#grocerystoredean

[sword-of-stardust]

The Endless Cycle of Burnout and Recovery

[Kiki's Delivery Service - dir. Hayao Miyazaki // bestinsio (Twitter) // grocerystoredean (Tumblr) // The Oh Hellos, Boreas // Kiki's Delivery Service // Mitski, A Burning Hill // sea-mists (Tumblr) // clonist (Tumblr) // Mary Oliver, Wild Geese // MrTechnodad (Reddit) // My Chemical Romance, The Foundations of Decay // that-house (Tumblr) // stuckinapril (Tumblr) // elytrians (Tumblr) // Kiki's Delivery Service]

[grocerystoredean]

happy holidays. back to grocerystoredean for this November fifth season

[caztiel]

tagged by @zeropercentmp3 and @frankiecorleone :) thanks besties

tagging @transgendergerardway @kubfoo @jerseymuppet @cinnamon-syrup @planetary @exitwound @voregeoisie @elliotjonesss @bazpitch @grocerystoredean @eyecharvist and everyone else who sees this post

[louisdotmp3]

misha is in his babygay enthusiastic ally phase obviously. god. who do these anons think they are. misha googles am i gay quizzes at night in the dark.

misha buzzfeed am i gay. deancoded

[spnblrcrushes2]

grocerystoredean hi for the love of god etc !

@grocerystoredean

[s11e17]

for the fic prompt maybe smthn set in s4? dean and cas s4 weird trust that they had to just confess stuff to each other is so interesting to me

tumblr user @grocerystoredean you are a genius, i hope u enjoy :) more under the cut i (once again) wrote way too much / edit: i posted this on ao3 bc people seemed to like it !! wehh thank uuu :)

--

Well, fuck. Dean exhales into the soupy air, watches the sand dunes shiver light years away. Nothing like the desert Dean knows — his old friend the New Mexico desert, wide and empty, not a soul to see him for miles in any direction except the satellites above. Once — he’d been twenty-three, maybe, a year after Sam leaving him and eleven months from Dad — he got out of his car in a stretch of land where even the highway markers had died off, and he crawled on his hands and knees in the sun and tore his clothes off and just howled at the sky for the joy and the fear of it, fear of that aloneness.

This isn’t that desert. This is the kind of desert they show in movies. This is Lawrence of Arabia desert, Iraq War propaganda desert, Iron Man opening sequence desert. Hell, maybe Dean does know this desert as well as the other. He looks up at the sky and thinks it should be yellower.

When the hue of the sky tilts — or, maybe it’s already been that color, always been that color — he figures it out. “This is a—”

“A dream, yes,” Castiel says from behind him. Dean turns around. He sees him in the poor bastard he’s wearing, but when he looks at him a little sideways, or when the heat covers him, he thinks— Cas has gotta be miles away for the way the sun makes him liquid, the way Dean can see shifting wings like floating lakes behind Cas’s eyes.

Dean shoves his hands in his pockets, ‘cause what else is there to do. “Nice, uh. Nice place.”

“Three men were tested here,” Cas says, which isn’t a reply. He nods at something over Dean’s shoulder, and Dean turns to look, and he sees— or, they’ve been inside of a furnace this whole time. It isn’t hot, though, or at least, not hotter than the desert was. Is. Than the desert-furnace has been.

In that gravel-rough voice of his, Cas quotes: “Blessed be the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednago, who hath sent his angel, and delivered his servants that trusted in him, and have changed the king’s word, and yielded their bodies, that they might not serve nor worship any god, except their own God.”

“Throwin’ it back to the Old Testament, huh.” Dean knocks on the inside of the furnace. It’s like a kiln, the kind they ran into at that high school on Samhain. “Thought we were at the end of the book.”

“Linearity is not our… strong suit,” Cas says. It ain’t really a joke, hell, it barely counts as an idiom, but Dean laughs anyway, ‘cause the guy’s trying. And Cas looks half-pleased by Dean’s reaction, too. With that subtle curve in his mouth, the one Dean might be imagining, Cas continues, “I knew even then what this would come to.”

“This?” Dean studies Cas’s face, since he’s the only thing changing, moving in here. The only thing worth lookin’ at. “You mean me?” God, he looks so— he looks so human, somehow. Dean can see flames pouring out of his palms, great wings arcing up like lightning, cleaving the sky— but still. When Dean looks at him head-on, when he smiles, Dean almost feels like he might be— he might— anyway.

