#i need to get offline before i start rage-posting left and right

[humanitys-strongest-bamf]

"we're respectful towards trauma-survivors but only the ones that are convenient for us" / "we encourage self-care and prioritizing your mental health but only if its convenient for us" gtfo

[crackers4jenn]

But what if I write a s15, post-finale "Changing Channels"-esque fic where Dean didn't die, Cas is back from the empty, and Gabriel gets bored and meddles a little, popping Dean and Cas into various fic/romcom tropes??? (a snippet behind the cut)

+++

The blare of a horn startles Dean awake, echoing in his ears long after the initial honk.

Still kinda drowsy at first, Dean notices, through the windshield, which should’ve been his first red flag, a stretch of road ahead, and then some taillights.

Immediately he’s hurled into panic mode.

“Shit, shit—”

He swerves onto the shoulder and slams on the brakes, his heart thumping hard enough he can feel his pulse in his neck. A light sweat breaks out across his forehead over what seems, now, like a close call.

Blindly grappling for the gear shift, he winds up missing; instead, his hand hits the dashboard of what definitely isn’t the Impala.

Dean's brain stutters offline for a second.

When it turns back on, he manages to put the car in park while fumbling for the door handle—too high, it’s in the wrong spot—he finds it and stumbles out of the car, nearly face-planting into asphalt in his hurry.

It’s dark out, that’s the first thing he notices. He finds himself, somehow, in the middle of a suburban neighborhood, the tree-lined, HOA kind, every house with an American flag staked in the lawn and pumpkins adorning the front stoops.

Mind racing, he tries to recall the last thing he remembers.

Eileen was over. They were at the bunker. Her and him and Sam and Cas were in the Deancave, watching a movie.

There was no hunt, no way he could’ve been caught and strung up by some djinn. He hasn't pissed off any witches lately. They were at home freaking relaxing, so how is he here?

Maybe they fell asleep? Maybe he's dreaming?

He closes his eyes, tries to wake himself up. Jittery, he shakes out his hands. Nothing happens, and he's drawing the line at a Wizard of Oz heel tap, so he gives up.

With sinking dread, the kind that comes with a lifelong history of being the cosmic mattress to a douchebag higher power, Dean starts for the car again—then stops dead in his tracks and does a full-on double-take: there’s a giant neon 'Pizza World' sign welded onto the roof, because, holy shit, it’s a pizza delivery car, he’d been driving a pizza delivery car.

Needle careening toward the red end of his freak-out meter, he drops back into the driver’s seat in a throat-drying, adrenaline-releasing rush, only then realizing with a groan—the pants he was wearing the last he remembered? The three layers of shirts, including flannel? His go-to? Yeah, not part of whatever bizarro world he woke up in. Now he's got on a black polo shirt with the Pizza World logo, and (worse) a pair of jean shorts that're riding way too high up his thighs for his liking.

How the hell did he miss this before?

Oh, right, probably from the shock of BEING HURTLED INTO SOME WEIRD ASS MINDFUCK.

He gropes for his phone in his back pocket and finds it there easily, so at least one thing’s still the same, never mind that he’s got denim riding up his ass right now, but when he swipes the thing on, there’s an unfamiliar map pulled up, coordinates already plugged in.

He frowns and taps the home key. And then taps again when nothing happens. Zero to pissed, his taps turn into rage pounding but the map app stays frozen on the screen. When he tries to force a restart, the phone won't turn off, which is when Dean accepts, fine. He has to play along. Cool.

Awesome. Nothing weird or messed up about that.

He starts driving.

Turns out, he’s basically already wherever he needs to go. He gets to the end of the road, takes a left, and the destination he’s being led to like a horse following an ominously dangled carrot is a two-story house smack in the middle of a cul-de-sac.

He rolls up the driveway with his high beams pointed at the garage, cutting lines in the dark. Just like every other house he passed, this one’s still decked out for Halloween, fake cobwebs strung from the rafters and a couple of plastic skeletons at the porch.

Now that he’s here, thinking alright, I played your stupid game, he tries his phone again. Nada.

With a sigh and some bullshit bravado mustered mostly out of frustration, he turns the car off and starts to get out. He winds up pausing, one foot on the ground, the other still in the car, to hook his hands over the frame of the door, taking a moment to look around for anything shady, his hunter instincts on high alert.

The wind rustles some trees, which blows loose a few stray leaves that drift to the gutter. Up the street, a car drives past, freakishly quiet because it’s one of them super silent electric ones.

Right, then.

He crosses the driveway, walking up the pathway that leads to the front door. The curtains in all the windows are drawn open. He cranes his neck trying to peek inside without making it obvious to the neighborhood crime watch that’s what he’s doing, but all he sees is a couch and TV and living room.

Reaching the door, he hesitates once more. Forms a fist to knock. Then decides, maybe he oughta be the one springing his presence onto someone, not being sprung on. He grabs the knob.

The door yanks open and Dean almost falls off the porch from surprise.

“Dean,” Cas says on an exhale so full of relief, it helps Dean process that it’s Cas in front of him, who looks like he’s almost sagging from the weight of his own appreciation. “You’re here.”

Dean shrugs his bravado back into place now that there’s a familiar face to tether himself to. Still, his knees nearly buckle at the sight of him, and he wonders vaguely about Sam, but doesn’t let himself think too hard about whether or not he's here, if he’s okay. If he goes down that road, there’s no getting off it.

Gruffly, he goes, “Yeah, and where the hell's that, exactly? Got any idea?”

“I don’t know. I woke up a few minutes ago, here, in this house, but when I tried to call you—”

He holds his phone out for Dean to see. His contact information is pulled up and when Cas hits the 'call' button in demonstration, there’s only dead air on the line. His finger covers the screen for a moment before he swipes to show Dean the text messages he’d been attempting.

Dean pulls his phone out too. What do you know, the map has disappeared, but when he brings up his own texts, there’s zip from Cas.

“I got nothing,” he tells him, at a loss.

"I tried Sam too. It didn't work."

Suddenly remembering the car, his freaking uniform, Dean asks, “Did you… order… pizza?” and doesn’t know what kinda answer he’s even expecting here, but he’s trying to figure out what sorta rules they’re following.

Cas's eyes narrow in confusion and then grow big, seeing Dean clearly for the first time, and not in a recognizable way. His gaze falls to the logo embroidered on Dean’s chest. “No, but—”

All of a sudden, some kid comes whizzing into view behind Cas, which is startling enough on its own, but then he stops to shoot Dean with a nerf gun. He aims for the crotch and absolutely nails the shot. Dean curls inward with an airy oof of pain as the kid bolts back off with a victory whoop and some sociopathic gusto.

“The hell,” Dean manages to squeeze past his lips, high-pitched and shell-shocked.

“You’re a pizza man?”

Cas says it like something’s beginning to fall into place for him. Less of a startled realization and more of a dreaded observation.

Dean breathes, “Yeah,” with a wince, trying to unfurl.

“I'm a babysitter,” Cas says disbelievingly. Another kid shyly inches into view, her arms wrapped tightly around one of Cas's legs as she reveals half her face only. Jesus, what the hell. “Apparently,” Cas adds, reaching down to pat the kid on the head in a reassuring way.

Dean’s crap when it comes to guessing kids' ages, he’s only ever had Sam and then Ben to go by, but he’s gonna clock the clinger as four and the nut-buster between the six to eight range.

Doesn’t clear up anything in the slightest.

“The hell,” Dean says again.

++

The boy’s running around like he dripped sugar straight from the bag into his veins. He zips past Dean and Cas with his gun pointed at them at all times, the kind that unloads multiple foam bullets at once, but he disappears into the dining room slash kitchen without firing, finding his glee in the way Dean flinches.

“Freak,” Dean murmurs.

Cas stares at him flatly, unimpressed with Dean making instant enemies with a child. The girl’s still suctioned to his legs like a frog on the side of a terrarium, peering up at Dean like he’s the thing hiding in her closet at night.

Yeah, yeah.

“So, what, we hang around, then, wait for mom and dad to get back? Play Candyland?” Before waiting for an answer, he shakes off the sarcasm and hisses, "This don't feel wrong to you?"

"No, Dean, it feels incredibly normal," Cas rolls out just as mockingly, sharper and more biting. "I often wake up clung to by random children in other people's homes—”

A foam bullet sails past their heads. Dean's freaked out enough his frustration bubbles over.

“Dude, Deliverance Jr., dial it back,” he bites out in the direction of the hyperactive blur. Something in his tone makes the lip of the little girl quiver, and that’s the only warning they get before she breaks into an eardrum-bursting wail.

“Dean,” Cas sighs. For a second he’s torn between his own annoyance and the weariness of needing to offer comfort. Because it’s Cas, the latter wins out and he softens.

“What? Kid's freaking her out,” Dean defends, throwing his shoulders in the direction of the other rugrat.

“Really? Because I think that might be you—”

Perfectly timed, another nerf bullet whines past, just barely missing Cas.

Dean's eyebrows climb high atop his forehead to gloat: you were saying?

Unwilling to step off the high road now that he’s there, Cas instead redirects his attention to the girl. Her cries have lowered in volume, now at a range still in 'giving it two more minutes before the neighbors call CPS,' but at least Dean can hear himself think.

Dropping into a crouch, Cas puts a hand on the girl's shoulder. “Everything is going to be alright, you don’t need to be afraid.”

The brother sure as hell knows his cue, he'll give him that: they hear the springy release of the trigger just seconds before a bullet thwacks Cas—with eerie precision—right at his temple.

