]

Life’s Lessons - Part 3

Title: Life’s Lessons - A Lesson in Faking It

Pairing: Mechanic!Dean x Female!Teacher!Reader (eventual)

Other Pairings: Dean x Lisa

Word Count: 5,342 (song lyrics in italics).

Part Summary: Monday morning is off to a bad start as Y/N’s car refuses to start, but she receives some help from Dean. As an IOU when he refuses to let her pay full price for the car service, Y/N invites him dinner. Realizing what it could imply, she backtracks and invites Lisa, too. 

Warnings: Swearing, some angst, Lisa being aloof, social insecurities, alcohol consumption to deal with nerves.

Music: Out on the Tiles by Led Zeppelin (Dean and Y/N car scene), Back in Black by AC/DC (playing in the garage during Dean and Y/N garage scene).

Life’s Lessons Spotify Playlist 

A/N: Thank you to everyone who has read so far, it’s been so great to hear your thoughts! Any thoughts, theories and feedback you have is always welcome, so don’t be shy to comment! It’s greatly appreciated! Happy reading and enjoy! :)

Dividers by the wonderful @firefly-graphics! Check her out for all your AU needs!!!

Life’s Lessons Masterlist 

Monday arrived too quickly for Y/N to be happy about it.

She had managed to get some revisions done on her lesson plans, so she was prepared for her classes in terms of content. She just hoped for the strength to deal with the kids this week. She really hoped this week would be better than her first.

She woke up as soon as her alarm went off and started getting ready. After her shower, she dried her hair and got dressed into a purple A-line dress, with a collared neckline. She wore her black, pointed toe shoes, that had a short heel, the most sensible heels for school. After applying a little bit of make-up, she fixed her hair and pinned it into a bun. Seeing that she had some time before she left, she made herself a quick breakfast, of yoghurt and fruit and a piece of toast with peanut butter.

Breakfast was a lot different at the Winchester/Braeden household.

Dean was at the stove, working on scrambling eggs. Ben placed plates on the kitchen counter, the bacon already crispy and done, on the counter already. As Dean turned to put the eggs on the counter, he lifted his arms up, as Lisa ducked underneath to get past him. She took out one ceramic mug and a travel mug, filling them both with coffee.

“I’ve got soccer try-outs after school, so I won’t be done until 5” Ben said, pouring himself some orange juice.

“I’ve got a meeting today and it might run late, so can you get him?” Lisa asked, putting Dean’s travel mug in front of him.

Dean took out some eggs on Ben’s plate. “Yeah, I’ll come get ya.”

“Thanks” she mumbled, fixing her own plate of breakfast.

Dean ignored her lacklustre response, as he practically shovelled food into his mouth. He was going to be late if they didn’t leave now.

“And then drop me off at my science partner’s house. We’re working on a project together” Ben explained.

“Sure” Dean nodded, as he ate.

“They’re going to bring you back home, right?” Lisa asked.

Ben nodded but continued eating.

Dean looked between them, practically inhaling breakfast. “Alright” he mumbled around the last bite of food in his mouth. “You ready?”

“Yeah” Ben replied, gulping his juice down.

Dean put his plate in the sink, followed by Ben’s as he grabbed his coffee. “Bye.” He leaned over and kissed Lisa’s head, a habit that he hadn’t dropped even if it didn’t mean what it used to, before walking to the door.

“Bye mom!” Ben called out.

“Have a great day!” she called back before Dean closed the door.

“Fucking start, you piece of shit!” Y/N yelled, as she turned the key to her car in the ignition. All she got back was a grinding sound, and nothing else. It would stutter and die down but pick up again every time she turned the key.

“Damn it!” she slammed her hands on the wheel as she sat back, shaking her head.

This is what she got for driving all the way to Kansas in this piece of crap car, which might as well have been held together by duct tape and dental floss. She got out of the car with her phone, trying to look up a number for a mechanic.

Dean walked over to the Impala and was about to get in when he heard an awful sound coming from across the street. He looked up to see Y/N’s car still in her driveway, which was the source of the noise. He watched as she got out, a frustrated look on her face.

“Hey” he called out.

Y/N looked up, smiling tentatively. That’s not really the mechanic she wanted. Well she did, but she shouldn’t.

“Get in the car” he said to Ben, as he walked across the street to her.

“That doesn’t sound good” he told her as he reached her.

She shook her head, as she frowned. “Yeah, I’m going to be epically late by the time someone shows up.”

“Okay, there’s no freaking way you’re calling someone else, I’ll give you a ride to school and tow this to the shop later” he explained.

“What?” she asked, shocked that he offered without hesitation. “No, Dean, it’s really okay-”

“No, no, you’re not talking me out of this. I’m taking Ben to school; it just makes sense” he gave her a pointed look, letting her know he wasn’t backing down.

“Dean, I really can’t. With Ben… it’ll be really awkward, I’m his teacher” she protested.

“Look, I’ll drop you guys off around back, no one’s gonna see you. Okay?” he insisted.

She was going to be late if she didn’t take the offer.

“Okay” she sighed, defeated but relieved. “Thanks.”

Dean smirked. “No problem, sweetheart. Come on.”

They walked over to the Impala and Y/N admired it as they got closer. She had obviously seen it a few times from across the street, but she was excited to take a ride in it. She loved the look of classic cars because of her dad, and she felt a heaviness in her heart as she thought about him, so far away back home.

“She’s beautiful” she said, as she ran her hand over the smooth finish. The sleek black shone in the sun, showing her that Dean loved his car immensely.

“Yeah, she is” he agreed, grinning.

Ben smiled at her nervously as she got into the car. Y/N just smiled, feeling slightly awkward that she was in a car with one of her students, and his surrogate dad. She just had to avoid conversation about school and hopefully everything would be okay.

They were on the main road to school pretty quickly, the silence in the car too much for Dean to bear. He leaned forward and switched on the music player, his Zeppelin tape coming to life through the speakers. Y/N smiled and bopped her head along to Out on The Tiles. Dean looked at her from the corner of his eye and smirked at her reaction to his music. Lisa didn’t really like listening to his music.

“I’m gonna go back and get your car later” he said, lowering the music slightly. “I’ll take a look at it.”

“I really can’t thank you enough, Dean” she smiled.

“Hey, it’s my job” he shrugged, as he looked out at the road. “Swing by the shop after work and we can sort everything else out.”

“Sounds good” she nodded.

Another silence fell between them, the music the only thing they heard but the lyrics to the song caused an air of awkwardness to fill the car.

All I need from you is all your love All you got to give to me is all your love All I need from you is all your love All you got to give to me is all your love Oh yeah, oh yeah Oh yeah, oh yeah

“So…” Dean trailed off, trying to find something to say. “You uh… you into Zeppelin?”

“Yeah!” she exclaimed. “Grew up on this and pretty much all classic rock, thanks to my dad. I got all his records and his record player when I moved out here. Said he wanted me to take a piece of home with me.”

Dean let out a whistle as he glanced at her. “That’s awesome.”

“Yeah” she sighed, looking out the window. “I started listening to this stuff because of my dad, too” he told her. “Hell, I got a lot from him, the car too.”

“Really?” she asked, surprised. “Your dad gave up a mint condition Impala?”

Dean raised his eyebrows as he looked at her. “You know this is an Impala?”

“Yeah” she shrugged like it was no big deal. “I went to a car show once with dad. I saw one there and knew it was the same once I saw yours.”

Dean, however, thought it was a very big deal. Damn it, just one more thing to like about her he shook his head, getting rid of other things he was thinking of.

“Well… it’s still in the family, so it wasn’t much of a sacrifice” he laughed.

“Still… he must really love you to just give it you” she said, turning to him.

Dean looked at her and saw the small smile on her face. As he thought about it, he knew that she was right. He and his dad had their issues sometimes, but there’s nothing they wouldn’t do for each other. He smiled back at her and then looked at the road. He knew he had to get this conversation back to the safe zone before they arrived at school.

“So, you’re into cars?” he asked, casually.

She laughed, shaking her head. “Only for the look of them. I have no idea about them otherwise.”

Dean shook his head, with a smile on his face. She had a great laugh and he suddenly felt the need to hear it as much as he could.

“Ben’s into cars and this music too. Right, Ben?” he asked the kid sitting in the backseat.

“Yeah” Ben mumbled.

“Lisa not so much though” Dean mentioned, but he realized that he only did that so that it didn’t seem like he had forgotten her about for a second. It scared him how drawn he was to Y/N.

A few moments later, Dean pulled up at the back of the school. They could see the main drop-off area from there, as kids yelled goodbyes to their parents and hurried in.

Dean looked up at the rear-view mirror, seeing Ben gather his things. “See you at 5, kid.”

“Yeah. Bye Dean” he mumbled, as he opened the door and shut it, the hinges squeaking.

Dean watched Ben walk towards the entrance, then turned to Y/N.

“Thanks for the ride, Dean” she said, gathering her bags. She handed her car keys to him, for later.

“No problem” he smirked, as he leaned back, one arm outstretched, his wrist leaning on the steering wheel.

Y/N tried not to sigh noticeably, as she was flustered at the sight of him. Did he know what he was doing to her? He had to know, right?

“I should go” she laughed, trying to hide her nervousness.

“Wait” he said, as he pulled out his phone. “Put your number in and I’ll text you when I’ve picked up your car.”

“Sure” she said, quietly.

She was a little nervous about him having her number. Would Lisa think something of it? It was just two people exchanging numbers, that’s all. Plus, it was about her car anyway. She quickly typed in her digits and name and handed his phone back to him.

Great. I’ll see you later” he smirked, trying not to sound excited at seeing her again.

“Yeah, see you there” she replied, as she quickly got out of the car and walked towards the entrance.

