#She does not like to chat with her capricious sister

[foxalone]

She has no name, no one knows who or what she is, she exists and is responsible of darkness.

Although she's causing a mess she's not really bad, but she's not a pacifist either.

Underblood by me

Undertale by Toby Fox

[postmodernmulticoloredcloak]

Hi. I need ur help. Is Dean mad at Cas, at God for making Cas "responsible for a failed mission that ended with a sad brother/kind of kid to Dean, bc he questions reality and his love for Cas ... or rather both? I'm a little bit confused after having read so much meta all at once.

Hi! I think you are confused because... it’s everything at once! I think Dean is feeling many things right now, and not all of those things have a good outlet or way to be dealt with, so they are directed somewhere else and become messy.

Dean is, at any given moment of his life since he was a child, angry at himself. That’s the inevitable result of a father that made him feel inadequate, by dropping responsibilities on his little shoulders that were too big for him and inevitably he couldn’t live up to. He has made important steps to deal with those issues--that’s the point of the scene with him saying that it wasn’t fair that he had to be mother and father to Sam--but a lifetime of being made feel inadequate don’t disappear with a snap of your fingers. Especially because it wasn’t just his father dropping huge responsibility after huge responsibility on him (remember when he literally dropped the responsibility of possibly having to kill Sam, the kid he raised as his own child, and then died?) but it was a much bigger game. God dropped the responsibility of the entire world on him over and over. Apocalypse after apocalypse, Lucifer, Eve, Leviathan, Michael, soulless Jack, but also the regular monsters, a never-ending string of situations where the responsibility for the lives of many other people, strangers and loved ones both (in fact sometimes it’s a Sophie’s choice!).

It’s not surprising that he developed feelings of inadequacy and self-loathing so big you can see them from space. The poor guy feels that he’s not good enough for anything, especially not good enough to be loved, not good enough for someone to stay with him. He feels that everyone will inevitably abandon him because why would they stick around? He’s trash. Even worse, he’s poison, he ruins everything he touches, everyone he gets close to.

The intensity of these feelings vary depending on how hard the circumstances are on his mental state, sometimes it’s better sometimes it’s worse. I think some fans expect him to “get better” in a linear fashion, but mental health does not work as a straight line; there are ups and downs, and when sometimes renews your trauma, you just fall back in the mechanisms of your trauma. It’s unreasonable to say things like “he should have learnt by now”--that’s not how trauma works. You get better when you are not actively exposed to trauma. Renewed trauma means going back.

So we have identified the first thing Dean is angry at, himself. Of course, hating yourself is very vexing on your mental health, and it is in fact healthier to transfer the anger and disappointment from yourself to someone else, as it prevent you from being crushed under the weight of self-loathing and guilt.

Then there’s the figures in position of power that have dropped the various responsibilities on Dean’s shoulders. First, John and Mary. Mary is a particular case because of course Dean never actually blamed her for dying, and even when he learnt about her deal with Azazel he knew that she was just a pawn in a cosmic-level game, and of course it’s not like she decided to make the deal and die for fun. But when Mary returned and her behavior shattered Dean’s life-long image of her, feeding his feelings of inadequacy and self-loathing because it felt like he wasn’t even worth for his own mother to stay with him, that fused together with an irrational sense of abandonment that came with the loss and forever left a mark in his little four-year-old brain.

I think the scene where Dean confronted Mary at the end of the season was about this: a need to outsource the blame and self-hatred, and Mary was the figure that catalyzed so many emotions since his early childhood, love and loss and joy that was robbed away from him and such profound pain that came with her disappearance from his life, to the point that when she returned and shattered his image of her, he found himself with so many extreme emotions about her.

And now John. Alright, I’m digressing big time so I’ll keep John short, everyone and their grandmother have written essays on Dean’s relationship with John and it’s not particularly relevant here, save for the fact that John is dead and Dean has never really had the chance to confront him. Even when he temporarily came back thanks to the magic pearl, circumstances were... suspiciously too apt for Dean to approach the father figure in a positive way (I’m convinced that it was all a very precise machination by Chuck to make Dean well-disposed towards him, basically). Dean was in a high, and he was in a mental state where he did not need to make that emotional outsourcing on John. Mary and John met again, then trouble happened, that they had to say goodbye and it was highly emotional and obviously left no space for emotional outsourcing. Result, Dean has no way to really bounce all that negative stuff back on John. John was just a ghost from the past, really, and ghosts from the past don’t really serve any substantial purpose.