“You, Sam, it’s—” Cas shakes his head, or his head shakes him, or— what happens is, Cas corrects himself. “I mean to say that I have already known what this would come to. I know it now. Or what I mean is, I am in this furnace and Nebuchadnezzar is sentencing three men into a furnace and the apocalypse has already begun.”

Sheesh. “You, uh. You angels sure don’t make it easy for us to follow, man.”

“I am not a man.” Dean’s breath catches as Cas— as the furnace becomes, is, has always been the ocean, as Dean swallows saltwater while he swims to the mountain which is Castiel. His feet touch sand and the beach gives way to desert and Castiel puts his hand on Dean’s shoulder, where he touched him before, the first time, and Dean—

“Yeah,” Dean croaks out, and Castiel’s hand tightens and Dean falls to his knees, just like that, splayed out on the hot sand the way he’d crawled out of that car on that desperate hot afternoon when he was twenty-three. “I know. I know, Cas.”

“I have always known about this,” Cas says from above him, hand trailing up to Dean’s collarbone, the side of his neck, his— his jaw, his cheekbone, his hair. Cas puts his hand on the crown of Dean’s head like he’s healing him and Dean shudders. “About you. And yet.”

Dean waits. Cas stands there, wearing his goddamn slacks over his curling lion’s tail, silent.

Dean pushes Cas’s hand off him, stumbles to his feet. Cas doesn’t stop him. “And yet what, Cas?” he asks, hoarsely.

“I don’t know how this ends,” Cas says quietly. He says it like it’s an admission. Like he shouldn’t have said it. He steps back. “I shouldn’t have—”

“This— the apocalypse?” Dean catches Cas’s shoulder, and Cas lets himself be moved. “Look at me. Hey. Look at me.”

Cas locks eyes with him. That fire. You were Mount Vesuvius, Dean thinks out of the blue. You were ash covering the sky; an ice age. I can see you, covering Europe in snow. I see you making famine.

“I’ve never been conscious of it before,” Cas says carefully. “There has always been an empty space. The ending has never been foretold. But I never—”

He inhales sharply, and pulls away from Dean’s grasp. “You ruined me. Time— I must have always been conscious like this, but this is a change, but that doesn’t— I am not in— I am not like you.”

“Jesus, Cas, let’s— chill out for a sec—”

“I should not be inside time the way you are,” Cas bites out, violently. And then he pauses, and looks at Dean.

Thoughtfully, he adds, “And yet. Here we are.”

“Yeah, okay, I don’t—” Dean rolls his left shoulder back. All he knows is that Cas said you ruined me, and Dean can understand that much. Maybe he can fix it. He asks, “That’s a good thing, right? That you don’t know? That means we can change it. We get to pick how our story ends.”

“You shouldn’t be able to see me like this,” Cas says abruptly. Under his skin, a hawk cries, echoing. “In this in between form.”

He looks restless. Dean tries, “S’okay, Cas, you’re not puttin' me off or anything.”

“We shouldn’t have had this conversation.” Cas blinks, and the earth slides, and Dean is in the driver’s seat of the Impala. He feels the bass of Cas’s voice under his thighs as he says, “Sleep well, Dean.”

The dream lingers. Dean senses glimpses of it: sand, the steering wheel, Pompeii. He has the sneaking suspicion that Cas might’ve been involved, but he has no evidence, no reminder to check on Sam’s location, no ripped up sheet of paper in his pocket.

He rolls over to check the time. An old Gideons sits under his phone, propped open to Daniel, of all things. Dean thought they were at the end of the book. But there is a God in heaven that revealeth secrets, and maketh known to the king Nebuchadnezzar what shall be in the latter days. Thy dream, and the visions of thy head upon thy bed, are these.

“Bullshit,” Dean snorts, tossing the Bible back into the drawer. He thinks about praying to Cas. Hey Cas, he’d say, you up there? Got kind of a wacky feeling about all this. Wackier than our usual, even.

Ridiculous. He throws his coat on, and kicks Sam outta bed, mostly just thankful the kid’s where he’s supposed to be. He waits for him in the car, tapping his fingers against the steering wheel. It’s quiet, but he doesn’t really wanna put on any music. As if there’s something else he should be listening for.

“Well,” he says to himself when he can’t remember it. Sam comes out of the room with their bags, and he turns the key in the ignition. The engine’s rumble is familiar under his thighs. “It’ll come to me.”