Dean watched Y/N walk away, appreciating the way her hips swayed as she walked. He told himself it was harmless to look. It’s not like he was going to do anything about it. He quickly pulled away from the curb, the engine roaring as he drove to the garage.

Later that day, just after lunch, Dean left the garage with Benny in charge until he got back. He drove back to his street and stopped in front of Y/N’s driveway with the tow truck. He got out of the truck and walked over to her car, popping the hood open. Given the sound he could hear that morning when she attempted to turn the car on, it was clearly the starter and the flywheel that weren’t cooperating with each other. He opened the driver’s side door and put the key in the ignition. When he turned it, he heard the same sound, which confirmed what he thought. The grinding noise also seemed to die down every quickly, which meant the battery was weak, too. Hopefully there was enough in there to get the car into neutral for a tow.

He spent a few minutes trying to get it to start without harming the flywheel, which already looked to have some broken teeth. He got out of the car and walked over to the tow truck, driving it up the driveway. He slid the panels under the back wheels, and then got out to put Y/N’s car in neutral. Once everything was secure, he got into the tow truck and drove back to the garage.

As he drove, his mind wondered to Y/N. The conversation he had with her that morning was so easy, and they had just met last week. It wasn’t that easy with Lisa. Having been with Lisa for 3 years now, shouldn’t they have their easy moments, too? The first year had been great. The second was a little rocky, with its fair share of arguments and apologies. Soon after, as he quickly started to realize the kind of woman Lisa was, he knew the charade was over. She was a great mom to Ben; it was everything else that was a problem. The last year had been filled with distant behavior and more arguing, a lot arguing. To the point of yelling and not being able to hear what the other person wanted. He also doubted whether she told him the truth about something that was bothering him, but he didn’t dwell on that.

If they weren’t fighting, it was mostly quiet as they’d ignore each other or pretend to be the happy couple when people came over. They had tried to fix things, but it had pretty much been useless for about nine months straight now. Maybe things would be different with Y/N…

Dean shook his head. He couldn’t think like that. Just because things were rocky with Lisa didn’t mean he could check out on her and Ben. He still cared about them and didn’t want to do anything to hurt them.

He arrived at the garage and decided to get his mind off things by seeing what to do about the car. Work was always a good distraction from what was going on at home, and it would have to be a distraction from thinking about Y/N.

Y/N sat in the staff room, munching on her salad. It was a slow day, surprisingly, and so she found herself just scrolling through social media and news articles. She was on top of her work for school, so it was nice to take it easy for one lunch. Her phone chimed loudly, showing her she had a message. As she opened it, she smiled down at the screen.

Hey, it’s Dean. Just got back to the garage with your car. Pretty positive I know what’s wrong, but I’ll tell ya when you get here.

She instantly replied back.

Thanks so much for doing this. I really owe you!

His reply came quickly.

You really don’t, sweetheart! That’s what friends do :)

So… we’re friends now? I thought we were just neighbors. She typed back, with a laugh emoji.

You knew I had an Impala. Trust me, we’re friends ;)

She couldn’t help the smile that spread across her face. She bit her lip trying to keep it at bay, but she just couldn’t.

She and Dean were friends now. Maybe that would help in keeping her crush on him from becoming complicated.

“Thanks for doing this” Y/N said, as she sat in the passenger seat of her friend’s car.

Cas smiled, waving her off. “You’re welcome. I should really see the guys anyway. I haven’t in a while now.”

“I didn’t realize you were friends with Dean” she said, trying to act casual. She was dying inside knowing that they were friends. It was like she couldn’t escape him. Not that she wanted to, even if she should.

“Yeah, since high school” he nodded, as he glanced at her. “We drifted a little when I went to college in California and he stayed here, but we reconnected once I got back. I’m friends with most of the guys who work there.”

“That’s great” she said and looked out the window. Hearing how close he was with his people made her miss her people.

“So, how long have you and Meg been together?” she asked, changing the subject from Dean.

Cas smiled as he thought about his girlfriend. “4 years. I never thought she’d go for me, so I know I’m lucky to have her.”

She smiled sadly, longing to have something that would last more than a year and a half.

“I was telling her about you, and she wants to meet you as soon as possible” Cas laughed.

Y/N joined in and nodded. “I do too.”

Cas pulled up to the garage and Y/N could feel her nerves flutter around like butterflies in her stomach, as she stared up at the sign Winchester’s Auto Repair. Dean had that effect on her, and it was scary to think how quickly she had started to like him. The reception area was closed, so they went in through the side door, after Cas shook the front door and found it locked. She walked into the garage, with Cas behind her, instantly hearing buzzing noises in the corners of the garage. She looked around and tried to spot Dean, but was met with a muscular man, short hair and a beard, wearing a white Henley, smiling at her as he walked over.

“You must be Dean’s neighbor” he said, his Southern accent, mostly likely Louisiana, thick and raspy. His blue eyes shined as bright as his smile. “I’m Benny.”

“Y/N” she smiled in return.

“Hey brother” he said to Cas, nodding at his friend with a smile.

He looked at Y/N, the smile never leaving his face. “I’d shake ya hand, but as ya can see” Benny laughed, showing her his greasy hands. “Dean’s just on a call, he’ll be out soon.”

“Okay, great” she said, but just as she did, she saw Dean coming out of the office.

“Hey!” he beamed, as he walked over. “I see you’ve met Benny.” He patted his Cajun friend on the back as he stopped by him.

“Hey man” he said to Cas, as he hugged him. He smiled at Y/N, and she felt as if her heart skipped a beat.

“Your car’s out back. You wanna come with me and we can talk?” he asked her.

“Sure” she replied. She turned to Benny and smiled. “It was nice meeting you.”

“Good to meet ya, cher” he winked at her, causing her face to heat up.

Dean rolled his eyes as he led the way, walking past his friends. “Ignore him” he told Y/N, causing Benny to snicker when Dean was out of ear shot.

Y/N followed behind Dean, as they walked past all the cars inside the shop. They went out to the back, which was a small outdoor workstation, with a few more cars out there. She spotted hers as they walked over.

“Okay, so…” he started as he popped the hood on her car. “The starter wasn’t catching on the flywheel because it had broken teeth, that’s what the grinding noise was. And the noise was sort of dying as well, so the battery’s weak.”

Y/N looked at him blankly, her eyes wide as she tried to understand what he just said. Dean found it extremely cute.

“All I understood was the battery part” she shrugged; her eyebrows furrowed.

He let out a small chuckle. “It’s okay, I forgot that you don’t understand car speak.”

“Guilty” she confessed.

“Don’t worry about it” he reassured her. “Basically, you’re looking at two new parts, which I’m gonna have to put an order in for and uh… it’s gonna cost ya some.”

She sighed heavily, hanging her head. “Great.”

“Hey, it’s all good. I’m gonna do it for half” he told her, with a smile.

Her head snapped up in shock. “No, Dean, I’m not asking you to do that.”

“You don’t have to; I’m doing it anyway. The only thing is, it’s gonna take a week for the parts to get here, so you have to do something about getting places. There’s a good car rental over on-” he explained but she cut him off.

“That I can deal with it, but Dean… I can’t-” she stopped when he gave her a playful glare.

“It’s not up for discussion, Y/N” he stated as closed the hood. He crossed his arms as he leaned against the car. He looked at her and she just couldn’t take it anymore. Damn him and his glorious face for being such a nice guy.

“Dean” she sighed, shaking her head.

“Y/N” he said, smirking.

A silence fell between them as they looked at each other. He wasn’t going to budge on this, so she had to admit defeat.

“Thank you” she said, smiling.

“No problem” he said, still smirking.

Y/N had noticed he said that every time she thanked him so far. It almost like their thing, now. Shit. They had a thing already.

She smiled and leaned into him, wrapping her arms under his as she hugged him. Dean was a little startled but quickly wrapped his arms around her shoulders. He smiled as the smell of her shampoo filled his nose, just as the scent of his deodorant mixed with a hint of motor oil smell filled hers. They both realized that the hug had lasted longer than they expected it to, and quickly pulled away from each other.

“Alright” she moved a few steps away from him, pushing her hair back, awkwardly. “I better head home.”

Dean scratched the back of his head, trying not to think about that hug. “Yeah, I gotta finish up and pick up Ben” he moved off the car and walked her back out. It was quieter in the garage now, and Y/N could hear Back in Black playing from the little speakers in the corners of the garage.

She looked around the room, trying to decide whether she should ask him what she wanted to, before looking back at him.

“Hey, if you’re not doing anything tonight… you want to come over for an early dinner? It’s a school night, I know but I can at least pay you back in food” she asked.

Dean looked at her but didn’t say anything. Y/N realized how that must’ve sounded and immediately back tracked.

“Oh, I mean you and Lisa. Both of you. Not just you, both of you” she rambled.

Dean laughed and patted her arm. “It’s okay, Y/N. Uh, yeah. I mean, I’ll run it by her, but it shouldn’t be a problem. Is that allowed though?”

She knew what he was asking and nodded. “As long as we don’t talk about Ben or any of my other students, it’s fine. I mean, this is a small town. Who else are we supposed to socialize with?”

“Well, he’s going to be over at a friend’s anyway, working on a project. So, coming over to yours will be better than being at home. It uh… gets quiet when he’s not around” he told her, but quickly realized how much he revealed.

Y/N realized what he meant but didn’t say anything. “So, I’ll see you both tonight.”

“Sure thing” he nodded.

Y/N smiled and walked away. Cas insisted on taking her home, but she told him she’d be fine to walk. It wasn’t that far. Dean watched as she said goodbye to both his friends and took her things out of Cas’s car, walking down the road. She had an effect on him, and it was beginning to scare him. He was in a relationship and had made a commitment. He couldn’t just back out because he wasn’t happy. He had to try harder and make more of an effort, and he had tried when they started going through problems, but that hadn’t been enough for Lisa.