And now to the juicy part--Chuck. Dean started out his journey believing that God didn’t exist. His reasoning was a classic argument of atheism: a lot of terrible evil exists, and if God exists he either isn’t omnipotent (then what kind of God is he??) or doesn’t care, or he’s malevolent, and those options don’t go well with the idea of God Dean would have been exposed to as a person growing in a primarily Christian environment like the US.

Then he learns that God exists, but he doesn’t care. He’s left, and now everyone else--angels, humans, demons--is supposedly left dealing with a godless world. That doesn’t really come as a shock to Dean; for Cas it’s shocking, because he believed that God cared. For Dean, the jump is just from a non-existing God to an absent God, and that doesn’t change much for him. Furthermore, he’s not exactly foreign to the concept of shitty father figures who dump you on your own in a shitty world.

The shock comes now. For Cas, ironically, there’s no shock now, because he experienced that shock of being angry and disappointed towards God years ago. Now he makes the jump from a shitty disappointing God to... a shitty disappointing God, just in a different way.

Dean goes from a God that isn’t around, that leaves you alone dealing with the shittiness of the world... to a God that has been there all along, manipulating everything. Dean could deal with a God that is what Chuck pretended to be when he reappeared in season 11, when Chuck gave him the speech about leaving his creatures find their own way, parenting-versus-enabling; that was a painful perspective but it made sense, and Dean could accept it. But when Chuck revealed himself to be the mastermind behind everything, an actual capricious author who uses them as pawns for his entertainment... that’s a blow. A very, very big blow.

Chuck had played a very specific game on Dean. He presented himself as a father who did the right thing for his “baby”, albeit the difficult one. He explained that he realized that a hands-off parenting was healthier for his creatures, that being present in their lives wasn’t parenting but enabling... He sold Dean a picture where being an absent father does the child good. (And later had Dean briefly meet John again to feed him a romanticized impression of his figure and his relationship with his family... talk about yikes!)

Dean had fought tooth-and-nail to affirm his free will against the machinations of angels, he strongly believed in that against the idea of destiny. And Chuck presented himself as the good guy, who gave them their free will, while his bad, bad sister Amara wanted to take that away from them. And now the truth comes out. Chuck was never the hands-off parent that distanced himself for the good of his creatures. He was an author (authors lie...) who just played with them for his selfish reasons.

Dean’s own sense of what reality is has shattered. That is generally not good on a person’s mental health. So, yeah, Dean is not in a good mental place.

So Dean now is angry at God. Rightly so. But God, by definition, is not there to confront. (Dean thought he had confronted him once and God just fed him manipulative lies, so it’s not like he hopes to have a nice honest chat with him). Furthermore, Dean, Sam and Cas currently believe that Chuck has actually left the building this time. They think that Chuck’s “welcome to the end” meant that he just slapped an ending on this iteration of the story and fucked off to write another one, create another universe. They are convinced that they are actually living in a post-Chuck world, like the apocalyptic wasteland universe.

I also think that Dean hasn’t realized that Chuck’s ending isn’t really the ghostpocalypse, but also, and especially, ruining their relationships, and their mental health basically. The ghostpocalypse is just the smokescreen (c’mon, like the Winchesters would perish against a bunch of ghosts and demons from hell, been there done that) and the true ending he’s orchestrated out of pettiness and spite is breaking them, breaking their relationships. Sam loses Rowena; Jack’s death and all that jazz definitively drives Cas and Dean apart.

But let’s go back to Dean’s anger and shock and frustration. He could drive it all towards himself, and just get crushed under the weight of it all; he can’t drive it all at God, because he bailed; so he directs it towards the one person closest to him that he truly feels like an equal.