Dean tries not to preen, settling instead to rock back on his heels, lifting a finger gleefully. “You, uh, got a little something—”

The bullet gives up its suction and drops to the floor.

Cas closes his eyes and breathes out through his nose.

Abruptly, everything around Dean and Cas but Dean and Cas themselves freezes with a time-bending pop. The girl turns silent and motionless, her head thrown back. And not figuratively, not in some bullshit 'it's like time stood still' metaphorical way. Literally. Even the tear that had been falling down her cheek is now paused in place, glistening wetly.

Cas slowly climbs to his feet, glancing over at Dean. There’s almost a crackle in the air, bringing with it a sense of foreboding.

“Cas…” Dean murmurs in alarm, ready to grab him by the collar and dip out of there fast if they need to.

“WOW, seriously?” booms a voice from the other side of the room, right next to the boy who was caught mid-attack with his gun aimed at his sister. Gabriel waves a hand in front of the kid’s suspended face, then grins, pleased with his work. “Hello, boys.”

Dean and Cas have barely wrapped up their 'what the actual hell?’ facial exchange before Cas is storming forward, fists clenched. “Gabriel,” he fumes.

Gabriel disappears with a smirk, only to reappear behind them, now with the sofa serving as a makeshift barricade.

“Ah-ah,” he scolds Cas.

“Aren’t you supposed to be dead?” Dean turns around and blurts. Cas reappears at his side, swaying close enough their elbows brush. “Like, dead-dead.”

Gabriel places a hand over his heart in mock-offense. “Was, yeah.” His gaze sharpens. “And then Castiel happened.”

That all-to-well known, first feeling of betrayal starts to bubble up and stab Dean in the gut, the one that means Dean was left out of some really important shit, but one look at Cas squashes it dead. Cas's brow is folded together, just as confused as Dean is.

Gabriel's sigh is loud and full of suffering. “My untimely demise, the Empty, eternal slumber, et cetera-et cetera,” Gabriel ticks off with a roll of his eyes to catch them up, put out by it. Dean feels Cas tense. Protectiveness tears through him and he falls another inch closer to him. “Ringing any bells? Sure, never-ending unconsciousness has its appeal, don’t get me wrong. But Cas here showed up and things got LOUD.”

Cas is turning over his own memories. He's still frowning. “Jack—”

“Picked the locks, raised a little hell. Broke you free. Yeah, and left the doors wide open. Long enough, anyway,” he says with a boastful shrug of the shoulder to imply his escape was easy. His tone changes again. He jerks a finger between Dean and Cas. “What're we callin' him, by the way? My big brother’s half-human Nephilim son turned… dad, I guess, in the package of a barely pubescent boy-toy?” He makes a clicking noise. “Doesn’t really roll off the tongue, and 'God' feels—” His head wobbles back and forth like he’s coming up short, like it’s Jack’s fault for that. "Been there, done that."

Full of threat, Cas steps forward. No wings are visible, not with Cas officially one of the mud-monkeys, but there’s almost a ripple in the air like they’re there anyway.

Gabe swallows his words with a placating grin. “Going with 'Jack,' then.”

With a calmness he doesn’t feel, Dean reaches up and grips Cas's sleeve. Not to stop him, purely for the purpose of anchoring him.

It makes Gabriel’s smile grow until it’s uncomfortable to be in front of.

“Finally,” he says, huffing it out. “Funny thing, when you showed up,” he tells Cas. “All them bittersweet-nothings keeping you company night after night after night? Over and over, the will-they-why-freaking-won't-they, the drama,” Gabe recalls like even now it still pains him. “Buddyroll, we all caught the show. Your's,” he tells Cas pointedly, and something about it makes Cas squirm. “It woke us up, and it played EVERYWHERE. I’m talking full theater release, in IMAX.”

Dean glances over, not following along. “Cas?”

Ignoring him, Cas bites out, “What’s your point? Why are we here?”

“Gettin’ there,” Gabriel says. Feeling brave enough to leave the protection the couch offers, he swivels around, admiring the aesthetics. His gaze bounces from the jumbo flat screen TV—he whistles, impressed—to the family photos on the wall—that gets an apathetic headshake, like Gabriel's calling 'pass' on the hotness of the mom, or hell, the dad—before finally landing on the crying kid, still frozen mid-tantrum. He shudders.

“Gabriel,” Cas warns, past the point of tolerance.

“You, baby bro, are hella impatient." When Cas's glower intensifies, Gabriel pulls up defensive hands. "Just an observation. You have the self-restraint of a hurricane over Florida soil. You tell this shmuck shaped like a Bass Pro Shop you love him—” Dean gets gestured at in disgust, "—yet here I am peeking in two months post-miracle resurrection, two months post-the Truman Show you didn’t sign up for, and instead of busting you in flagrante delicto,” he purrs pervishly, “you’re 'two dudes in a hot tub five feet apart cause you’re not gay'?”

The reference goes clear over their heads, but the implication doesn’t.

Cas moves out of Dean's hold, almost embarrassed, but Dean’s too busy processing everything to notice, his brain working stupidly fast to put it all together.

The pizza guy.

The babysitter.

The freaking short shorts.

When he meets Gabriel’s playful gaze, his own is full of fury.

“You thought, what,” Dean starts roughly, “you'd zap us into porno land and we'd just start going at it?”

“Ding, ding, ding,” Gabriel calls out, pressing his finger to the tip of his nose. “Street-smart’s got it one.”

Cas isn’t connecting the same dots.

Dean seethes through his clenched jaw, “Dude, you’re the babysitter,” and tries like hell to keep the flames from licking up the side of his face, willing away the telltale flush of embarrassment.

All of a sudden, Cas gets it. His eyes widen in understanding and almost automatically drop to Dean's pretty damn bare legs. Just as quickly he snaps his attention elsewhere, looking at the wall, the ceiling, the door where, come to think of it, yeah, Dean wouldn’t mind bailing right about now.

“Cute,” Gabriel teases.

“Whatever this is,” Cas says, menacing once more, “you need to stop.”

“I could,” Gabriel agrees. And then he grins. “Or—”

He snaps his fingers.

[loveinterestcastiel]

erosion

I wrote some endverse fic based on a @lateral-org post asking a FANTASTIC question:

When/why/how did endverse! cas get rid of the trenchcoat and what was dean's reaction?

Rated M. Warnings: Graphic Depictions of Violence. Word Count: 4.1k

tagged some mutuals and people I thought might be interested in this under the cut, if you want tagged in this/future fic or want me to remove your tag dm me!

erosion

Of course, Sam said yes in Detroit. So why dream about that? He lived it every day. The redundancy was irritating at best.

Where the fuck did I leave my boots last night? Cas cursed under his breath and embarked on a thorough search of their cabin, the coarse words warm and familiar on his tongue as he yanked on his socks. I really am starting to sound like Dean.

Dean’s boots were already gone, his gun and thigh holster absent too. He’d left his green jacket behind, tossed carelessly aside last night and hidden under the trenchcoat on the floor at the foot of their bed. He slipped his coat on over his clothes and shoved Dean’s jacket into their pack- he knew he’d want it later, even if it was just for the drive back. He slipped on the worn coat, habit- he’d stopped wasting Grace on its upkeep a while ago, but it was still important. It felt like comfort, in some strange way, so he kept on wearing it despite the worn-through elbows or the stubborn little bloodstained spot on the hem.

He’d dreamed of Detroit, last night, again. He didn’t know if he’d ever get used to dreaming, as unsettling and involuntary as it was. It felt like the unfair hijacking of an otherwise enjoyable human bodily function, and he resented it altogether. He snagged a bit of weed from his stash and tucked it in next to his flask, sweeping out the cabin door and into the frigid morning sunshine, giving Chuck a lazy wave as he ambled past his cabin to the truck lot, kicking little pebbles across the packed dirt at imaginary targets with a super-human precision that grated strangely on him today.

“Big run today,” Chuck said with a tentative smile, his hands clasping a chipped mug filled to the brim with his ridiculously indulgent tea, wafting a cascade of steam out over the railing of his cabin porch before dissipating into the air. “Don’t forget the perishables if you can get at them, ok? We’re seriously low on-”

“Toilet paper, milk, cheese, butter,” he interrupted, “plus sugar, flour, canned fruit, hygiene products, toothpaste, toilet paper, coffee, meat if we can get it, .35 and 9mm ammunition, mechanical oil, gasoline, propane, rubbing alcohol, gauze, surgical tape, toilet paper, paracetamol, and oh, toilet paper again!” Cas recited dryly, rolling his eyes. “You gave us a written list yesterday. Twice. Couldn’t fuck up blackout drunk.”

Chuck snorted, shaking his head in self-deprecation. “Just doing my job, Cas.”

“We’ll do ours,” he called over his shoulder, continuing down the central path briskly. “We’ve all got our part to play.”

What was it Lucifer had said to Dean, that night Zachariah stole him out from under Cas’s nose and threw him into the future? No matter what choices you make, whatever details you alter… we will always end up here.

It certainly seemed like he was right. Most days, it seemed like they were all hurtling towards the exact same place Dean had caught a wretched glimpse of, once, with the brakes slashed and emergency failsafes offline, and no indicator that the impossible choices they were making every day were anything but inevitable. He knew that Dean still had nightmares about his ending, but he didn’t know much else about Dean’s nightmares anymore but what little snippets he could garner from what Dean mumbled and cried out in his sleep. He’d lost the ability to dreamwalk a while back. Three nights after the Croatoan virus wiped out Fort Worth and they were forced to fall back, he tried to enter Dean’s sleep to watch his dreams in the dubious refuge of a closed down Motel 6 off of interstate 70 as they ran west, to see if there was some piece of information they’d missed, some new choice they could make one day that could change the path they were on.