Maybe he had to try again.

“I really don’t like this” Lisa lamented, as she fixed her top in front of the mirror.

Dean rolled his eyes, annoyed at her attitude. Ever since he told her that Y/N had invited them for dinner, she had been voicing how unsure she was of going over there.

“Lis, if you’re having a tough time with this then why’d you say yes in the first place?” he asked, as he shrugged on a fresh plaid shirt.

“Because…” she didn’t really have an answer. “I don’t know, I just agreed because she’s new here and she needs people to talk to, clearly.”

“She’s not desperate, Lisa” Dean turned to glare at her. “You’re talking about her like she doesn’t know how to make friends. Plus, she literally just got here.”

“I didn’t mean it like that” she corrected herself.

“Well, that’s sure as hell what it sounded like” he clipped back. “Not everyone has to be out every damn weekend to prove they have a social life.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked, frowning.

“Nothing” he mumbled. “Let’s just go.”

Dean turned and walked out of the bedroom, picking up his jacket along the way. He waited for Lisa to pick up her bag, before he walked out of the house, with her locking the door behind them.

Y/N leaned against the kitchen counter, a glass of wine in front of her. She never drank on a school night, but she really needed at least a glass before her company for the evening arrived. She was nervous to have Dean and Lisa over to her house, mostly because of Dean. She was really crushing on him and she had to hope that she could stop herself from looking over at him in a way that would make it obvious how she felt. At least with Lisa there she could control herself. Fake it till you make it, Y/N she thought to herself as she took a big gulp of wine.

When she got home, she had made chicken alfredo for dinner, something that she knew how to whip up quickly.

Y/N jumped out of her skin and her thoughts, as the doorbell sounded. She smoothed her hands down her jeans and fixed her plaid shirt as walked to the door, opening it. She smiled as she saw Dean, trying not to linger on him as he smiled back at her.

“Hey guys, come on in” she said as she looked at Lisa.

She stood aside and let them in, closing the door.

“Wow, looks a lot different without all the boxes” Dean joked, as he walked into the living room.

“Wait…” Lisa stopped next to him, a look of confusion on her face. “You’ve been over before?”

Y/N sensed that Dean didn’t tell her about that and stepped in. Dean didn’t need to be interrogated for something small. “Oh, he just helped me on the first day here, with some of the furniture.”

Lisa nodded. Luckily, she let it go, but still walked past Dean with a glare.

“So, can I get you guys anything? I’ve got beer, wine, iced tea…” Y/N listed but Lisa shook her head.

“I’m fine, thanks” she said, simply.

“Dean… beer?” she asked, with a small smile.

“Sure, thanks, Y/N” he replied, giving her a reassuring smile.

“Well, dinner’s actually ready so we can sit down. I’ll bring your beer over” she said, walking into the kitchen.

Dean and Lisa sat down at the table, next to each other. Y/N took a beer out of the fridge and brought it over to the table, setting it next to Dean’s plate. She sat down across from him and lifted the lid off the dish on the table.

Dean whistled, a dreamy look in his eyes. “That smells amazing, Y/N.”

“Thanks” she laughed. “Let’s hope it tastes good.”

They all served themselves and dug in, and surprisingly, Lisa was the first complement her.

“This is really great, Y/N” she said, after a mouthful.

“Thanks, Lisa” Y/N smiled.

“This is amazing” Dean hummed, around a mouthful. Lisa glared at him, but Y/N found it endearing. He noticed Lisa looking at him and swallowed quickly.

“So…” Y/N started. “Dean told me how you guys met. I think it’s amazing that you reconnected, and now here you are” she smiled, as she looked at Lisa.

Lisa looked at her, her lips pursed as she took in what Y/N just said. “Yeah, it’s pretty great, but um… you know it’s private so…”

Y/N nodded, staring down at her food. “Of course. Sorry.”

“It’s fine” Lisa played it off with a small smile.

As Lisa ate, Dean looked up at Y/N with an apologetic look. He mouthed ‘sorry’ to her and she smiled, shaking her head to tell him it was okay.

“So, Lisa. What do you do?” she asked, changing the subject.

“I’m an accountant” Lisa told her. “Not the most interesting of jobs, but hey, at least the money’s good.” She added in, with a small laugh.

The conversation remained simple and somewhat bleak. Mostly questions about work and brief questions about family, that didn’t require a lot of explanation. It was a civil evening; however, which Y/N was really grateful for. When they were finished, Y/N picked up the dish and started clearing up.

“Hey, Y/N. where’s your bathroom?” Lisa asked, as she got up from the table.

“It’s just down the hall on the left” Y/N instructed.

“Thanks” Lisa muttered as she left the room.

When she was out of ear shot, Dean stood up and helped Y/N clear the plates. “I’m sorry, Y/N. She just-”

“Dean, it’s really okay. Please, don’t apologize” Y/N reassured him as she walked into the kitchen.

She carried the plates over to the sink and didn’t realize that Dean was right behind her, ready to pass the glasses over. She turned around and smacked into his chest. She laughed as he held her steady, joining in.

“Sorry” she continued to laugh.

“It’s okay” he laughed as well, as his hands rubbed along her arms.

Y/N looked up at Dean and realized he was looking at her. Their eyes met; their bodies close to each other. Dean looked down at her lips, beautiful and inviting. She looked up at his, perfect and pouty, begging to be kissed. It would’ve been easy to lean down and press his lips against hers, but they couldn’t. As much as he wanted to, he couldn’t. They heard the bathroom door open down the hall and jumped apart. Dean went back to the table and pushed the chairs in, making it look like nothing had just happened.

Lisa walked back into the room, oblivious to what had happened just moments before. She smiled as Dean stood next to her. She put her arm around him and smiled up at him. Y/N looked away, her heart sinking at the scene in front of her.

“Dinner was really amazing, Y/N. Thank you” Lisa told her. “We should really get going, though. I’m sure Ben’s on his way home, too.”

“Of course,” Y/N walked over to them. “Thanks for coming.”

“Thanks for having us” Dean said, trying not to look directly at her.

Y/N walked them over to the door. “Goodnight.”

They both called out ‘goodnight’ as they walked down the steps of the porch. Dean knew he couldn’t look back at Y/N, so he kept walking, resisting the urge to turn around.

Y/N shut the door and leaned her forehead against the wood.

“Fuck” she whispered, as she closed her eyes and shook her head.

That was too close. She can’t believe she almost did that with Dean. That couldn’t happen again.

She began to realize that maybe her little crush on him was developing, and that was a scary thought that she didn’t want to entertain. She couldn’t.

So, she wouldn’t. It would be easy enough. She just had to avoid him.

That was easier said than done.

-x-

Tags: @flamencodiva @deanwanddamons @winchest09 @katehuntington @akshi8278 @hobby27 @michellethetvaddict @spngirl05 @kyjey @halesandy @440mxs-wife @stoneyggirl @deanswaywardgirl @wonder-cole @that-one-gay-girl @redbarn1995 @marianita195 @babypink224221 @deans-baby-momma @parinarain @thoughts-and-funnies @mandalou29​ @castiels-a-winchester​ @perpetualabsurdity​

[clairenatural]

look at you, strawberry blond

destiel, 1.8k. pining, fluff, growing up together, etc! minor character/parental death, vague mention of John’s A+ Parenting. based on the mitski song  (this is a repost because the first one got deleted)

I love everybody because I love you

Castiel first learns what love is when he’s eight years old and Gabriel, sixteen, is grumbling about driving an hour out of his way to find his girlfriend the rare chocolates she likes for Valentine’s day.

“Why?” he asks his older brother, and Gabriel sighs, melodramatic as always.

“That’s love, little bro. Remembering the little things and then putting in the time to make it happen.”

Cas thinks about when he told Dean his parents don’t let him eat candy. He thinks about how Dean has given him half his Kit Kat bar every day for the last year.

He thinks about the time he scraped his knee falling off the jungle gym and Dean spent the rest of recess picking dandelions to make him feel better. Yellow is his favorite color.

“Oh.”

“You’ll understand when you’re older, Cassie. Love is about sacrifice, and commitment--” he goes on, but by the time Michael cuts him off, yelling from his office that you’ve only been dating for two months, Gabriel, stop preaching to Castiel, Cas has already sprinted up the stairs to his bedroom.

A broken piggy bank, $1.50 in pocket change, and several pleas to Gabriel later, and Castiel tucks a king-sized Kit Kat into Dean’s valentine box.

 --------------------------------------

When you stood up, walked away, barefoot

It’s eight years later, one summer in high school, when Castiel realizes that there’s a difference between loving and being in love, and that he is, in fact, in love with his best friend.

He realizes this as he watches Dean walk away, sandals discarded and unnecessary in the soft grass, back to the picnic tables to get them both more fruit punch. It’s the annual junior class picnic, the official welcome to being upperclassmen, and the August sun casts a warm glow over Dean’s freckles, and Castiel knows.

Two seconds later, he watches Dean nearly get hit by an errant frisbee and completely forget his punch mission in lieu of playfully tackling its thrower, Benny Lafitte. He watches Lisa Braden, giggly and glowing and perfect as always, yelp as she’s almost caught in the crossfire, and Dean winks at her as he releases Benny.

He swallows thickly and turns his attention back to the patch of grass they’d been laying in, flattened where Dean had been just a few moments before. He wishes he hadn’t come to this particular realization.