Dean has been directing anger towards Cas since Mary’s death, in my opinion, because Cas is the safest outlet for the horrifying vortex of guilt, self-loathing and abysmal self-worth that something as traumatic as losing Mary (again--remember what I said about renewed trauma not being something you learn to deal with but something that reopens wounds and possibly makes them worse?) and seeing Jack no longer himself, essentially losing him to an even more terrifying destiny than mere death, must have caused.

It’s like Dean trusts Cas so much that he subconsciously feels safe using him as an emotional outlet/scapegoat... and now that safety gets shattered again because Cas rightly puts some distance between them (as I believe it’s a healthy choice given the situation, although not dictated by the right motivations in Cas--I guess it’s something like using the wrong formula but getting the right result, because right now staying together is not healthy... like, the healthiest thing would be getting a fuckton of therapy, but that’s not in the cards I guess) but Dean’s traumatized psyche will register it as a confirmation of that lifetime-long conviction that he’s not worth to be loved, that he’s not worth for anyone to stay.

Cas’ biggest fear is that Dean won’t ask him to stay with him, Dean’s biggest fear is that Cas will leave him--ta-da, their worst fears just became true! Of course, Dean doesn’t insist Cas stays not because he doesn’t care but basically because he cares too much, and Cas leaves because he thinks Dean doesn’t care...

But let’s get back on track. Is Dean angry at Cas? Yes. Is Dean really angry at Cas? Eh. What is this anger really? It’s a defense mechanism. It’s pretty much the alternative to just shatter. It’s a survival mechanism, shattering would be really bad for his survival perspectives. So he uses a trusted, close figure as a scapegoat for what is a huge mess of emotions. (Not Sam, he goes into parental mode with Sam, it’s known, it’s safe, it works.)

Rowena’s death just adds more meat to the fire, because she meant something to Dean himself and also because Sam is truly heartbroken about it. I don’t think that Dean doesn’t understand the circumstances of Cas’ choices, but rationality here has very little grip. It’s been just a few days since Mary’s death, and not really much longer since Michael escaped and Jack sacrificed his soul, and let’s not forget that Dean has basically been in a state of severe ongoing trauma ever since Michael possessed him, tricked him into believing he was free (Chuck mirror alert!) and violated his mind repeatedly, completely manipulated his perceptions, and then pretty much destroyed his family.

Dean’s mind has been tortured by Michael and immediately next, with zero time to breathe, tortured again by Chuck’s manipulations and revelation that shattered Dean’s sense of reality--a sense of reality that had already been shaken because of Michael’s tricks, and now he just finds out that the reality he anchored himself to... is also a manipulation. There’s no reality he can anchor himself to, or at least that is how he feels right now. His psyche has suffered some heavy blows, and no speech from Cas about them being “real” can currently heal the damage. For Dean, this isn’t a matter of what Chuck has done or not; it’s just an aggravation of a state of attack his mind was already in.

This post has gotten a bit long XD I hope it could help you get a better idea of Dean’s mental state (granted that this is merely the way I see what the show is doing, no one is forced to agree with me!) and feel free to ask for any further clarification or argument!

[yukiwrites]

Love Behind the Mask

Thank you so much for your support, @fseffect! This was somehow challenging and accomplishing to write, so I hope you like it! ;D

Summary: Marth wasn’t supposed to land in Askr. She had a mission; she had to prevent her terrible future from happening -- so why... why was she now wishing to extend her time in this strange world? She found someone she would love to spend time were it all peaceful. Was she allowed to feel like this, despite the weight of her mission?

Commission info HERE and HERE!

Sometimes, the quiescent calm in that world woke her up from her light sleep. She would come out of her room in her usual disguise, ready for a battle to break in only to find that the night was stagnantly going forward.

That calm terrified her.

"I mustn't dawdle in this world, and yet..." she said in a low breath as though the well-taken care of walls could hear her, looking back at the living quarters.

She clutched her chest, suddenly wanting to be free of her mask if only for a moment to gaze upon the starry sky appearing before her as she strolled to the garden. One hand reached out to the mask, but she stopped it.

No.