It simply hadn’t worked. He mourned the loss of one more skill in the darkness of their room that night as Dean slept uneasily in the bed beside him, one more thing which, in its absence, made him ever more useless to Dean, much like the loss of his ability to time travel, or to smite their enemies with ease. Flight was becoming difficult by the day, and he knew in some part of his mind that his wings would be the next to go, and he would be grounded, permanently, on Earth and not in Heaven.

And so it goes.

Anyway, it wasn’t like they had much of a choice about anything these days. Once Michael had taken Adam, they lost their only trump card. Heaven didn’t need Dean anymore, but Hell desperately needed Sam. It was a shame, it really was, that Sam’s gamble hadn’t paid off.

It was a miracle Lucifer let Dean go. He had brushed him off as a non-threat. Unimportant on a cosmic scale, however important Dean was to the vessel. To Sam. So Dean walked out of that run down building alive, and he was the most beautiful, terrible thing Cas had ever seen. His soul shone brighter than even an archangel’s grace in his rage and trembled with the fierce sharpness of grief, and it was glorious, righteous.

Godly.

Even as Cas’s memories softened and blurred, becoming tinged with a mortal haze, that memory of Dean remained in a sparkling clarity. He could imagine no life, no moldable version of the past, in which he did not choose Dean. From the very first moment his soul had reached back to cling to Cas’s Grace in Hell, Cas had fallen, was falling, would fall, for Dean. It was inevitable, his love. They were inevitable. They fell together in the time after Detroit, into battle, into bed, and into cosmic obscurity. Soon, too soon, their losses began to outnumber their wins, and they had to make more and more certain regrettable sacrifices just to stay alive. Cas was used to collateral damage, far more than Dean was, but whatever the other humans in their ragged camp believed of him, he wasn’t unaffected. Just the opposite, in fact. He had never felt anything before, not for billions of years, an incomprehensible existence of light and intent and obedience and war, and now he felt everything. That- not Dean’s disappointment, or the slow loss of his Grace, or his Father’s unyielding silence- was undoubtedly the worst part of becoming something like human.

Some days were better than others, of course. Some days he took precious little blue or white or green pills, all different shapes and sizes and he felt good. Numb, pleased, far away. Quiet. Others, fewer than the days he had his pills, he took shrooms, LSD. Molly, twice. Often he took nothing at all, craving the wicked pain and emptiness it created in him as his sobriety enhanced the ache his dwindling Grace left behind, needing the punishment to feel real before forcing himself into a tumultuous sleep after days spent horribly awake with half a bottle of rotgut sloshing in his stomach. He still liked joints, rolled meticulously, their verdant smoke curling up deliciously in his lungs and setting him up on a lovely little metaphorical cloud the best, and then, they were even more so lovely when he shared them with Dean. There was nothing, nothing like passing it between them, before transitioning into trading hit after hit between their mouths, brushing against his soft lips, breathing his air, watching Dean’s cheeks flush a stunning pink and holding tight to his deep golden hair, dragging him down into slow, languid kisses that desire deepened and turned into a precious sort of holy consumption as the high hit its stride in them both.

He was sober today, mostly, just riding out the last of some gorgeous pink pill from a nearly full bottle he’d just scavenged out a few days before. It made him feel floaty, focused, fearless. He felt almost like he did two years ago, before his reeducation stint in Heaven. Angelic. It was nice. He’d take another, later. Maybe Dean would want to take one, too, and they could fuck high out under the stars on their quilt again like they did last October and feel like the real Gods of this stupid little planet, on top of the world, on top of Dean, cradled in the soft embrace of his thighs, and worship each other.

Take that, brothers. Castiel smiled viciously at the sky. You’ll never fuck God like I have.

Standing impatiently among their motley caravan of vehicles in the sickly yellow light of a midwestern April morning sun, his back to Cas, Dean’s silhouette and the flashing imprint of his soul- the only one Cas could still see clearly- caramelized into a sweet union of tangible and not that pulled at his stomach and swept him into the siren song of Dean’s being and woke up the hungry creature that lived in his heart and craved DeanDeanDeanDean.

No one else was there yet, probably all still dicking around at the camp mess and drinking shitty chicory. His feet fell silently on the earth, leaving behind the sound of the universe and the vibrant humming of Dean’s soul- and oh, he hoped he could always hear that symphony, even when all the rest of his powers had run dry.

Just as he reached out to take Dean by the shoulder and turn him around, Dean moved with a sudden burst of energy, like a coiled snake striking out. He whirled around and met Cas’s eyes, took him by the neck and the waist, and kissed him. His lips moved with a gentleness that contradicted the intensity of the grip of his cold-fingered hands as they worked their way into his hair, wormed their way under his trenchcoat, and touched the bare skin they found where the hem of his t-shirt met his jeans. He met the kiss eagerly, licking teasingly at the seam of his lips, biting down gently and coaxing Dean into opening his mouth. He pushed Dean back until his back hit the nearest rusted army-green truck with a small thudding noise, pressing himself up against Dean and tugging on his hips so they were pressed flush against each other, the contact sending and electric thrill racing up his spine.

“Cas,” Dean gasped out at the sensation of their bodies meeting, the air punched out of his lungs.

“Mmm, morning,” Cas murmured between kisses. “You’re out here early.” Dean’s neck was uncharacteristically bare above the neck of his rough brown sweater, creamy and invitingly unmarked. Cas indulged in the impulse to change that, working his way over the tender skin, sucking and biting until a bruise began to bloom below the junction of Dean’s jaw and neck, worrying it with his teeth until it was a deep reddish-purple.

“Couldn’t sleep,” Dean whispered, letting his head fall back against the truck window, baring his throat further, and closed his eyes. He seemed almost happy, today. He seemed to light up in the lead-up to their more dangerous missions, and Cas didn’t want to think about that right now. Didn’t want to ruin the moment. “Didn’t want to wake you up,” Dean elaborated.

“I appreciate that.” Satisfied with the rather outrageous hickey he’d created on Dean’s neck, Cas pressed it with one last kiss. “How’d you know I was behind you?” he asked, pressing their foreheads together and slowly grinding their hips together lazily, just breathing Dean in.

“Felt you,” Dean said, bringing their lips together again briefly. “Always can.” One more little kiss.

“Dean, last night, when you couldn’t sleep, I dreamed again about Detroit-” Cas started to confess feverishly, almost against his will, Dean stiffening up at his words in his arms, and was interrupted by the sound of people approaching, footsteps, voices, and an earsplitting wolf-whistle directed at their compromising position.

Dean’s face shuttered immediately, and Cas felt every scrap of easy bliss flee his body.

He pulled back with more than a little reluctance, his stomach twisting as a fakely jovial grin tugged at the corners of his lips, and clapped Dean on the shoulder. “Let’s go, fearless leader. We’ve got a mission to run, don’t you know?”

“Don’t start with that fearless leader shit,” Dean said tightly, rolling his eyes away from Castiel’s face and fixing on a point somewhere over Cas’s shoulder. “Who’s driving?”

“Looks like Cas is driving,” Joe called out mischievously.

Risa smacked him in the chest. “Get in the truck, idiot.” She turned her gaze to Dean, an odd glint in her eye. It felt sticky and wrong in his core but Cas stamped the feeling down. “Group brief over the radio on the way?” she asked.

“Yeah, at 8,” Dean said, sliding into his unshakeable militaristic persona with a firm nod. “Should be fairly straightforward in and out supply grab. Intel says the Croats cleared out of Roanoke a couple days ago, left major infrastructure and commerce sites relatively untouched. It’s a good thing too,” he added, “we were getting spread a little thin with most goods.”

“Sounds easy enough.”

———————————————————————

It was not, in fact, easy.

Their intel was wrong, so wrong, and Cas didn’t know how the fuck it happened, but they were fine, they were almost finished, closing up the trucks in the alley behind the supermarket and waiting for Dean and Trish to return from sweeping the perimeter, when out of what seemed like thin air and with no more than a broken shout for warning there were more Croats swarming them than he’d ever seen in one place before, and Joe and Maya and Kris were dead, and Dean was nowhere to be found.

The Croats had the remaining seven pinned down against the main truck, snarling and screeching and reeking of blood and gore, strips of flesh and clothing that once adorned their companions now dangling from their teeth. Their single-minded need for the endless consumption of human flesh and that it was currently being denied drove them to a terrifying frenzy, but the hunters were starting to push back, and the Croat numbers were thinning slowly but surely. Cas thought he saw Allen get bitten, but next he glanced at him he looked fine. He’d need to check on that if they made it out alive. He resigned himself quickly to the idea of killing the man before they got back to Chitaqua- Allen was a nice enough man, quick-witted and skilled with a blade and a loom, but nothing was worth bringing a Croat back to camp. He owed it to the man as a human being to grant him a swift death if he’d been infected before Allen himself could realize it. A shot to the back of the head, unawares, had to be better than a clumsy battle and inevitable stab to the chest (Cas knew he would always have the upper hand against a human, even when he had fallen in full) with fear in his heart.

He buried his angel blade to hilt in yet another Croat’s throat, yanking it out and ducking out of the way of the spray of blood that followed in a well-practiced motion uncanny in its speed. They would win this one.

But still no Dean.

Cas felt a bubbly panic rise up in his chest through the haze of battle as it became clear to him that Dean wasn’t coming back. Even from the other side of the building or from inside, there was no way that Dean had not heard the commotion of such a large fight.