And the grass where you lay left a bed in your shape I looked over it and I ached

--------------------------------------

I love everybody because I love you I don't need the city, and I don't need proof

Castiel goes to college in Chicago and pretends like the two-hour drive between them doesn’t mean anything. And it doesn’t, until Dean’s father gets a job back in Kansas halfway through his freshman year. Dean goes with him even though he’s an adult because the alternative is letting Sam deal with John alone, so Castiel spends most of that summer in Lawrence, dodging both his friends in the big city and his family back in Pontiac. He tells them all that he’s studying Kansas’ role in the Civil War, assisting in research back at the University, but he and Dean spend two months going on road trips with Sam.

His sophomore year John dies and Castiel flies back for the weekend, explaining his sudden departure as a family emergency and getting an extension on two papers. Dean holds his hand at the funeral but won’t look him in the eyes for two hours after, even as he refuses to leave Castiel’s side.

The boys move in with Bobby but that summer Dean shows up in Chicago, explanations lined up about not worrying about Sam anymore and wanting to see what about the city made Cas keep coming back. Castiel gets an internship and pretends like that was the plan all along. He quietly cancels his plane tickets to South Dakota.

All I need, darling, is a life in your shape I picture it, soft, and I ache

--------------------------------------

Reach out the car window, trying to hold the wind You tell me you love her; I give you a grin

Dean stays in Chicago. He moves into Castiel’s empty room when his original roommate moves out, he finds work at an auto shop, and he starts taking mechanic classes at a community college. Castiel isn’t sure why—he doesn’t want to ask. Afraid to look the gift horse in the mouth and risk having his happiness bitten off.

Then Dean starts talking about a girl. Then Castiel meets the girl, Cassie Robinson, and it all makes sense.  

He pretends it doesn’t sting every time Dean brings her up, that the way his face lights up doesn’t burn, that he doesn’t feel physically ill the first time he meets her.

By the time Dean tells him he’s in love, gushing about Cassie in a way eerily reminiscent of Gabriel twelve years earlier, it’s turned into a dull ache that Castiel has mostly contained in the back of his chest. They’re on their way to Cassie’s apartment, the first stop on their way to a cabin spring break of their junior year, and the ache is suddenly threatening to break through his ribcage.

But the sun is warm on his cheek, and the radio is playing a soft summer soundtrack, so Castiel allows Dean’s happiness to wash over him long enough to forget who—or, more importantly, who isn’t—causing it. He grins at his best friend before turning his gaze back out the passenger window of the Impala.

Oh all I ever wanted was a life in your shape So I follow the white lines, follow the white lines, Keep my eyes on the road as I ache

--------------------------------------

Look at you, strawberry blond

Dean and Cassie break up, and Dean drinks for a month, but Castiel getting into Stanford for grad school distracts him just long enough to go back to normal (a normal that does not involve thinking about how Dean nearly kissed him when they were both drunk the night he got his acceptance).

This new normal involves staring graduation in the face, and California beyond that, and moving out of his Chicago apartment somewhere in this middle, which also involves coming to terms with moving away from Dean.

Until Sam gets his own acceptance to Stanford a few months later. Then Dean starts sending him links to two-bedroom apartments, and using “we” when talking about the move, and looks just as confused as Castiel when he asks about it.

“Well, yeah. I mean, with you gone, and now Sam—You thought you were going by yourself?”

And even though Castiel vaguely thinks this is a bad idea, and living with his best friend who he’s been in love with for his entire memory had been hard enough for the two years they’d been doing it, he can’t say no. Because every time he gets up the nerve to say something Dean calls him over and shoves his laptop into Castiel’s face, talking about hiking trails and flower fields and front lawns and dogs, and that quells any doubt he had.

They move to Palo Alto, into a townhouse with a lawn and a communal garden. Dean adopts a golden retriever.

Fields rolling on, I love it when you call my name

--------------------------------------

Can you hear the bumblebees swarm? Watching your arm

Two months into Castiel’s first year of graduate school they have a picnic, taking advantage of the lingering warmth of the California fall. Sam is off in the field playing with Zeppelin, obviously having used the ‘come meet my brother’s dog’ excuse to invite the pretty blonde woman (Jess?) chasing the golden with him. Dean is rambling about Star Trek and Castiel is paying half attention, the majority of his focus on the reading in front of him because professors don’t consider picnics an extension-worthy excuse.

He’s just started to get invested when he hears a yelp and looks up to see Dean Winchester, his best friend, most trusted confidant and the possible love of his life, swatting a bumblebee. Cas gasps, reading forgotten, and lunges across the picnic blanket to grab Dean’s wrist. “Dean.” He chastises, and Dean gives him a look.

“It’s a bee, Cas.”

“It’s a bumblebee, which are essential—”

“To our ecosystem, yeah, but it’s pretty essential to me that it doesn’t sting me.”

“It won’t sting you if you don’t swat at it.”

“You didn’t see the look on it, man. It meant business.”

“Bees are attracted to sugar. You probably just smell good.”

Dean grins. “You calling me sweet, Cas?”

And, well, no. He isn’t. He’s talking about the empty pie tin next to Dean. But the words make him realize just how close they are, how far he’d moved into Dean’s space in his efforts to stop his hand, how the force of the movement had pushed Dean almost back onto his elbows.

He opens his mouth to respond the way he usually does to Dean’s cavalier flirting, but the words don’t leave his mouth—which is, somehow, he swears, closer to Dean’s than it was a second ago. Just as Castiel is preparing to push back, clear his throat, and add this moment onto a growing list of almost-but-not-quite moments stretching back years, Dean sucks in a breath and closes the gap.

Castiel reacts before his brain can fully comprehend what’s going on, bypassing any shock entirely and kissing Dean back immediately. He lets go of his wrist, instead bringing his hand to the side of Dean’s face, stroking his cheekbone with his thumb. Dean pushes himself back up and wraps an arm around Castiel’s waist, pulling him essentially into his lap, and then they’re kissing, and Dean smells like summer and tastes like apple pie, and Castiel suddenly understands more than ever why bees are always buzzing around him.

It feels like a lifetime until it’s over, until they’re just staring at each other and out of breath, both scared to say anything and break the magic they’d accidentally created. The silence is only broken by a shout from across the grass, followed shortly by a tennis ball that nearly misses them, followed by 65 pounds of golden retriever that does not miss them and nearly topples Castiel in his pursuit of the ball. And then Sam comes running after the dog, still shouting—apologies, this time—and then there’s Jess, laughing hysterically, and then Castiel has to scramble out of the way because Zeppelin has made a U-turn, interpreting the whole commotion as a game of keep-away.

Dean meets his eye above the chaos and grins, and the sunlight hits his dirty blonde hair, and it’s so breathtaking Castiel almost forgets to smile back.

I love it when you look my way.

[seattlesea]

The Poor Character Developments in the Heroes of Olympus Series

Rick Riordan doesn’t know how to write character arcs ✨

-Percy. What arc did he even have? From The Last Olympian to The Son of Neptune it seems like he just got more arrogant and douchey, and this is never explained or expanded on. The readers don’t know why he suddenly got so arrogant. His pride got out of control and he was doing things he knew he couldn’t do but jumped into anyway like attacking a giant head-on alone. He was reckless in PJO, but every time he always had a plan. In HoO he just turned careless. He even put other demigods’ lives at risk at times and honestly didn’t do much throughout the series. He was just kind of there, not really contributing to anything and only involved when the book needed comedic relief or to remind the readers that ‘Hey, Percy is super cool and powerful’. As for his arc, he didn’t change at all. He just got annoying and way too self-involved and vain. I mean- he was literally in front of Hercules, the man who broke Zoë Nightshade’s heart- the girl who literally sacrificed herself for Percy- and he didn’t even say or do anything? He didn’t even mention Zoë or think about her at all. All he was worried about was how ‘big-shot Jason’ got to meet the all-famous Hercules and he didn’t. And this never changed. Percy’s character arc was completely flat cause he never learned from his lessons or mistakes. Even when in Tartarus and was reminded of all the people that he lost during the Second Titan War, how he forgot about Calypso on her island for over two years, and how he left Bob the Titan alone in the Underworld, he didn’t make any move to change. After that scene, he completely forgot to even mention them again. 

-Annabeth. Same thing with Annabeth, except her realism was ripped from her. She was well-written in PJO with actual flaws and weaknesses, relationships outside of her romantic one with Percy, a very important and crucial role, fighting bravely, etc., but in HoO, she- just like Percy- was pretty much dead weight, and she became extremely weak. The only thing she really accomplished was following the Mark of Athena and getting the Athena Parthenos, but she still had to be saved by everyone else, and honestly any other demigod could’ve done it way faster. Nico literally could’ve just shadow-travelled to the statue then shadow-travelled it back out. The only times she fought (which was very few times) she was always with another demigod, and the two-three times she actually fought she always had to be saved, by a newbie, especially. In the Temple of Fear, Piper ‘toughened’ her up and saved her three times from the giant Mimas, and when caught by the giants, Piper was the one to save Annabeth (again). She couldn’t do anything by herself without others having to save or help her. And she also became very dull. She didn’t have any more of her pride, short temper, care, ferocity, etc. All she was was a Percy fangirl. Everything was about him and him only. This also didn’t change. We didn’t see any improvement or alterations to her personality whatsoever. 