[mishastoesies]

the last ask about the handprint and jack touching it to be closer to castiel but with the ashes necklace. i am. unwell.

HELP!!!! HELP oh my god okay so dean puts jack in his crib and sets the necklace on his dresser so he can go shower and when he comes back jack has levitated the necklace into his crib and is clutching it in his little baby hands looking at it with more awe and reverence than a newborn should be capable of and dean is just... overcome with emotion. namely, completely irrational anger, then all-consuming misery. 

he KNOWS it’s ridiculous to be angry at a kid for getting into your stuff, that’s what kids do, he grew up in a cramped car with no privacy with his baby brother, he KNOWS, but... that necklace is all he has left of cas. that, and this strange, mini cas that is everything and nothing like cas all at once. and he takes the necklace away from jack, holds it to his own chest protectively, and jack, of course, starts screaming, and dean feels like a complete heel at that point, so he gives it back and jack quiets down, and he realizes that he’s gonna have to learn how to share the memory of cas with jack. they’re both mourning. and that’s when the permanence of cas’ death hits him and he just kinda crumbles in on himself. he doesn’t cry, not in front of jack, but something’s off about him until cas comes back. potentially he goes completely nonverbal, potentially he asks sam to give him a few “tough cases” to “work through some stuff” (suicide missions so he can die in a futile attempt to see cas again), i’m not sure yet, but he’s DIFFERENT afterwards.

[enochianribs]

angel tfw anna and uriel exchanging a Look every time cas mentions dean because he goes full "13 year old girl talking abt her crush" every single time. cas: dean usually orders this at diners UwU. uriel and anna: stare at each other like theyre in the office

no exactly. 

uriel: “castiel. this matters why?” 

cas:  fuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufuckyou  “it doesn’t. it was just an observation.” :^)

[chocolatecakecas]

deangirl (insert red flag emoji)

tell me my red flags🚩

[googledocsdyke]

dean thinking being gay/figuring out you're gay is for privileged people + him having turned tricks when he was younger. implications. i.

IMPLICATIONS! bc like. okay. i think for dean it's very much about the separation of acts and identity. like performing queer sexual acts is "allowed" and "more safe" because he separates it entirely from any outward expression of queer Identity or identification with the surrounding culture. like if it's ONLY utility, ONLY a means to an end and survival, if it can be folded into the logic of "keep sammy safe" it can be de-gayed. and i think in a way everything but the most repressed part of himself doesn't even read his sex work As gay, bc it's so many years away from the things he thinks he knows to be Gay Things — indulgence, softness, decadence, wealth, the opposite of survival

whereas to think about identity rather than acts? to parse himself out as A Gay Man or A Bi Man or whatever rather than someone who maybe did that one thing that one time? to call himself to queerness as an identity in any way? unthinkable literally unthinkable that's not what dean winchester Does

[taffetizer]

obsessed with you keeping up with this im so glad I’ve invested you in this

i'm literally obsessed with it it's the funniest thing ever.

[uquizstats]

this gender uquiz by @grocerystoredean (thanks for sharing the results!) has six results: gay kindergarten teacher, male thot, 80s movie man, mx frizzle, male wife (enemy of the state), and secret good dean winchester

The results from the quiz are broken down like so, for a total of 144,671 total takers as of April 22, 2021 at ~10:13 pm PST:

Quiz takers posted their answers in the comments and reblogs of the post a total of 1,177 times, with the last recorded reply being on April 22, 2021 at 10:16 pm PST:

The changes in these two charts are laid out here (notes % divided by results %):

In comparison to the actual results of the quiz, the notes of the post show

more than double the amount of secret good dean winchester results

those who got mx frizzle were also noticeably more prone to posting about it than others, and

takers who received male thot gender showed up the least, cutting their numbers almost in half.

gay kindergarten teacher had lower numbers in the notes than in results, but that seems to be a common theme for top results

Interestingly, 80s movie man had almost the exact same amount of representation in both pools, taking up less than a single percent of space more in the notes than in the results

[crobby]

peace offering?

accepted

[samdyke]

seeing your post on a blog I nearly unfollowed for making so many “spn sucks and I haven’t watched it” jokes on November fifth. loading my kora samdyke official sniper as we speak

[anthonycrowleymoved]

crowley continues to call cas a whore despite the fact that he is also having sex with dean winchester

yeah you get it

[calamitysong]

🎶

you should’ve seen the other guy, nathaniel rateliff