Something was stopping Dean from coming back to him.

“Risa,” he shouted over the din to the woman on his left. “Dean and Trish-”

“I know,” she interjected tersely, hacking the head off of a skeletally thin Croat in a tattered suit. “Retrieval? We’ve got this handled here as long as this all the fucking bastards around.”

“I’m going in,” Cas said quickly, slicing at a particularly bold (stupid) Croat trying to charge him. It crumpled to the ground and twitched once, and was still. Some of its companions fell on the body ravenously, and were subsequently cut down in turn as they began to tear at the corpse. “Leave as soon as you’re able; I’ve got the keys to the main truck. Cover your right,” he warned Risa, and, sensing an opportunity in the parting sea of Croats before him, ran.

He was through the service doors of the building before the Croat hoard could even begin to respond to his escape, and their noises were quickly muffled by the service door as it locked automatically behind him, leaving him in relative quiet.

There were a surprising number of crates and boxes remaining in the storage and unloading zones, either empty or nearly so, and he quickly ascertained the area was, apart from himself, devoid of life or anything of interest to the camp.

Cas.

Dean's sudden prayer hit him like a sledgehammer to the gut.

Aisle... his mental voice trailed off for a second into indistinct sounds, colors, and waves of pain. Aisle seven. It's bad.

Cas shoved through the access door into the freezers, and out into the store with a recklessness he would have been ashamed of had he been so terrified.

He turned down aisle seven and skidded to a halt, frozen at the sight that greeted him, and tried to make sense of the hideously macabre tableau.

Trish's decapitated body lay the furthest from him, her ribcage torn open, her organs spilling over her arms and scattered in pieces over the floor. Three dead Croats, all headshots, around her remains. Then a bloody lake on the cheap linoleum tile, thick and viscous and so, so red, two more dead Croats, clearly more hard-won victories, their arms hacked at, heads partially removed, and nearly blocking the last body from view, wedged up against the shelves and bloody as it was.

"Cas," Dean wheezed, lifting his head laboriously to meet his eyes, blood bubbling up between his lips and staining them. "Cas, I'm so sorry-"

"No, no, don't talk like that," Cas said desperately, kneeling beside Dean. He took their pack of his back with shaking hands and shoved his angel blade somewhere inside. "We can fix this. You'll be okay."

"Cas-"

"You will!" he said, too loudly and startling himself.

"My ribs," Dean panted out in pained little gasps. "Broken. There's something in my back." He twitched minutely as if to show Cas the problem and immediately convulsed involuntarily at the pain the movement caused him, a horrible rattling moan in his throat. "My leg. Right one. Broken too." His jaw was clenched so tightly it was a miracle he could speak at all through the teeth-grinding pain he was in.

"Okay," Cas said faintly.

Cas...

Oh, he hated feeling. Sometimes he thought it made him useless. He missed being cold. Brutal, uncaring about pain or death. But this was Dean, and he'd never actually been particularly good at being a machine, anyway. "Okay. Dean, I need to see your back," he warned him, before moving him as gently as he could and angling his body so that he could get an unobstructed view of his back.

There was a crude metal stake wedged just an inch to the left of his second and third thoracic vertebrae, rusted, twisted and cruel-looking.

"Dean, I- I have to try to heal you," he said slowly, knowing that Dean wouldn't want him to be wasteful with his Grace. But this was beyond what human field medicine could help.

Dean didn't respond. He'd fallen unconscious.

"Oh no, no, no, baby," he babbled under his breath, trying to figure out the best way to extract the bar of metal. "Hold on," he muttered, grasping the stake firmly and bracing Dean's body against his own, trying to avoid fucking his broken ribs up more.

"Father, please, if you're still here, if you're listening, if you care at all," he begged, "help me."

Of course, his Father didn't answer. Gritting his teeth, Cas yanked out the stake and tossed it aside, immediately covering the wound with his hand. He summoned his Grace together and it responded sluggishly, but his hand was glowing and Dean's back was knitting back together.

As the skin merged into a puckered, raw-looking pink scar, Cas dropped his hand away from the wound and found himself utterly breathless, gasping for air and drained.

Dean was still unconscious.

He leaned Dean back up against the shelving and took a moment to figure out what to do next. Dean was still dying. He was still in danger. He couldn't be moved, nor could they stay put. He quickly opened up their pack and realized in horror that all the medical supplies were with Risa and AJ on the trucks and so, so far away by now.

He yanked his coat off with a twinge of regret. It was bloodied and worn and what he was about to do with it felt like a milestone he was loathe to reach.

He shredded it into long, wide strips, not letting himself think of how it was the last piece of Jimmy Novak, or how he had repaid the man's sacrifice by being party to the end of the world they both wanted to protect, or how Claire Novak had stopped praying to him weeks ago, now. He got on with the job, this is just a job, I can fix this-

He managed to wrap Dean's leg up decently tight, straight and stiff, but he had quickly discovered it was broken in several places. He didn't know what he could do for Dean's ribs, and he felt, as if from a distance, how Dean's breath was coming shallower and shallower, and he made his choice.

He laid his left hand on Dean's broken leg, as gently as he could. Leaning forward, he smoothed the wispy little baby hairs he loved to tease Dean about back, off his sweaty, pained, precious face, and, placing his right hand on Dean's crushed ribs, near his heart, touched their foreheads together. He looked at Dean's soul, his shining, beautiful (fading) soul and knew.

"I love you," Cas whispered, his voice wrecked. With that finally said, he grabbed his exhausted, weary Grace, and though it fought him and slipped through his grasp, he got hold of it and he pushed everything he could, everything he was into his hands, into Dean.

When he had done it, when he had drained himself down to mists and vapors, and had saved Dean, he gathered him in his arms, and carried him back to the truck on numb feet, leaving the scraps of Jimmy's coat behind in aisle seven.

When the truck broke down thirty miles from Chitaqua, and their radio too, he turned to Dean, pulling on a blue-ish jacket they'd picked up earlier during the run. It fit well.

"It's a good look for you," Dean said gruffly, staring at Cas with an expression he could not recognize. There was blood still smeared on his cheekbone, he noted absently.

"Oh. Yes. Well, thank you," Cas answered, adjusting the sleeves.

Dean tugged at the tan fabric strips on his leg, wincing at the pressure.

"You did a good job, Cas. With this fabric splint from your coat-"

"I know you won't be able to walk it," Cas said quietly, unable to meet his eyes even as he interrupted him. "I did what I could, but you'll be weak for days. You need time."

"You can leave me, Cas," Dean said, a strange, pinched guilt-pain-tenderness on his face. "You can come back for me."

"No," Cas said, smiling, and choking, and took Dean's cheek in the palm of his hand with a terrible ache rising in his throat. "I can't."

April 19th, 2012, under the peak of the Lyrids meteor showers, Cas flew for the last time, right up to the gates of the camp.

When they landed, a millisecond and millennia later, his wings burned away into nothingness in a wave of electric, minty-white pain that forced him to the ground. In the aftermath, panting and sweating and shaking in Dean's arms and clutching at his handprint on Dean's shoulder, he realized his Grace, or what was left of it, anyway, had consolidated into a bright little ball in his chest. Like a soul.

The realization was followed by another. Despite his earlier conviction that it would one day be lost to him, he could still see Dean's soul- behind his teeth, in his chest, radiant like a halo around his head, and worth, a million times over, and a million again, falling for.

Tagged:

@heller-jensen @sunforgrace @rambleoncas @adhdeancas @evermorecastiel @holmesemrys @plantdadcas @good-things-do-happen-dean @jeanne-de-valois @autisticandroids @sonder-stars @yana125 @faithcastiel @cascreamtiel @seffersonjtarship @i-sing-for-me @purgatorybi @bibelphegor @cowboyslikedean @gracefuldean @dimples-of-discontent @judaskissdean @wafflehousegothic @icaruscastiel @67chevyimpala67 @lesbianjenderenvy

[my-writings-and-musings]

loving the angst!! can we get cygate for the oxygen loss prompt?

Absolutely! I think I'll just start doing one character or couple per ask for this one, because I always make it so long and drawn out! As usual, links to previous posts for this prompt are below!

Part One: Here!

Part Two: Here!

Part Three: Here!

Part Four: You're Here!

Part Five: Here!

Part Six: Here!

Part Seven: Here!

Part Eight: Here!

Part Nine: Here!

Part Ten: Here!

Part Eleven: Here!

Part Twelve: Here!

Cygate

(Cyclonus/Tailgate/Reader)

·As the three of you have become inseparable, you're once again spending the day together in your shared quarters, in a basket style cuddle position that has the massive Cyclonus lying half on his side, the smaller Tailgate cradled in a mirror position, and teeny you in the little basket shaped space between them. From the berth it's a perfect way to watch something on the monitor together, or to just spend a lazy afternoon napping and talking, or to simply enjoy each other's company. You would suppose that's probably why it's a favorite activity for the three of you, but you don't care to do much thinking from your safe and secure spot between the two bots you love more than anything.

·You were all on the verge of drifting off when the lights unexpectedly flicker, a not too worrisome sight, that is until a number of other things start to glitch and go offline. With communications amongst the downed systems, there's no way to find out what's going on from where you are, so to the disappointment of everyone involved you all three decide you'll have to do some investigating. Tailgate hugs you tight before preparing to do just that, playfully saying he wants just a few more minutes to cuddle, nuzzling his helm against your head as he buzzes sleepily. How can he resist? You're so soft!