-Jason. The majority of the fandom doesn’t like Jason- which is understandable- but they hate on him for the wrong reasons. They dislike him cause he was ‘boring’ despite him actually having multiple distinct personality traits. They just think he didn’t have any personality cause his traits weren’t directly commented on like the other characters’ were (which is actually bad writing, readers should be able to interpret a character’s personality without it being stated to them by other characters). And he even had a sense of humor. His character arc though...fell short. But! He could’ve had an amazing character arc, Riordan just focused on the wrong parts. Riordan’s take on Jason’s character arc was deciding if he was more ‘Greek or Roman’ and then deciding he was both. But...that makes no sense, cause that’s just stereotyping every single Greek and every single Roman. The fandom says that the Romans are the cruel, harsh, and merciless ones, but what about Hazel? Or Frank? Or Reyna? Or the fact that they immediately accepted Nico while Camp Half-Blood outcasted and even ostracized him? And they say that the Greeks are the fun, cool, relaxed ones, but what about Percy, the only character to canonically torture? Or Annabeth, the unfriendly bossy one? Or Thalia, the merciless, ambitious hunter? Or Piper, the prejudiced manipulator? So really, Jason’s character arc made no sense. It was written to be Jason going from ‘always following the rules and following expectations because of his godly parent’ to ‘doing whatever he wants’, but the fandom forgets that Camp Jupiter is the one who doesn’t care about godly parent, Camp Half-Blood does, cause Camp Jupiter has demigods live in barracks for the sole purpose of demigods without family members not having to live alone while Camp Half-Blood separates cabins and tables by parentage and immediately set Percy to high standards after he was claimed. Besides, does Camp Jupiter have harpies that literally kill demigods if they’re out past curfew? Plus, Jason was breaking multiple rules before his character arc anyways- leaving Camp Jupiter, sailing across the Mediterranean Sea, etc. 

-Piper. Oh boy. Where to start with this one. I’ve already gone over how her horribly-portrayed backstory ruined the chances of a good character arc, but now let’s discuss the character arc she actually had. And the best way to describe it is ‘tell not show’. The main idea for Piper’s character arc was that she felt insecure about herself and useless and that she gained confidence in herself and her powers, but that’s not actually what happened, because starting from The Lost Hero, Piper showed multiple narcissistic tendencies that showed that she had a huge ego and placed herself on a pedestal she did nothing to earn or deserve. This is first shown with femininity- Piper immediately thinks that she’s better and above any girl if they so much as wear lip gloss or a dress, which is a sign of an obvious ego: thinking you’re better than everyone else (or in her case, a certain group of people) before getting to know them first. It’s also shown when her and Annabeth are looking for a weapon for Piper and when suggested that she doesn’t choose a dagger cause she’s a newbie, Piper retaliates with “But you use a dagger”...aka thinking she’s already on Annabeth’s level and that she can do whatever Annabeth can despite being a newbie. It’s not hypocrisy if Annabeth has been training for over nine years. Another example would be in The Mark of Athena-  "Piper's eyes flashed defiantly, like anything Reyna could do, she could do". Like, no, she can’t, cause Reyna has been training her whole life and Piper doesn’t even know her. Piper shows multiple signs of having a very high opinion of herself, including degrading others (especially other women) for her own sake, thinking she can do what anyone else can, thinking she’s better than everyone else, constantly fussing over her appearance, thinking she deserves everything she’s gotten and that she deserves more without earning it, etc., so her entire character arc wasn’t even there. She just went from quiet about her narcissism to openly expressing it. She never grew from her horrible traits and habits, never realized she was wrong by jumping all over Jason while he was amnesiac, etc., and the whole ‘feeling of uselessness’ was brought up once then never expanded on or mentioned ever again, and nor was her internalized misogyny and fiery hatred towards femininity (which wasn’t even explained). Riordan should’ve used the ‘snobby rich girl learns to be kinder and more modest’ or expanded on the fact that Piper almost killed her friends multiple times. In Katoptris, she saw Jason with gold eyes in Kansas then said ‘Let’s go to Kansas!’ She saw her, Jason, and Percy literally drowning and legit said ‘Let’s go drown!’ without telling them about what she actually saw in her dagger. She saw her and Annabeth exploring some ruins and said ‘Let’s go!’ despite knowing the visions were deadly. She put all of her friends in multiple, life-threatening situations and never felt guilty and wasn’t even called out on it, because no one said if the visions in Katoptris were fate- something you can’t avoid- or destiny- something you can choose and change. 

-Frank. Frank’s character arc was clear, but it happened in the wrong way. The main idea of his development was that he was insecure about his appearance then gained confidence from it, but he did only after he magically gained rippling abs and muscle. He only felt good about himself once he lost all his fat as if that’s not obvious lookism, fatphobia, and fat shaming (thanks, Riordan). Frank should’ve learned to love himself despite his flab and appearance and learned that it didn’t matter what he looked like cause he would still be a hero either way. He should’ve shown the readers that ‘Hey, I don’t care what I look like, cause appearance doesn’t matter, whether you choose to do the right thing or not does’, but it was wasted for fat shaming every single reader who was insecure about their weight and didn’t or couldn’t get skinnier and telling them that they should be insecure about themselves because they don’t look like Frank. Is it really so hard for society to believe that a lot of people who aren’t stick-thin are happy and confident about their body? 

-Hazel. Honestly, her character arc was one of the most confusing ones, cause she didn’t have anything to drive or even start one. Her backstory is tragic, yes, but there isn’t anything in it that she has to learn to change from cause all of that was resolved when she took down Alcyoneus and Gaea. The only thing I can think of is learning to break away from toxic people even if they’re your family or friend or cause you don’t want to hurt their feelings, but Hazel didn’t struggle with relationships at all. She wasn’t even introduced to any toxic people besides Octavian, and she already hated him. Her transition from the racist and segregated days to the modern world could’ve been really good material for a character arc along with internalized racism- she of all people (someone born and raised in segregation who was taught to hate herself and her skin tone) would grow up thinking that there was something wrong with her because of her dark skin tone and- especially after meeting so many different people of different ethnic groups and skin colors- could’ve learned to love herself and learn that skin tone doesn’t define you (which also would’ve been a perfect lesson for younger readers). Another thing that puzzled me about her ‘development’ was her powers. Her Mist control powers are cool, but what would’ve been cooler was if she was reluctant to use them because she wouldn’t want to twist the minds of people just like Gaea did to her mom. Her gem and metal control powers could’ve been expanded on but they were barely mentioned after The Son of Neptune. As for her curse, that...made absolutely no sense. Her curse was honestly just dead weight. It wasn’t even that one thing that had a lot of potential, it didn’t even have potential, cause what would she ever use it for? It was just used to make her backstory sadder, but it was never mentioned again or even explained. The only thing it could’ve been used for (and what I was hoping would happen) was if one her friends or allies took one of her cursed jewels and died because of it. The one thing I was really hoping to see in her character arc was from the quote she said to Hecate after Hecate gave her the three paths to choose from- “I’m not choosing one of your paths. I’m making my own.” This really sparked my interest because almost everything Hazel had gone through was forced onto her by others without her consent. She didn’t choose to be born into racism and segregation. She didn’t choose to be cursed. She didn’t choose to be used as a pawn by Gaea through her mother. She didn’t choose to almost raise a giant and nearly bring upon the apocalypse. She didn’t choose to use her curse against others and move to multiple places. She didn’t choose to be brought back to life. She didn’t choose to be brought to Camp Jupiter and thrown into an army. She didn’t choose to be a part of the Seven and face the same woman who used her and had her mother possessed years ago. The only two choices she made herself- destroying the island and Alcyoneus and sacrificing Elysium so her mother wouldn’t go to the Fields of Punishment- and she and her mother died because of it and she went to Asphodel for years. I was really hoping to see Hazel break free from others always making decisions for her and learn to make her own choices, but that never happened. 

-Leo: His character arc was also very confusing, but because it was all over the place. Riordan kept switching up Leo’s internal problems; forgetting about one of them and jumping to another, jumping to three different others, and then going back to the first one a few chapters later. It was so confusing. And then- in the end- he focused on the worst problem Leo had- not finding a love interest. I mean, who exactly focuses on whether or not they have a girlfriend while in the middle of a war and fighting to survive again? I liked Leo’s other problems- guilt over and blaming himself for his mother’s death, seeing his fire powers as a curse instead of a gift, forcing himself to hide his pain with humor instead of opening up to people, running away from all his problems, and his abandonment issues and constant fear of being left out and alone, but they were all replaced with ‘He felt like the seventh wheel’ (cause yes, Riordan, if you don’t have a love interest, you are immediately lesser than anyone who does, obviously). Leo got over his mother’s death in The Lost Hero- which, great- but after that nothing too memorable changed about his character. He never even used or mentioned his fire powers after The Lost Hero, he continued to hide all his pain with humor, hide his emotions from other people, and never learned to open up to others about his pain and trauma, he never learned to stop running away from his powers (shown by when he faked his own death without bothering to talk to the others about feeling left out), and his abandonment issues and fears were never expanded on, he just ran into the arms of a girl who verbally abused and constantly insulted him AKA ran to the person who gave him attention, even if it was the bad kind of attention, as if that’s not something emotionally scarred people and people with abandonment issues do, and he never grew from accepting unfair hate and criticism. 

-Nico. His character development was actually pretty good. From going to an energetic, cheerful, and playful kid to becoming a quiet, closed-off, and independent teen who struggled with depression and feeling alone and like he didn’t belong, to finding comfort in his family and friends (especially Reyna, Hazel, and Will) and learning to accept himself for who he was (as a son of Hades and as gay) and how to confide in others about his struggles, problems, and trauma and finally letting people in after being do dubious of people after Percy broke his promise to protect Bianca, he found out that King Minos was using him, and almost all of Camp Half-Blood excluded and ignored him. After being alone for most of his life, by the end of The Blood of Olympus, he has two homes (as stated by Reyna), is comfortable with people hugging him, allowed people to take care of and help him, decided to stay at Camp Half-Blood and Camp Jupiter instead of isolating himself, made a bunch of new friends that helped him through his struggles, and he even showed multiple signs of healing from his depression and anxiety. His character development was pretty well-written. But, there was one thing wrong with it that kind of ruined the rest- his love life. Nico had an incredible character arc that could’ve taught multiple valuable lessons to younger readers, but most of it was ditched after he came out as gay in The House of Hades. Throughout all of his point of views in The Blood of Olympus, Nico never thought about any of his past trauma or struggles, Bianca, his new family and friends, etc. Pretty much all he thought about was finding out how to come out to the others and Percy. And while mustering the courage to come out is a huge deal and is great material for a character arc, Riordan never actually utilized it. Nico telling Reyna he was gay was really touching (best duo) and telling Percy he had a crush on him was great, but after that, his entire character was about his attraction towards Will (which was way too rushed, but that’s for another rant), and it got pretty annoying cause it made it obvious that Riordan only confirmed him gay for publicity by trying to shove it in the reader’s faces as if every gay person needs to have a boyfriend to validate and prove their sexuality. Riordan should’ve stayed on track with Nico’s original character arc. 