'Marth' must still be hidden. In this strange world, anyone from the past she was supposed to go to could appear -- and if they recognized her, she could ruin their future as well.

'Marth' must still go on. 'Marth' has unfinished business.

Of course, so does she, the one behind the mask. She took it upon herself to jump into a portal leading back in time so as to save her family, friends and the whole world, really.

"Falling here was a complete misguidance, though I'm yet to learn if Naga planned for this or if another being go in the way during the ceremony..." Once again Marth realized she was talking to herself, an habit she inherited from her Mother, most likely. "I am pressed to leave, and yet... oh, and yet..." she once again felt the tingling in her chest, her eyes itching under her mask.

Inadvertently, her feet made her turn from the garden back to the castle, quickly walking towards the dormitory.

"Yet I have found her here," Marth's voice was soft with fondness, her face and chest warm with love. She needn't worry about the dimly lit corridors for she knew the way by heart.

A most adored door reached her limited field of vision, her feet almost running towards it. Without a second's hesitation, she knocked on it. "... Sakura? Are you there, my lady? The moonlight was so beautiful tonight I had to come to get you..."

A little bit of fumbling and a lot of hurried steps before a very eager pink-haired princess opened the door, wrapping herself with her thick sleeping hakama. "Luci- um, Marth! I-I didn't, um, I didn't think you'd stop by tonight, so I was about t-to go to you in-instead... the starlight looks g-great from my window..." The princess shyly looked down, her cheeks turning rosy from excitement as well as embarrassment.

'Marth' never lost her smile, somehow surprised with herself for actually knocking on someone else's (Sakura's, no less!) door in the middle of the night for something as, should she even say that, mundane as watching the stars.

But the doomed future she came from bore no stars -- the skies were always covered with ash, shadows and clouds. Being able to see so clearly here, in this foreign land, alongside someone who turned out to be so special to her... it was a blessing, truly.

She was going to live it to its fullest until the end.

"My lady, the view is even greater from the hill beside the dormitory," Marth extended her hand to her small and beloved princess, enjoying how she eagerly yet awkwardly took it. "Allow me to escort you there."

Sakura squeezed Marth's hand, almost forgetting to close the door behind herself before they left. She stuck closely under the guise of being cold, when in reality she truly just wanted to be even closer to the woman she loved.

How sneaky, Sakura, She thought as she rested her head on Marth's shoulder, I didn't know i could be like this. But maybe... This isn't so bad. She closed her eyes, snuggling closer to her beloved, allowing herself to be led.

Marth's heart raced in a way it never had before -- the sight and proximity of Sakura so close to her own body made her want to simply hug her and take her away from there, to someplace far, far-away from their worries.

She would never, of course, as the future of thousands relied upon the success of her mission; but in the world inside her head, whence everything was peaceful as there were no more fighting, she and Sakura danced in the open, their hairs down and their faces bare.

Oh, how she longed for such a day! To be able to openly be herself and hold Sakura close in front of whoever might be watching.

"... Lucina?" Sakura's quiet voice took Marth out of her deviations, the place she had told her beloved about standing right before them. "Is this it?"

"S-Sakura...!" Alarmed, Lucina looked around. "You mustn't say my real name-"

"I-I know, I'm sorry. But you were so distracted; that was the only way..."

Lucina took her cape from its clasps and placed it on the grass right under a tree. "Forgive me, my lady. I was lost in thoughts of you when I should have been enjoying your presence..." she looked down in distress, forgetting to invite Sakura to sit.

The princess did it anyway, holding both of Lucina's hands close. "You were t-thinking of me...?" She took those hands to her cheeks, wanting the both of them to be even closer.

Lucina pressed her forehead with Sakura's, finally allowing herself to take off the 'Marth' mask to face her beloved as herself. "As I always do. The thought of you brings me a solace I never thought possible." Their breaths intertwined.

Ahh, even her lips tasted like cherry blossoms.

During the day, calling Lucina as such was utterly forbidden -- only Sakura knew of her secret, after all. Even the matter of Marth being a woman in disguise was only known to her, Marth's beloved.