·Thankfully both he and Cyclonus have developed some quick reflexes, as the sudden rumble that shakes the ship nearly sends all three of you to the floor, and between Tailgate's secure hold on you whilst Cyclonus stabilizes you both you're saved from falling and/or being squished. There's little time to celebrate though. Cyclonus recognizes the signs of an enemy ambush, and Tailgate quickly puts together the system glitches as being related, meaning that you're all facing some serious trouble. Particularly the very squishy you.

·Cyclonus is armed in seconds, his demeanor one of focused contemplation as he tries to strategize despite a total lack of reconnaissance. Tailgate, still holding you, jumps in with confirmation that you have to be taken somewhere safe! The two of them will have to aid the defense, but you can't be left alone, so they'll need to find somewhere secure and guarded by lots of bots. Thankfully Cyclonus has an immediate solution; the medical bay. It has guards assigned to it in the event of an occasion like this, it's certainly fortified, and you'll be more than safe while they hold off enemy combatants.

·You never want to be left behind, but you concede that it's the logical choice, especially because you know Tailgate will refuse to hear any arguments against it. With your plan settled on, a path is decided next to save as much time as possible. Tailgate begins to buzz with worry as Cyclonus lays out the many potential ambush sites and choke points they need to avoid. Though he's the one holding you protectively, you give the minibot a gentle pat on his Autobrand, knowing very little of his anxiety is for his own wellbeing. The buzz of worry is starting to make your hair go static though...

·Cyclonus breaks his resolute guardian persona for a single instant once the path is decided upon, dropping to one knee so he can be closer to both of his much tinier partners. He looks to Tailgate and then you, reaching out with a clawed hand to gently cup your tiny face with a precision he's honed well these past few months. There's a single moment where all three of you seem to make the same wordless vow; I won't let anything happen to you. You're briefly hugged between the two of them to drive the point home, and when they part you see that between those two red optics and a bright blue visor there's enough dedication to make you certain they'd take on a Titan for you.

·You can't help but feed off their on edge energy when your room is left behind, though you have plenty of your own anxiety to keep you company. Nothing is responding, not even comms, so you're all running totally blind beyond what's right in front of you. There could be a full battalion of soldiers barreling your way, and you wouldn't know... Only being with the two bots you love more than anything keeps you calm. Tailgate isn't holding you especially tight, but there's an unrestrained kind of daring in his visor as it scans the hallways, like he's challenging anyone to just try and get to you. Cyclonus is similiarly inclined, but in his own way, the occasional glance of his optics in your direction so subtle each incidence could be mistaken for a trick of the light.

·It shouldn't have surprised you when there was trouble before the three of you had even passed the station of terminals about a third of the way to your goal. In fairness, they'd emerged from a hallway looking almost shocked to see a towering Cyclonus and a tiny Tailgate cradling you, so the group of hostile aliens obviously hadn't been expecting any resistance in this area either. You hadn't needed to prepare any defense of your own once their bullets started flying, as you'd been expertly tucked behind a corner by the minibot just as a greatsword had started lopping off limbs. With an emphatic "please stay!!" in your direction, Tailgate is right in the fray with his hubby.

·It's hard to think of danger while watching these two tear it to shreds. Their enemies are massive, hulking aliens armed for an invasion but they don't stand a chance against your partners, both of whom fight as if these brutes threatened you directly, which they likely would have if given the chance. Between the great arcs of a deadly blade and the powerful blows of two blurry fists, you can't help but be confident this won't be that long of a delay... You're a little giddy but not all too concerned about it when the universe decides to call you to task, something it seems to enjoy doing in moments set up for great irony.

·The alien that appeared so suddenly beside you could have killed you with its lazy swipe, but thankfully you're only sent sprawling in the hallway, your survival instincts kicking into overdrive once they realize the situation. You're overwhelmed by the urge to run, but your legs become more of a hindrance to this end than an aid. They're like sticks of lead beneath your teetering body, and you find yourself taking great gasps of air just to keep moving, unable to make yourself flee or feel as concerned about that fact as you should be. Something like a growl and a taunting chuckle comes just as the shadow you're certain will crush you comes barreling downwards.

·Death doesn't come. Not for you, anyway. There's a blur of purple and then you're just able to make out Cyclonus grappling with an equally titanic lifeform, the latter of whom struggles especially savagely, likely because they've been impaled on the former's horns and are certainly not about to be set free. Cyclonus is making the most of that fact, twisting and tearing with raw strength to punish his enemy for his transgressions against his tiny partner. Tailgate is right behind him, helping to ensure the little body he watched go tumbling is alright before moving you a safe distance with words of comfort. He doesn't wait for a reply before turning on the spot and hurling himself into the fray. Tiny fists deliver superpowered punches on his helpless target, and in his defensive rage he can't help but shout at the colossal bully for picking on someone so absolutely harmless to him, but he and Cyclonus leave little chance for a rebuttal.

·There's not much left of your attacker by the time you finally manage to get your legs beneath your body, save for the not insignificant bruises they gave you. Said injury hardly explains why you're incapacitated to this extent though; you're dizzy, shaking, out of breath, and your entire body feels heavy as could be. Before you can question the issue further, you're scooped up into frantic arms, your whole world turning blue and white with shades of purple as you're embraced with a high pitched exclamation of relief. Only your lack of enthusiasm gets the little mech to stop, and as you take hold of your spinning head the two faces looking down on you twist with worry.

·Cyclonus acts first, hurrying to the few still operating terminals and trying to see if he can get a systems report up, hoping that any kind of additional information might assist them. Just knowing where more enemies are could make sure you receive obviously critical medical attention sooner. Tailgate tries to get you talking; did that alien hurt you? If so, what hurts and where and how can they help? You try to answer, but it's getting rather difficult to take this seriously, especially while you're so carefully and securely cradled. Not even a small sound of concern from Cyclonus of all bots can get you to wake up completely.

·The next thing you know everything is in motion again. There's an explanation about atmospheric generators being offline and air being dumped from the ship, and a bit of panic regarding the speed at which oxygen concentration is dropping, then something about the medical bay having a storage of elemental oxygen... Truthfully, it's a little hard to follow with everything else going on. You can't help but be a little thankful though, how many people had two loving partners ready to tear aliens apart in their defense? It had taken so much for them to come together, and in addition to that miracle, they'd welcomed you into their sparks for the happiest days of your life... you couldn't believe your fortune sometimes.

·Tailgate is the one you can see most clearly for a time, his visor bright with panic and fear in a way you don't think you've seen before. There's very little time to think on it when suddenly he's being carried too, and you see Cyclonus come into view as he runs down the halls with Tailgate in his arms and you in his, the giant bot moving with such speed that you can feel air whistling past to stir your hair. It would have felt nice if not for the tears beginning to leak from your smaller partner's visor, and as you notice those you also begin to hear his faint encouragement for you to stay awake, his gentle voice breaking as obvious worry tears at his spark.

·Above all else you want to reassure him that you are awake! Seeing him upset just breaks your heart, so despite everything you're obviously willing to try, and that feeling doubles when you spare Cyclonus a glance and see fear in his optics. The sight makes little sense to you, especially with his bloodied horns making it clear that he shouldn't fear anything. Still, you try to stay awake for them both, but it's the hardest thing you've ever done. Between the bruise on your side and the creeping exhaustion you want nothing more than to sleep. Only the buzzing of a panicking minibot keeps you from slipping away now, but as the need grows you doubt it will be sufficient for long.

·A gentle servo cups your cheek to keep you looking upwards, and you grasp it on reflex. A warm and painless darkness is closing in on all sides, and you know sooner or later it will overpower you. All you can do is try to convey how sorry you are to those two worried faces you love so much, even if you don't really understand why you need to stay awake still. You never want to let them down. They're your everything, and you theirs, which is what makes you feel so guilty when your eyes finally close.

·Tailgate is on the verge of a panic attack when the little form he's cradling goes limp in his arms. He can still see breathing, but it's haggard and uneven, and he knows that's bad. All he can do is hold them tighter and pray as Cyclonus crosses the ship in what has to be record time, and though he says nothing the large mech is similiarly fraught with dread, his spark threatening to burn at the grief looming over him. He fought so hard to be with Tailgate, then the universe blessed them with you... would they truly be forced to suffer this loss together, so soon after receiving?

·The bots in the medical bay clear out fast when they see who's inbound, but thankfully the medics are quick even in the midst of a host of injuries, though the lack of communication has made everything chaotic to say the least. All they need to hear is "oxygen" and they're moving, commanding you to be laid on a berth while the necessary components are fetched, and the two fraught mechs are laying you down as commanded. Somehow the sight of you laying unconscious in the medical bay strikes both mechs in the spark, as if your little body on the gigantic slab just seems wrong. Cyclonus only holds his softly weeping partner as you're stabilized, and neither is much motivated to leave even when the battle is declared victorious, their intertwined fingers staying firmly together as they keep watch.

·You awaken to a gentle digit stroking your face, and just as you open your eyes there's movement and a familiar shade of blue fills your vision. Tears of relief from Tailgate patter against the medical bay in your private room, and so much comes flooding back when you realize there's an oxygen mask attached to your face, and that you're still more than a little sore. Cyclonus is softly asking if there's anything you need whilst Tailgate fusses over your blankets, and when you start to fully awaken you realize their residual fear is still holding on. Guiding their hands to you, it's hard not to shed a tear as you hear weak whispers of confessed fear, with both expressing the pain almost losing you made them face. You can only thank them for what they've done, and this spurs them both to reassure you it was worth every moment of struggle, just as love has always been. This odd but wonderful love the three of you share is proof of that every single day.

[silentauroriamthereal]

5,900 followers!