-Reyna. THE BEST CHARACTER ARC. Hers was actually really good. She started off trying to do everything on her own because she believed that she had to be strong enough to do things by herself without help from others to learning that it’s okay to ask for help. She also started off with the (quite serious and traumatizing) problem of bottling all her emotions because she believed that she always had to put on a strong, brave face for others without showing any signs of weakness to learning that it’s okay to express your emotions and confide in others (and again, that it’s okay to ask for help). This was mostly evident after she met Nico, which (in my opinion) kick-started her motivation to change because once she saw how much Nico needed help and giving him that support and comfort, realized that everyone is allowed to ask for help and started confiding in Nico as well. I like how she stayed strict and serious cause she has a formal job- a job that’s equivalent to an American’s president, that is- so she’s supposed to be serious, and she’s only strict cause she wants to protect her people. Though I do hate when people misjudge her as ‘cold-hearted’ or ‘cruel’ because Reyna is actually one of the kindest and most selfless characters in the series. Even Pegasus (the immortal lord of the pegasi) was ‘touched’ by Reyna’s ‘compassion’ towards Scipio (he didn’t even say that to Percy about Blackjack), and it’s pretty obvious she cares deeply about her family, friends, and people. And overall, her character arc was easily the best-written one in HoO. But then Riordan- just like he does with most things in this series- completely trashed her character arc just so he could have the opportunity to make fun of wlw readers who thought Reyna and Thalia would be a good couple by making her leave everything behind for the Hunters of Artemis just cause she ‘couldn’t find a love interest’ as if joining the Hunters is the only option for single female demigods instead of just...living a normal demigod life without a partner without leaving everything they know and love behind for no reason other than their shitty love life. 

[luci-in-trenchcoats]

Home Bound (Part 2)

Summary: With some help from Samson, Dean makes it back to the bunker and starts to process everything that’s happened...

Masterlist

Pairing: Dean x reader

Word Count: 2,700ish

Warnings: language, angst, injury, mention of character death, mourning, supernatural events

A/N: Written entirely in Dean’s POV. Enjoy!

______

“Morning,” said Sam as I groggily sat up. He was cooking in the kitchen, humming a happy tune to himself.

“God, it’s barely seven in the morning,” I said, rubbing my eyes.

“I’ve already been up for an hour,” he said. “Eggs?”

“If you’re offering,” I said, stumbling over to his bathroom. I changed back into my clothes, yawning as I sat down at the table. He put down a cup of coffee and plate of scrambled eggs along with some hot sauce. 

“You got any money to get by?” he asked, standing at his counter eating.

“I’ll be fine,” I said, wolfing down my food. 

“Here,” he said, pushing an envelope towards me. I leaned over and grabbed it, opening it up to find a wad of money. “It’s about five hundred. S’all I got laying around the house. That enough to get you home?”

“Samson I can’t accept this,” I said, putting the envelope back.

“I wasn’t really asking,” he said, setting it down on the table next to me. “I’d let you take my car but I need it for work.”

“Sam, it doesn’t look like you got much. I’m not taking your life savings,” I said.

“I have a bank account, jackass. It’s not my savings. Don’t worry about it. Go home, take care of what needs to be done and yourself. You’re getting closer to popping. Pay it forward some day,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said, drinking down the last of my coffee. I tucked the envelope in my pocket and he set his mug down.

“I’ll drive you to the bus station,” he said. I put on my boots by the front door as he rummaged around in a closet. He pulled out a black winter coat and held it out to me. “For if you decide you need a walk again.”

“Write down your address,” I said, handing him back the envelope.

“Alright. I don’t want any money or the jacket back. Send me a Christmas card or something,” he said. He returned it after a moment and grabbed his keys as I slipped into the coat. “Better?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks man.”

“S’no problem. Let’s get you home.”

36 Hours Later

My hands were shoved in the fleece lined pockets as I walked up the dirt road to the bunker. The ice storm in Colorado had followed me all the way back to Kansas but the hooded winter coat made all the difference in the world. I couldn’t wait to take a hot shower and curl up in bed with one of Y/N’s blankets. 

What happened after...I wasn’t going to be able to put off later for much longer. Now that I was home though, I could let go and get my head on straight in the morning to figure out what had happened.

With a deep breath I stepped down to the door and opened it up. The heat had been left on and the hallway was cozy. I stepped through to the other door inside and found the lights were on too, exactly as they were when we’d all headed out. Just in case, Y/N said. She didn’t want to come home to a dark house.

I headed down the stairs and cut into the library, the space feeling far too big for just me.

“I miss you,” I said. I pinched my nose and heard a creak behind me. I spun around, eyes wide.

“Dean?” said Sam. My Sam, the one that must have died, must have, was right there, in pajamas and with a bowl of chips in his hand.

“I die and now you eat the crap, Sammy?” I said. He set the bowl down and rushed over, giving me a hug. “I’m getting you all wet.”

“Don’t care,” he said. He squeezed me hard and I let out a tiny gasp, Sam giving me some room after that. He looked confused though and shook his head. “How…”

“Was gonna ask you the same thing,” I said.

“I didn’t die. You pushed me out of the way,” he said.

“I don’t remember that,” I said. “You were right there. Since I woke up I assumed…”

Sam was smiling at me still but the hunter in him finally kicked in. I nodded to the cabinet where everything he’d need to test me was. Three minutes later he was hugging me too hard again.

“Relax, Sammy. Gonna pop my shoulder back out,” I said. He immediately released me and I cradled my arm. “I fixed it already.”

“Still. You should wear the sling Y/N bought,” he said. We wandered over to the infirmary and he dug around in a drawer until he pulled it out.

“Is she…” I said, taking off my jackets and slipping it on over my head. Sam shook his head and I sighed. “You don’t know that for sure. Up until five minutes ago you thought I was dead too.”

“True but, you know,” he said. I nodded, staring at the floor. “Cas is alright. Billie got him back from the empty. He’s up in heaven trying to help keep that going. They’re trying out this new method or something.”

“Not your memories?” I asked, heading for the kitchen.

“No. I mean kinda. More like, collective afterlife? It uses a lot less power I guess,” said Sam. “They’re doing small test groups right now he said. I haven’t seen him in a while.”

“How’s he alive again?” I asked.

“Billie brought him back,” he said as we walked over to the kitchen.

“How’s Jack?”

“He’s doing okay. He got pretty hurt during the fight. I took care of him for a few weeks before he headed out. New God and all. He’s still learning.”

“He bring me back?” I asked.

“He doesn’t know how to do that yet. He says he feels like he will be able to someday, like it’s in his bones but he doesn’t know quite right now how to pull it off,” said Sam.

“So how am I back?”

“I honestly have no idea,” he said. I took a seat at the table, catching Y/N’s mug sat at the end in her usual spot. “We gave you guys a hunter’s funeral. There’s a little marker up in the woods a ways, in that clearing you two used to go have dates in.”

“There’s no body then.”

“No. Where’d you wake up?” he asked, taking two beers out of the fridge.

“Middle of nowhere Colorado,” I said. “Any idea why?”

“No, not really. Any place we ever hunt?”

“No. I met a guy. Samson, apparently dad and I saved his folks back in the day while you were at school. But they didn’t live there. I never...I never met the guy,” I said. “He knew who I was but he’d never met me.”

“You think he was lying?”

“He was nice to me when I was an ass. I don’t think he was playing at anything. How would he know what I looked like though?”

“It’s possible I suppose that he reached out to other hunters and learned more about you? I mean the girls got pictures of us. Maybe Eileen?”

“Maybe,” I said, shaking my head. “Shit, Sam. How’s-”

“She’s good,” said Sam with a small smile. “She’s over in Lawrence at the moment actually. She’s looking at houses for us.”

“You guys deserve to finally be together,” I said. “She’s good for you.”

“I know.”

“Gonna stop hunting?”

“I don’t really need to anymore. We kind of turned them all human,” said Sam. I cocked my head and he shrugged. “The hail mary? It worked. No more monsters.”

“That’s great,” I said, forcing a smile. Great. I couldn’t even bury myself in hunting to feel slightly less crappy. I was worthless.

“I’m heading out to meet Eileen in a few days. Come with me.”

“Nah, I don’t wanna intrude or-”

“You can have some space but you’re not staying here alone,” he said.

“Y/N’s dead. I have no job now. I’m not gonna be the brooding mope sitting at the end of your couch when you finally get to be with your girl.”

“Dean,” said Sam as I stood up.

“I really want to shower and sleep, Sammy. I’m cold and exhausted. Please,” I said.

“You’re gonna come with,” he said. I clenched my fist and glared over my shoulder. “Y/N wrote you a letter for if she didn’t make it back. It’s in your room. When I thought you both...I read it in case she wanted something to be done after she was gone. You know the only thing she said? You need to go live your life. She loves you and wants you to be happy.”

“Easy for her to say. She’s not here,” I said.

“Dean. I know this is raw for you and I’ve had four months to deal you didn’t. Don’t disrespect what she wanted.”