Still, they were drawn to each other often. Because Sakura was usually by herself due to her shy and inward nature, the sight of the mysterious masked Hero hanging around by her side caught the eye of many an attentive people.

Sakura's sister, Hinoka, for one. Princess Camilla of Nohr for another.

Even though both older sisters had differing bases for their interest in Sakura's and Marth's relationship, they were both adamant to know more.

Hinoka, fiery as only she was, meant to confront Sakura head on. She would ask who that Marth fellow was and what was he doing hanging around her little sister like that as well as what his intentions were.

But Camilla, cautious and capricious, stopped her fast-friend. "Why, and spoil the lovely atmosphere they have going on, dear? Let them enjoy themselves!"

"Absolutely not!" Hinoka shook the hand Camilla had placed on her shoulder. "Sakura's quiet and doesn't speak her mind very often. Although she can be stubborn whenever she wants it, she's too gentle and easy to take advantage of -- I don't want any random crook hanging around her without making sure he's not bad news!"

Camilla blinked, placed one hand over her cheek and let out a lady-like giggle. "A 'he' you say, darling?"

Hinoka frowned, following Camilla's line of sight to something behind her own back. "What do you mean by- oh, there they go! I'm gonna go ask her now-"

"Shh, darling; let us see what they do for now, yes? Look at how careful they are in looking at their surroundings! If only they could see us this far down the hill..."

"They're doing something in secret!" Hinoka hissed, her chest burning, though she didn't know if of rage or embarrassment.

The two women carefully followed, though Camilla never lost her amused smile. "I wonder if little Sakura knows the lady under this 'Marth' mask! Ah, to be young and bright!"

The hoshidan princess stopped on her tracks. "Lady? Isn't Marth a man-"

"Why, did that poor deep voice and flat chest deceive you, darling? That's a woman through and through. She must have had a reason to hide her gender, so let us not spread this around, hmm?"

"Well, if she's a woman, I'll feel more relieved, actually-" Hinoka breathed out at the same time she gave the last step towards the hill, immediately spotting Marth and Sakura holding hands, their faces inches from each other. "HEY, YOU'RE KISSIN-"

"My!" Camilla almost clapped, then laughed when both women jumped almost ten feet into the air and away from each other.

"B-b-b-b-big sister!! A-and Lady Camilla t-too!" Bright red, Sakura covered her face with both hands, crouching down so as to become one with the ground. "I'm- Um, we- I!"

Marth didn't have her mask, her hair, usually short, was flowing through the wind like the ocean, its deep and long blue contrasting with the deep red of her face. "Y-you're my lady's- Sakura's- sister- I, um, forgive this secretive behavior, we're, um--" she panicked, no knowing where to look.

Equally bright red, Hinoka huffed with protectiveness. "What have you been doing to my sister? Why are you lying to everyone about your gender?! This- you're- kissing- even I haven't done that yet- But my little sister-"

Marth widened her eyes, her face turning into a deeper shade of red. "F-forgive me once again, my lady, I simply love-"

"Oh, my dear, no need to be so ashamed!" Camilla wrapped one arm around Hinoka's shoulder, making the shorter woman almost fall on her face, "little Hinoka here is feeling somewhat dishoriented, but I am sure we can all get along, hmm?"

"Hey- get off me-"

"Why don't we go have a nice and long chat under that shade? I'm sure you both have a lot to tell us, yes?"

"Don't ignore m-"

Sakura ran to Marth's side, hugging her beloved's arm with everything she had. "Um- big sister! P-please listen to us! I- I want to tell you a-about our r-r-r-relationship..."

"Relationship..." Hinoka hissed, losing the strength in her legs. Camilla kept her up by holding onto her shoulders, though.

"This is going to be utterly adorable! Come now, little Hinoka. I'm sure your sister has a lot to say."

Still fuming with something akin to rage or jealousy, Hinoka failed to notice how Marth trembled slightly, though still securely held Sakura's hand in her own. Camilla smiled softly at their young love, guiding them all to a nearby shade.

The nohrian princess knew her friend well; she would come along in a while. Hinoka loved her little sister more than anything, after all. There would be no way she wouldn't accept her love, as fleeting and young as it were.