So! I’ve been on tumblr since about August 2013 now. I had been away from fandom in general for a solid 3-4 years by that point, having left the Harry Potter fandom after a good deal of waning interest, which was definitely accelerated by basically everything about JKR (and this was before she outed herself as a major TERF) - adding to the canon with random shit she would say in interviews, etc, the whole “Dumbledore is gay” - but not in actual canon, including not making it canon in the movies that came after, etc. When I left the HP fandom, fandom in general was still very much on livejournal, though due to endless issues with LJ, people had already started drifting off to other platforms, which led to a widespread sensation of the fandom breaking up. My offline life got busy, I started my masters, and just didn’t have either the time or the interest in writing HP fanfic anymore. I had written 1.5 million words of fic and figured I was about out of words, anyway. My longtime friend, @moonflower-rose, had designed me an icon with the Latin phrase cacoethes scribendi, which basically means an endless mania for writing. I had started to feel that I wasn’t living up to that anymore, too, so I just quietly disappeared. 

Fast forward to 2013 and my encountering the ridiculous talents of Benedict Cumberbatch via Star Trek Into Darkness (still think that title needs a colon, but what can you do) and immediately needing to see everything else he’d ever done. I’d heard of Sherlock in my last, lingering days on LJ, but hadn’t decided to delve into it at all. At this point, only series 1 and 2 were out, though setlock photos for series 3 started emerging just after I plunged wholeheartedly into the Sherlock fandom. I was hooked immediately by Ben and Martin’s acting, by the interesting stories (though I was irked from the beginning of the treatment of Irene Adler and the imposition of a hetero-ized romance of two obviously (one canonically!) gay characters). I was irked by the lazy writing and easy outs that Moffat and Gatiss always seem to prefer. Nevertheless, I was only about halfway through The Reichenbach Fall when I was seized with a feeling that was half sinking and half elated: that I needed to write about these two people. The old urge had come back, and it came back hard. 

Now, a little over six years later, I’m over 2.3 million words deep into this fandom, with 88 posted stories and another that’s over 16,000 words in at this point. And the place where I re-found fandom and all of the community that comes with it, was here. It’s still astounding to me that anyone reads my stories. It’s astounding to me that 5,900 of you follow me. It’s really, really cool. :) 

I used to make a post like this about every 100 new followers, but I’ve sort of slacked off it lately. If you’ve been following me for a long time, this will be repetitive and I’m sorry! But here goes: 

-I generally follow everyone back, with the rider that, if the blog posts too much untagged content that I’m not interested in and can’t filter out because of the lack of tags, I’ll unfollow, just because that’s a lot of blogs. Sometimes tumblr doesn’t show me who followed me. If you’re following me and I’m not following you back and you wish I were, please, please, please just drop me a line and say so and I’ll fix it! 

-I post my stories at ao3. I have not imported my HP stuff and have no desire to do so. You can still find it at skyehawke.com. As long as skyehawke is still up and running, I will leave my HP stories there. Meanwhile, my Sherlock stuff is all posted here at ao3. 

-if you’re someone who has the means to support writers and artists in the fandom and that’s something you’re interested in doing, I do have a Patreon account. It’s over here. I always feel intensely squirmy about promoting this and only have it because @ravenmorganleigh made me get it (bless, lol). As a person who is perpetually struggling to make ends meet, I feel badly because I can never afford to support anyone else financially (every month that I make the rent is a win, basically). The donations people make through my Patreon have often meant the difference between being able to buy groceries or not. I don’t mean to be dramatic about this, but that’s literally the case, and I’m endlessly, endlessly grateful to every single dollar anyone has ever donated. But please don’t ever feel that you need to do this and please don’t if it isn’t something you can afford! I mean that. Also, my Patreon is set up for monthly contributions, and if you’re just dying to make a donation but want it to be a one-time thing, I also use PayPal, via my fandom email account, which is silentauror@yahoo.com. 

I’ve met some of the most amazing people here in this place and I’m very glad that I chose to come back to fandom, to find my own creative voice again, to have this chance to discuss and share excitement or rage or humour, and to be a part of so many of your lives, in whatever small way. I always get introspective at this time of the year, since it’s not only about to be a new year, but my birthday is also right at the end of the year (it’s December 30th), so I always end up having Big Thoughts About Life in this window between Christmas at the end of the year. Today, this is my Big Thought: how grateful I am to have all of you, in whatever large or small way, in my life. <3333333333333333333333

[aspenforest732]

A few of you liked my other fanfic post so figured I'd share one I'm cooking up now. The Marle one is dead in the water, probably won't go back to it at least until I read Dawnshard.

Lemme know if you want more Phoenix lore. I didn't realize how much I had until I was scrolling back up through this post, and this is just on two of the 6 subraces

New one is going back to my Phoenix race, but this time it's a young Orator named Xava who climbed the ranks quickly in the Marvel universe, especially considering they lost their Listener companion I guess is the right word? Orators can only speak through the force/magic, and their speech is imbued with mind-type magics that allow them to convey meanings to groups or individuals beyond their actual words (like advanced subtext). They can also be understood by anyone and pick up languages quickly. Listeners can only hear through the force and can hear all the subtext in someone's words (yes, this is overwhelming at young ages). They can understand everyone and pick up languages quickly. Listner/Orator pairs comprise most of the operatives in a functional universe unit, usually taking an advisory role in some capacity or placing themselves in a seat of power that is deemed suitable by the Council. The pairs are bonded for life, and if one dies, the other usually retires to help the next generation due to skill gap and loss of their other half. They share a more intimate pseudo empathy/telepathy than Phoenix at large due to their bond and ability to pick up on each others' nonverbal cues.

Onto the actual story, Xava fought in a war with the TVA in one timeline, and their partner, Lexal died saving another group (only one could go and Lexal hid the underlying message that the one would die from Xava). Since they were so young, Xava decided to push forward with their career and use the skills Lexal taught them as well as supplemental training to do the work of a pair.

I originally started with a story in the aftermath of the Season finale of Loki, but then decided it would be more interesting to do one somewhat based on a fanfic I'm reading. We'll go chronologically.

Minor AU where Loki is able to harness the time stone to go back in time (haven't settled on the exact circumstances, but it's either on the statesman and Thanos has the mind stone instead of another or Loki is the one to kill him instead of Thor almost doing it in infinity war). Xava is sent due to the possibility of a new tertiary branch developing, and they go back to right after the failed coronation as Thor would be raging about going to Jotunheim.

BUT as they arrive, he's embracing Loki and Xava sees a pair who were supposed to be taking Thor to a branch 2 over. Enough moments have passed with such deviation that they've now skyrocketed away from the other branches, so sending him to the original would destabilize this one too much.

Now with a keystone pair, the three Phoenix have to work together, despite the other Orator's distaste for Xava's age and knowledge base due to their different fields of expertise (Avengers: Thor and House of Odin: Loki, respectively). The Listener is more or less a peacekeeper between the two as Xava tries to make things work smoothly but loses a lot of respect for the Orator when it's revealed he intentionally stayed in the dark about who saved his unit (Lexal).

There are a number of shenanigans I've thought up in that storyline, but it's still pretty new.

Fast forward about 5000 years, and the universe is stable enough to have endured 300 merges and is strong enough as a tertiary branch to not need representatives specifically for the keystone pair.

Xava is promoted to Ishvar (manager of timeline) and is transfered to the new trunk split (MCU, MCOU(comics), MFU(fanfiction), and now MMU(multi)) of Loki season finale. They will be working as both an Ishvar and a keystone representative due to their experience with Lokis and unusual circumstances.

Things are going pretty much according to plan with teams pouring into the universe to stabilize the trunk split while new branches rapidly form and collapse back into the trunk. This started before I watched What If?, so that would probably be considered a primary branch.

Loki returns to earth post endgame with a few must haves (AU before his appearance), forming a primary branch. Xava starts coordinating with the couple Phoenix already on earth, and things are still going pretty well, minus the mistrust sowed by their frequent consultation of a command sphere to direct movements (part of Ishvar, essentially giant collective mind database, call center, map, etc.). Then they get a Listener intern under 100 (age of puberty for phoenix). Which is the last thing they wanted right now, and they know they will royally screw up this kid if it's not sorted out.

Xava tries to figure out what's going on and reaches out to home world, only to be shortly cut off by a complete universe isolation message and every Listener screaming before falling unconscious. Homeworld is offline for the first time in Phoenix history (this is a result of my star wars fanfic tl;dr a Seer Phoenix lead a sith invasion of Homeworld, and the Council yeeted it into a different pocket dimension only taking the adults).

Now Xava can't send the kid back, who not only wasn't sent here by the Council since they would've sent a pair, but who is also linked to the SWU (Star wars). So they can hear but not understand any nonPhoenix is saying and struggle to use the magic here (enough to not be dying but not much more). They were born with the ability to hear everyone in the universe at all times (normally activated once they hit puberty), and while they have better control of it now, it's still a lot, especially before they got a translator chip.

That's pretty much where I left it since I wasn't sure where to go other than lots of meetings, a hidden message from Homeworld revealing their predictions for MMU, and discovering what the council had done. Of course, the delay in information caused the predictions to be largely useless as bringing Loki to the meeting prevented him from doing something that didn't seem vital at the time on earth.

[lotornomiko]

Triumph’s Tribulation Five Sneak Peak

Ah I usually don’t like posting until a chapter is complete, but I am having a lot of problems offline, in addition to the the third and final segment of the chapter, the check in on Midgard, is giving me no end of difficulties. It was supposed to be a Rufus POV but seeing as his POV keeps derailing the fic and my timeline, I will take whoever I can get to be the narrating voice for Alicia and Co. at this point.