“Oh fuck you,” I said. I stormed out, pausing around the corner. I heard him behind me and slumped my shoulders down. “I’m sorry.”

“S’okay,” he said.

“She was supposed to live, not me,” I said. “Cause she’s stronger than I am and I can’t deal with her not being in that bedroom when I go down this hall.”

“Dean. Grieve. Please. For the first time in your life, grieve properly. When you’re ready, you and me will go out to Lawrence. I’m gonna call Eileen and make sure she finds a place where you got a big room and your own bathroom and garage and all that. Until then, I’m gonna stay here. Ignore me, yell at me, whatever. I’m staying. Alright?”

“Yeah,” I said quietly. “I want a pool too.”

“Dean.”

“Hot tub.”

“We’ll put one in.”

“Fine,” I said. He ruffled my hair and I headed down to the bathroom. I slipped out of my clothes, pulling out the envelope with a few hundred dollars left. “Sammy.”

“What?” he called back.

“Figure out who this guy was,” I said, holding the envelope out the door. “That’s his name and address.”

“Whiltiston,” said Sam, making a face. “You sure this is his name?”

“Yeah, why?”

“You wouldn’t know. About two months back, the Whiltiston family was in the news. National news. They’d been reunited with their daughter who was kidnapped as an infant. She was safe. The people who took her pretended to be her parents. They were real sickos. I’d hunt ‘em down if they weren’t already dead,” said Sam.

“So this guy’s her brother?” I asked.

“Yeah, there was a brother Sam I remember mentioned at the press conference. They didn’t show anyone but the dad but they were all really happy to be back together,” he said.

“Still doesn’t explain how he knows what I look like.”

“They said the girl has a sketchy memory of certain things. I mean they were bad people, Dean. It’s possible we worked her case and didn’t know?” he said.

“See if you can dig up a phone number for me too,” I said.

“Yeah. I’ll see if...you know, we’ve been in the national news before too. It’s entirely possible that one of his parents saw us on the news and told him that was you.”

“Oh. That’s...a lot more likely,” I said, frowning to myself. “Forget about it. Could you just slip in some extra cash in there for me? I’ll send it back along with the coat. The guy didn’t have much.”

“No problem. I’ll get you the phone number too. I know you’ll drive yourself nuts if you don’t know for sure.”

“Sam,” I said as he started to leave. “I’m really happy you’re not dead.”

“Me too. Take your shower. I’ll put out some pajamas for you.”

I nodded and shut the door, resting my head against the back of it. After a moment I went to the shower and turned the water on, forgetting about the prickly heat until my skin turned a slight pink and started to warm up. Somehow I got through with washing myself before I saw Y/N’s shampoo staring back at me in the cubby. I swallowed and picked it up, flipping open the cap and taking a deep inhale.

It took awhile and one concerned knock at the door to realize at some point I’d sat down with my knees in my chest, Y/N’s shampoo sat on the ground beside me.

“Dean? You okay? You’ve been in there for an hour,” said Sam. I buried my head down and heard the door creek open. “Dean? Answer me or I’m coming in.”

“I’m fine,” I said, voice raw and cracking with every syllable. Sam didn’t open the door anymore but he was still there.

“Turn off the water,” he said. I reached up and hit it off, wiping the back of my hand across my nose. “You have one minute to dry off and put on a towel.”

The door shut and I forced myself to get up. I patted myself off and got a towel around my waist, trying to wash my face off before Sam saw me.

“I’m coming in,” said Sam. One look at him said more than enough and I looked away. “I told you to grieve.”

“Her freaking shampoo bottle,” I said. Sam looked over to the shower and saw it on the ground, running his hand through his hair. “Why can’t I shove it down like every other time?”

“You know why. There’s no chance of you getting her back and she wouldn’t want you to do something stupid. You loved her. You’re always gonna love her. Dean, I’ve been there with Jessica. It’s gonna fuck you up real good for a while. I thought I’d never be happy again, not like that, and then I found Eileen. It feels like the end of your life but it’s not,” he said. “It’s not going away if you shove it down so just feel it.”

“Yeah,” I said. I brushed past him and went to my room, shutting the door to change. I left it closed and sat on the edge of the bed, catching his shadow under the door. It moved away after a minute and I let out a sigh. The room smelled musty which I appreciated. It was something different to focus on. 

I rolled over to Y/N’s side of the bed and saw the letter Sam had mentioned on her nightstand. I ripped it off and found it wasn’t as long as I’d expected. She probably did it last minute.

De, I love you. I’m always going to love you. I need you to try to keep loving and not shut the world out. Find some happiness again or I’m gonna haunt you like I’m your own personal Casper. Okay? You’ll get there someday. My big green flannel is in the closet if you need it. Be safe (I’ll keep an eye out for you though, promise).

My head glanced up and over to the closet, staring before I stood and opened it. At the end was her big oversized green flannel. She’d stolen so many of my clothes over the years she’d decided to get something of hers I could take for myself.

I pulled it off the hook and brought it back to bed, tugging it on before I lay back on the mattress.

It too was a little musty but there was the faint scent of her shampoo again filling the air. 

“Fuck, I miss you,” I said. I shut my eyes and turned off the light, hoping exhaustion would put me to sleep quickly.

_______

A/N: Read the Final Part here!

[jazy3]

Thoughts on Grey’s Anatomy: 17X14

SPOILERS AHEAD!!!

So, if you read my review from the previous episode you know I turned out to be mostly wrong about this one. That being said, I really enjoyed the episode. I was never a ride or die japril shipper so I don't think this episode was as emotional for me as it was for other fans, but I enjoyed it. It was nice to see Jackson and April back on screen together! They always had great chemistry and I really enjoyed their scenes. And how cute was Harriet in this episode? She was SO adorable! I like that Jackson went to go visit his father to try and figure out what his Mom was talking about and I'm glad he got some closure there. That was nice to see. The scene where Robert tells Jackson why he left was super emotional and the acting was sublime!

I'm glad that Robert is giving lunches to people who need them in the community and is helping in his own way. It doesn't make up for what he did, but it's nice to know that he's making a go of the life he has with the diner and his coffee blend. It did bug me a bit that they played with time so much because it was difficult for me to figure out in the beginning what order the events went in which kind of took me out of the episode a little bit.

My biggest pet peeve with this episode was the whole thing with the meat slicer. Let me explain. It would have taken Robert a few minutes maximum to teach Jackson how to use it, but instead Jackson acts like the entitled pretty boy that he is and says he can operate it no problem. It's because of attitudes like this that people get hurt in workplace accidents because they assume that because it looks easy that it is. Anyone CAN operate a meat slicer, but you shouldn't without proper training.

Attitudes like that perpetuate the idea that people who work in hospitality, retail, construction, and other such fields are "simple" and that anyone can do it. It devalues the important work that so many people do, and it often results in untrained people getting hurt. So yeah as someone whose worked in both hospitality and retail and whose family works in construction I could have done without the harmful stereotype that we are all simpletons and Jackson's BS elitist attitude and him cutting himself on the meat slicer. Jackson's clearly never worked a day in his life outside of being a doctor and it shows.

I too was surprised when April agreed so suddenly to go with Jackson to Boston. I didn't think it was fair for her to agree without talking to Matthew first, but then she revealed that they split up. Going into this episode I really thought they were faking us out because April, a deeply religious woman, leaving her husband and step-daughter for Jackson didn't make any sense to me. But finding out that April and Matthew split up changes that. At first, I thought that would be impossible because getting a divorce in the early months of the pandemic was pretty difficult but the fact that they've separated but not officially divorced makes more sense.

Jackson says in the first half of the season that Matthew is spending more time with Harriet than he or April are because they've both been taking so many COVID shifts which at the time came across as them being a happy family. But taken in context with what April says in this episode it makes it sound like Matthew was spending time with Harriet because Jackson and April were working all the time and that put strain on their marriage. What Jackson is talking about would have happened in March or early April and this episode takes place sometime in June. Sadly, a lot of couples have split up during the pandemic in the way that April describes so while sad it was realistic.

While it would obviously be sad and confusing for the kids April makes it clear that Matthew and Ruby have the support of his sister and mother and her and Harriet have Jackson. I’m sad that April and Matthew’s relationship didn’t work out. I really liked them together. I do think it was nice though that they had Jackson ride off into the sunset with April and Harriet having left the door open for reconciliation the way they did with Arizona and Callie when Arizona moved to New York with Sofia.

Also let���s talk about the big elephant in the room. I get that this is Jackson's send off, but I still don't understand why Jackson couldn't run the Foundation from Seattle. That's what Catherine has been doing on and off for the last few years. Tom and Richard the previous and current Chief Medical Officers of the Catherine Fox Foundation are both based in Seattle. Why is moving to Boston necessary? It's their foundation can't they just move the Headquarters? Also were in a pandemic wouldn’t Jackson be working remotely anyway? Why do they have to move to Boston? What’s in Boston that they need so badly?

That being said, I'm glad that Jackson is getting a proper send off and will have time to say goodbye to everybody and have some heart to hearts and do it properly. We don't get that with every character. What in the heckity heck is Jo going to do next season? She doesn't have anyone to sleep with or date and she's leaving general surgery for OBGYN. That doesn't leave a whole lot of story for her. What is she going to do? Talk to Levi about his relationship problems and deliver babies? You could make a reoccurring character out of that sure but not a main character which is what Jo is currently billed as.

I'd like to see Jo adopt Luna and I think that could be really interesting so if they go that route, I could get on board but if not, I don't know what she's going to do. To be honest Jo isn't my favourite character, but I still feel bad for her. She has serious abandonment issues and every time she heals someone else leaves her! Jo's mother left her at a fire station as a baby. She wanted nothing to do with her as an adult. She did the work to get all whole and healed and was finally ready to have kids with Alex when finds out about the twins and leaves her for Izzie.