I’ve actually debated posting five as it is, but I am trying to have each chapter have three segments, even if one segment ends up being incrediably small like the Lenneth interlude was in uh was it chapter two...?

Right now I have Loki (With Frei!) and Lezard’s parts done...I am posting the Lezard part at least...it[’s mostly finalized, although I’ll probably tweak some words here and there when I go over it for the umpteenth millionth time...X_X

I’d say this scene is PG 13, though it is Lezard so has some darker edge to it...but still hopefully worksafe...! Side note, the A ending got strongly influenced after rewatching the A ending, and all the events leading up to it. It left me with the strong impression and opinion that Lenneth had some kind of mental, nervous break down when the seal broke. I think I even wrote down a few lines from it...if not to use in this chapter, then maybe a future one! I’m also currently in the midst of rewatching VP 2: Silmeria...so maybe that will find my muse for the Midgard crew in this! XD

Onto the scene excerpt now!!

====

The marble of the floor had sealed itself together seamlessly, not so much as a sliver of a crack to betray the chaos that had gone on just moments earlier. That of the anger that had been felt, the world itself a living extension of what had been in its God’s heart. Such has been Lezard’s displeasure that in that moment, Creation itself had acted, moving to protect him and his interests, spiriting the frightened Goddess away to somewhere else safe. Safe from his rage, and safe from his desires, the man who had once been human,  having pushed too hard, too fast, too soon.

She wasn’t ready. He knew that, every bit from her fight to her flight had in fact acknowledged it, the fear that was in Lenneth’s heart. It had sent her running, the Goddess scared, not so much of what he might do to her physically as much as the emotional havoc he had been intent on wreaking. The truths that had needed to be confronted, and with it would come all of its pain, such sorrow born of those lies that the woman had told herself. She wouldn’t be spared its sting, not even God himself able to shelter Lenneth from the agony of breaking free of such warped delusions. The comfort it had once given her, was now nothing more than a crutch, one that that divine beauty needed to break free of if that heart of hers was going to stand a chance at any true solace.

It wouldn’t be easy, that fact something Lezard could acknowledge in his more rational moments. His beloved needed a far gentler hand than he had thus far been capable of, that near overpowering lust of his, making him impatient and clumsy whenever she was so near. So consumed with the want of her, his attempt at a controlled veneer had all but shattered when her fear had turned violent, Lenneth’s fist finding its mark against his jaw. It had left him so close to doing something unforgivable, illusions torn and discarded if not for his world acting instead. Protecting him as much as her, Lenneth swallowed up whole into an abyss that had opened up beneath her feet.

Even now she was still there, free falling in an endless darkness, that heart of hers in an absolute turmoil that would only be the start of her unraveling. There was both pain and pleasure in the idea of it, Lenneth this intoxicating brand of everything that Lezard could have ever wanted. Her heart, her soul, that of her mind and her body, her tears, her agony, and that of her happiness, the man wanted it all. He was obsessed with the having of it, of attaining paradise with so perfect a being. It was so close to a reality, that he could almost taste it, his blood stained hands reaching for it, for her, Lezard this newly remade being, the ultimate Lord of it all, Lenneth and the effect she has always had on him, the one thing this God could not control.

Even now he was tempted, sheer folly though it would be to go after her right now. Lenneth was too wild in the moment, too angry and afraid, tormented by a truth he had only merely hinted at, such insinuations holding the strength to make a Goddess reel in an absolute terror. It was a fear not just for herself, for what might be done to her, but that of her world, the paradise that she had created. That perfect utopia that was nothing more than a lie that her wounded soul had retreated into, every insinuation that Lezard could make had the power to tear that universe apart from the root, the very foundations it had been built and brought to life upon.

It was a world of desires, that perfect paradise grounded in a pain so blatant that it had nearly torn the Goddess apart. That heart of hers that had been so ripped to pieces by the sins committed against her, it had left Lenneth reeling in an agony even she herself had not understood, the Goddess so overwhelmed in the moment as to escape into a fantasy. An illusion, the deceits woven there all by her own hand, the ageless woman latching onto a figment, the fragment that had been dangling before her. Seizing upon it, with that earring in her hand, out of all the lives she had slept through, it had been the latest, that of a child, a girl no older than fourteen when she had died, that had helped feed into a delusion. In that moment she had been thinking not as a Goddess, but as a human, a child, torn apart by a loss that had been about more than just one man’s death.

The seal had been broken, a flood gate of emotions overtaking the Goddess. How much agony had it been, to remember them all, every last life that had hosted Lenneth inside them. The highs and the lows, their joys and their pains, hundreds upon hundreds of women, all helping to shape the Valkyrie’s humanity. Her compassionate heart, the depth of her millennia of experience far more than anything those scant fourteen years as Platina could have given. She was just a sliver of what had helped shaped the Goddess, so small and inferior a speck, the child was not who Lenneth was meant to be.

So much more than any one human girl, Lenneth was in fact a being so uniquely her own. A caring Goddess, one whose capacity to feel and sympathize with the mortals a threat that Odin and the other Gods could not abide by. They hadn’t killed her, they had done WORSE, the woman’s free will taken from her, her true sense of being SEALED away.

A safeguard meant to control that which the Gods could not understand, that human compassion that that particular Goddess had been gifted with, the likes of which had been cultivated and learned over the course of a millennia of different hosts. Through them she had loved, and Lenneth had cared, the woman so wholly unique in her ability to FEEL, the Goddess the champion that the mortals had needed. The Gods had feared it, feared Lenneth and the allegiance that such emotions had wrought, Odin needing the Valkyrie to be a good little soldier who fell into line with his own selfish wants. Unable to dominate her as she had truly been, that tyrannous God had tried to eradicate her spirit, that of her true self, through such archaic means, such a brutal manipulation of the self, such that Lenneth had been little more than a doll. A puppet, beautiful and perfect, and so wholly without the feelings that would have interfered with the Heavens’ schemes.

The Gods had seen her as nothing more than a Death Goddess, a chooser of the slain to bolster their own armies with the souls of dead heroes. They had let her pick from the brave as though they were mere flowers, calling into service warriors from all corners of Midgard. Leaving her exposed to the very thing that the Gods themselves had feared, the emotions that were so plentiful in the humans, putting cracks in the shield erected around Lenneth’s heart. Bit by bit, that ancient magic had been worn away, the seal itself eroded with each and every encounter, until it had finally shattered, and with it went Lenneth’s mind, the woman having snapped.

It must have been so, so overwhelming, to have been hit at once with all those feelings, with the many lives she had slept through, their hopes, their desires, all coming to life within Lenneth in startling clarity. Was it any wonder she had lost her true self in the process, spinning from one host to another, again and again, until she had latched onto the most recent, that of the child, those scant years of fourteen the most overwhelming dream of them all given how fresh it had still been.

Even grounded in that child’s psyche, it had proved too much. Lezard himself had born witness to it, to that mental break that the Goddess had had. The tears that had fallen, the screaming that had been done, it hadn’t been just the Goddess, but the child, Platina, made horrified by the one solace of her life, Lucian the only kindness and warmth she had ever known, LOST, killed in turn by his own refusal to let go of his own delusions.

It had all been such a mess, a tragedy the likes of which all else had fallen short. Her puppet strings not just severed, but left tangled across the board, Lenneth had been operating on a grief born madness, forgetting who she really was, to play fantasy for one ignorant human. For some fake facsimile of him, Lucian a shadow, his miraculous return to life nothing more than a figment born of Lenneth’s own desperation and desires. Instead of the warrior she had known, he was something new, a puppet who was nothing more than some idealized version of who she had thought him to be, Lucian just one of the many dolls whose every thought had been painstakingly crafted by Lenneth’s power.

Creation itself had been remade on desire, on such potent delusions and lies, the many souls there not the people they had once been. They were just shadows of those that had died, annihilated in the Ragnarok that Lucian had helped Loki bring about. It hadn’t just ended lives, it had wiped out everything, including that of nearly every living being’s soul from existence, such devastation a permanent end, the cycle of rebirth itself destroyed. Such finality was there to it, that no one, not even God, could fight against, the world and its people entirely eradicated.

It left the world in complete ruins, Lenneth’s land a paradise populated in lies. It was a copy, a mere imitation of what had once been, formulated out of fragmented glimpses, the memories she had gathered, the people there nothing more than a pathetic bunch of puppets. They were just these hollow husks of what she thought them to be, these seemingly ideal versions ultimately falling short, all an attempt that was unfulfilling when it came towards truly easing the pain in the Goddess’ heart. They were all lies that couldn’t make her truly happy, anymore than they could satisfy her needs. Each and every last one of them, Lenneth living in a farce, a waking dream that could crumble apart so easily given the right push. If enough care wasn’t given, the Goddess would crumble again with it, her psyche perhaps lost to yet another kind of fantasy.

Lezard couldn’t lie and claim that he hadn’t considered it. Hadn’t given thought to molding Lenneth into a fantasy that would suit HIM best. But ultimately, he didn’t want the illusion, that of those broken remnants of who the Goddess had once been. He wouldn’t be satisfied with just a sliver, wouldn’t embrace the farce of just one of her sides. He wanted her everything and her all, Lezard made mad with the desire, with that need. It fueled him, his obsession with Lenneth the motivating strength that had led Lezard into doing the impossible again and again. He had died for her, traveled through time for her, even become a God for her, such a warped semblance of love a catalyst that had no limits and no match. Not even Lucian could compete, that young man unable to see past Platina, and past the Valkyrie, to the supreme manifestation of the woman, a Goddess so sublime as to move a heart that had once been so unfeeling.