Jo does the work to get better and work on her issues and begins a friends with benefits relationship with Jackson only for him to disappear to the woods after Jo called him out on it at the beginning of their relationship and has now decided to move to Boston with April and Harriet to head up the Foundation. Girl can't win. Also does April know that Jackson has been sleeping with Jo? I mean she didn’t tell him that her and Matthew separated so I guess she can’t be too mad at him, but still. Awkward.

I think Jackson loves camping more than anyone else ever loves camping. His departure means he won't be attending Maggie's wedding. I have to admit I was looking forward to the awkwardness. I’m curious to see what Catherine is going to do now. Will she retire? Will she go back to being an attending surgeon full time? Does this mean they are going to have to find someone new to head up Plastics? Are they going to introduce a new character for Season 18?

I feel like finding a replacement for Jackson could go either way. Because I didn't think I would like Hayes when he took over Peds but now I love him and he's one of my favourite characters! I still miss Alex, but Hayes has been a great addition. I root for him and Meredith so hard and he was one of my favourite parts of Season 16.

Also, poor Bailey! This woman is just trying to keep the hospital afloat and she's losing surgeons and doctors left, right, and centre. Alex moved to Kansas. DeLuca died. Jackson is moving to Boston. Jo is switching specialties. Meredith's out with COVID! And let's not forget that Bailey lost her Mom to COVID not that long after she suffered a miscarriage after having a heart attack way too young and she deals with OCD which the pandemic is doing nothing to help! This poor woman!

Onto next week’s promo, I'm glad that they are doing a proper send off with Jackson. I'm also super excited that Meredith is up and talking and moving around! I've missed her! Although I am mad we have to wait another two weeks!!! I mean come on! We waited two whole months for the show to come back and then we waited for two weeks between episodes 13 and 14 and now we have to wait another two weeks for episode 15. Come on! Meredith and Hayes better rise as a couple when the show returns because if they don’t I will be so disappointed.

Until next time!

[flyboytracy]

#Earth&Sky2021 - Day 5

It’s day five of #Earth&Sky2021 already, what the heck!

idek what theme I was trying to go for, lighthouse in a storm maybe? But anyway, here’s a flyboy brooding beneath the stars with a glass of whiskey and the weight of the world on his shoulders.

It’s pretty dark on Tracy Island when the lights are out. The whole world’s asleep and Scott should be too but sleep doesn’t come easily to him these days. As a kid he never needed it and even now when he needs it he can never find it for more than a few hours at a time...

It’s too warm by the villa so he chases a breeze to the edge of the island, whiskey glass in his hand and bare toes digging into the sand that gets trapped between the rocks by the storms that batter their little island. There’s one rock in particular he likes to perch on when his thoughts are too loud and his doubts refuse to go away. The runway can be seen from here, as can the little overhang of rocks above Thunderbird Four’s underwater launch chute and the roundhouse that protects the native fauna of the island from Thunderbird Three’s blowback. Scott’s own Thunderbird launches a little way behind him and that was one of the first things dad mentioned when he brought Scott out here to show his firstborn the island he planned to uproot their entire family to.

This very rock represents the beginning of Scott’s involvement with International Rescue. Will there be a plaque here in forty years’ time like the plaque of dad’s footprint on Mars? It feels somehow arrogant to assume he’ll have even half the impact that Jeff Tracy’s had upon the world.

Scott hadn’t been able to imagine it back then, barely a man himself and sat in the shadow of the greatest man he’s ever known. Dad had produced two of the tiny bottles of whiskey from the jet and Scott hadn’t been able to understand why because coming to this desolate little rock in the middle of nowhere had felt very much like running away, and that wasn’t something a Tracy ever did. Ever since he’d been old enough to stand up by himself, Scott had been standing firm against the world that constantly measured him against his father.

He’d taken a stand against anyone who’d ever dared to hurt his little brothers. He’d stood there for hours at swim meets or out on the back garden with Johnny waiting for the skies to clear. He’d stayed with his little brother when Virgil needed to record the light just right and he’d spent hours and hours at the park with Alan so his brothers could do their homework in peace and their youngest brother didn’t feel their parents’ absence as heavily as the rest of them. Dad had disappeared for days at a time and he’d told the guys it was work but he’d been old enough to guess it was alcohol and other things he didn’t wanna know about.

So he’d hesitated, sat upon this rock with a tiny bottle of whiskey in his hand, because he really hadn’t felt like celebrating when mom’s grave was back in Kansas and his heart felt like he’d buried it in the dusty dirt there with her. He hadn’t said anything but dad must’ve known because he’d reached out to tug Scott into his side like he was six and not sixteen.

Dad had always been a giant to Scott. When he was little it felt like he always had to lean back to see him and even when he grew taller, dad just seemed to get taller too. Having one of those arms around him had felt like being wrapped up by the universe and for a few fleeting moments he’d been able to forget about avalanches and detention slips and dinner for four little brothers who needed vegetables and attention. Dad’s hand cradled the back of his head just like how Scott cuddled Alan when he refused to go to sleep and part of the firstborn had broken.

Dad had fixed him, though. He’d told his boy about how the desolate rock was actually an extinct volcano with old lava tubes extending out underneath the ocean for miles around them. For the last year or so that weird nerdy friend of his had been making regular flights out here and beneath their feet lay something very special indeed.

It was going to be called International Rescue and it was going to make the world a better place.

It did and it still does, every single day. With every mission to Mars or London or some random canyon in a country Scott can’t pronounce, the world becomes a better place for somebody out there. A wife gets to go home to her wife or a son gets to show his dad a picture he drew at school because International Rescue saved a life. Not the world, not a country, just a life.

How can Scott even begin to live up to the legacy of a man who could look at a barren rock and imagine making it a home for his five sons and a rescue organisation? Their home had been weaved seamlessly into the rocks without disturbing the island’s ecosystem which had made one of Scott’s baby brothers happy and another had followed the progress of the villa and the hangars below with all the enthusiasm of a budding engineer.

Nothing Scott does could ever hope to live up to the legacy of the man responsible for all this. For a while he thought maybe his mark on history would be to keep International Rescue operational instead of letting it nosedive into the dirt without dad. Most sons would’ve wiped International Rescue from existence after losing their father to it but Scott had kept them flying and for eight years that had been enough.

But now dad’s home and back in charge from the safety of his desk and suddenly Scott’s achievements don’t feel all that remarkable any more when he compares them to his father’s. He’s the firstborn son of Jeff Tracy and he’s capable of anything. He should do more; he needs to be more than this.

But what?

Scott sits on the rock with his whiskey and stares out across the ocean.

It’s beautiful out here when the lights are down and the moon’s out. He can see the reflection of thousands of stars on the surface of the ocean and the moon shimmers at the centre of it all. A soft little breeze sends ripples dancing across the water and Scott can’t help but smile at how peaceful the world feels even though it’s dark.

There’s footsteps behind him and Scott would recognise them anywhere, even without a gentle, “Hey,” and the hand that squeezes his shoulder before Virgil comes to sit on the rock beside him. He’s barefoot too and the plaid’s been replaced by one of those hoodies that looks like a hug. Strands of dark hair have escaped from beneath the hood and Scott’s compelled to brush a couple back into place before tucking Virg into his side like dad once did with him all those years ago. Virgil folds up without complaint and his face disappears into the crook of his big brother’s neck before he heaves a sigh so loud it makes Scott shiver.

A hand comes to rest instinctively on the back of Virgil’s head, fingertips sinking into the soft material as they sit together beneath the stars. For a while he can forget about everything that’s happened since he sat on this rock with dad and focus on nothing but the here and now; the tang of engine oil that seems to follow Virg around like the beach does Gordon. Warmth radiates from the shoulders that’ve helped Scott carry his burdens since dad disappeared and it helps to ground him when he feels lost in the darkness. Even when he hasn’t known which path to take, he’s always been sure that he’ll never walk it alone.

“Can’t sleep?” he asks after a while because it’s not unusual to find one of his little brothers up and about in the middle of the night, but this one had a long day yesterday and they tend to sleep like hibernating bears after the worst rescues.

“Mmm.” little brother rumbles back to him from the depths of his comfy hoodie. The noise makes Scott chuckle, “I keep thinking about Thunderbird Two. She didn’t feel right when I got back from Portugal.”

“You said Brains checked her out?”

“Hmm. He said it was most likely a combination of factors including stress, high winds and exhaustion that altered my sensory inputs and slowed my reaction times.”

Scott remembers his glass of whiskey and takes a sip, “He thinks you imagined it.”

“Nmm.” another tired noise escapes from the depths of the hoodie and Scott’s kinda tempted to see how many he could get Virg to make like a rumbly game of Operation. On the other hand he’s spent his entire life taking care of the guy using him as a pillow and the noises worry him. His best friend needs sleep but Scott knows full well that won’t happen ‘til somebody takes a look at Thunderbird Two.

“I’ll run a systems check to see if anything comes up. We’ll have her sorted before sunrise.” Scott scrunches his little brother up in a hug before relinquishing his grip on the hoodie, “You get the coffee on and I’ll get her opened up.”

“F. A-” the affirmative gets swallowed up by a yawn that nearly swallows Scott too and he laughs as he gets to his feet, keeping Virg with him to stop him nosediving into the ocean because he’s lost more than one tired brother to the pool and the steps down to the sofas.

“I know how to sort it anyway.” he teases as they head for the kitchen, polishing off the remains of his whiskey and leaving the glass on the side to deal with later, “I’ll just give her a real good thump like dad does.”

“You are not using the Jeff Tracy Fix on my ‘Bird, Scott!” Virgil finally manages a full sentence and Scott’s laughter echoes down the hallways.