Her mark left on him, Lenneth had helped shaped Lezard into this mad man, so utterly devoted in the pursuit of her. Worlds had been ruined, people slaughtered, time itself run roughshod all over, yet his hands were no less dirty than any of the other Gods. Than even HERS, Lezard creating his own world, his own perfect paradise to ease the pain that was in HIS heart. That it spilled hurt onto others, was of no concern, Lezard an unfeeling God who had no desire to rule or be worshiped by anyone other than by Lenneth.

Such blasphemies should have been sins enough to weigh even God down, yet Lezard was instead made unburdened by it all, free of the demands the throne of Creation should have made of him. He was free, having discarded duty the way he had discarded bodies, nothing but time on his hand, and power, and harboring a patience that was fast running out.

====

[obsceneindecorum]

Mentally Ill Mass

I have gotten stuck only posting images I like and never posting anything I have drawn or taken a picture of or even written. I get in cycles of limited ability and it saddens me because it reduces who I am to a generic. Years and years and years ago I used to have a Tumblr, before all the changes, around the time it first came out actually. Once upon a time I used to be able to share everything I wanted and write everything I wanted and now I can't. Be it my depression or maybe some undiagnosed disorder, I just struggle so badly with energy levels and being able to do things. Even if the thing is small, if it's another step added to a bunch of steps it is just too much and I stick to the simplest thing. So, this right now is using up more energy than posting a picture. But I have just gotten up, have had coffee and have done nothing else yet. Could I do this every morning? No, because even though I like routine, I can struggle to stick to it. Not out of laziness, but it's like once I give myself a task I can no longer do it. Like rebelling against my own set of rules. I was never always like this. This is some new behaviour that has started after the 5 years of work place harassment I experienced that has left me unable to work and housebound. Not just my online life (the only life I currently have) but in my offline life I struggle to keep on top of things. Again, something that could be related to what happened at my previous job connected with mental illness. I used to be a cleaner, I now struggle to clean. You connect the dots on a mental illness map of consequences. Every time I clean, I start raging to myself about anything that has irritated me. It's tiresome. If I listen to music then I get stuck into maladaptive dreaming, the best solution I have found so far is to just do little tiny cleaning bits every day and not give myself enough time to rage myself into being able to do nothing for the remainder of the day. Enough of that. I have been drawing but never post the drawings and now I think I have spiraled out of drawing because everyone is so much better than me at drawing. I have pictures of my cats I never post. I have things to say that I never say. Tumblr used to be something I used everyday, I engaged with other blogs, maybe because it is different now and I still haven't learned it all, I don't do that. I just post, I don't follow anyone, I don't seek out blogs, I don't engage with anyone... all this stuff I used to do. Maybe one day. Maybe I need to come up with a plan that helps me post all the things I want. Maybe keep things posted on my desktop instead of hidden away in folders neat and tidy. Maybe quit doom scrolling. Maybe get back into list making. Something, anything is better than continuing my current cycle. I need another coffee.

[pkspeaks7495-blog]

Online Dating Experience, Mistakes and Realizations

What do you do when you desperately want to have cold coffee to get through a deadline and the only blender in your house decided not to work? You dress well, grab a cab and go to Starbucks with your laptop. I am not usually fond of Starbucks but I heard there Matcha Tavana Ice is brilliant and boy, it definitely is!

 Once I settled with my order, I started thinking how exactly will I compile my two years long online dating experience in one blog post! So many conversations with men, a few offline dates, countless discussions with friends who’ve been active users of dating applications and after two weeks of trying, thinking and writing, I am glad to share this article with you. Also, this is the last post from my Online Dating series and I hope you enjoyed all the articles as much as I did while writing them!

 Why did I join a Dating Application?

 Mein phele mein bhot moti thi, nakkara thi, mere se koi flirt nai karta tha and phir meri zindagi mein Tinder aaya and mujhe Validation mili!

I joined Tinder because I have some amazing friends and they were concerned that I won’t EVER get over my ex-boyfriend because instead of erasing him out of my memory I was blocking boys who tried to approach me. Two years after the break-up, forty-eight hours of convincing and I created a dating profile on Tinder. Anyway, to describe the journey I am going to contemplate on these two:

Mistakes

Realizations

  Mistakes

 1)  Ignored  instructions: I did not read the instructions where they tell you that you need swipe right someone that you like and directly synced Tinder with my Facebook.

 What happened next will either leave you either in splits and or you will end up judging me every time someone says ‘Tinder’, 'right or left'. 

I was randomly swiping right and left like a kid who was playing Road Rage for the first time and ten minutes later my phone started buzzing and did not stop. I did what any smart person would have done, I slept! The next day I got more messages, I replied to some, ignored some and continued swiping right and left. Three days later, I could not access Tinder and no, not because of excess matches but excess unmatches. I was so confused looking at so many so many messages, I decided not to reply to seventy-five out of seventy-seven messages and ignored the eighty-two matches. Yes, Tinder blocks you when you have a certain amount of unmatches. Am I the only girl in the world who has experienced that? I am pretty and I am sure the answer is yes! 

 2) Did not listen to I, me and myself:

After I was unblocked and realized that you don’t take left when a cake shop is on the right. I carefully observed my matches and unmatched the ones who were too cocky for my sensibilities. I did get a chance to speak to some intelligent and good looking boys but I lost them because the moment they asked me to meet, like a silly school girl I asked my ‘then’ best friend, should I? The equally silly best friend convinced me that I should at least wait for a MONTH before seeing them offline and I told the guys to wait. They waited and realized that this girl is like our government, too many promises but no results and well, the boys were exactly like the impatient citizens, they unmatched me!

 Well, after four sweet, intelligent and good looking guys unmatched me, I knew I had to stop listening to her and meet the online dates offline

 3) Justified my virginity: 

Dating Applications are one place where you will be judged because you are a virgin. What? How? You are twenty-one being a virgin is not even practical! 

And I am pretty sure most of them will judge a girl who on an arrange marriage discussion table will tell him that she is NOT A VIRGIN!

 4) Spoke to too many guys at the same time: Sometimes you get lucky because instead of too many profiles like these and you get confused who should you meet first. And then you realize you are bad with time management.

 Tip Alert: One guy at a time

5) Uploaded this photo: 

 This picture was clicked right after I performed at an event in college and was not really in a mood to get clicked and hence, this expression! But when I saw the picture, I absolutely loved it! But some guys had a different idea to it. They felt it was like a tease, depicted how naughty I can in bed or was my way of showing that I enjoy ‘licking’. But I still haven’t corrected that mistake because the photo is still there!

                                                                                                    Realizations

 1) Not everybody paid attention in grammar class- Because not everybody knows that a comma can make a lot of difference.

2) People lie about their height - One guy told me he was six feet but when I met him he was not beyond five feet and seven inches. 

3) Too many broken hearts- I guess a lot of people join dating applications right after they break up. Are they trying find their ex or are they looking for people who can listen to their sob story and sob along? Trust my experience it’s the latter!

4) Everybody is scared of love- 20’s is a confusing place to be in. Most of us are sacred of a relationship because we’ve had our share of heartbreaks, we don’t want to get into a serious relationship but we don’t want to date either because what if we get serious? What if that serious relationship hampers our career growth? What if like us the other person doesn’t take it casually and is all serious thinking about a life together? We think too much! 

5) But in our heads we sing this song twenty times!

 6)  Always choose a good restaurant for your date- Because people disappoint but food never disappoints! I once met a guy and he did not speak. When I say he did not, I really mean it but I was glad that we were at All American Diner and the food like always was Y-U-M-M-Y! And since then I always make it a point to select a good place to eat food. 

  7) Only two per cent people are okay revealing that they have a dating application in their phone. No, they aren't shy they afraid of getting judged. And no, those two per cent people are not two Rupees people!

8) One look at a guy’s photo and I can tell you if he has written something in the ‘about me’ section or not.

                         E-X-P-E-R-I-E-N-C-E! 

9) Yeh duniyaa… yeh duniyaa badi gol hai- I saw my brother, four family friends and two guys I met at my cousin’s wedding on Tinder. And since then I believe in statistics nad the fact that everybody is on Tinder. 

10) Truly Madly is like U/A version of shaadi.com because everybody there wanted to marry me. OkCupid is shady and that's the reason I left it within the first thirty minutes, yes it is that shady! Tinder says you can find friends, love and everything in between. Well, they are right, you do find all of it but mostly in between! 

11) Looks matter- I hate to say this but yes, they do. How many times did you swipe right to a girl or boy who did not meet your standards of beauty or handsome?

12) I will be forever alone- I have always been very confident and no, I don't flip when I am with a guy. And you know what? That is my problem. I talk to all my dates like I talk to my friends. I laugh like a maniac and I clap my hands!

I mean how do you fake a laugh or laugh in a way that makes a guy go weak in his knees?  

If I had to summarize the entire experience then I would say yes, it’s been amazing. Yes, I felt bad when a Pilot I met did not call me back. Yes, it was awkward when one of the guys did not speak anything. Yes, it was horrible when a guy objectified me. Yes, I almost fell in love with once. Yes, I made some cool friends. Yes, that Australian guy I met was really funny. Yes, the not so good-looking guy was and is the best date I have ever had.

Yes, I have been on a lot of dates. Yes, you can judge me. Yes, men unmatched me. Yes, meeting so many different people made me confident. Yes, I am happy that I tried something new! 

[punkmuseology-blog]

Welcome to the first #PunkLove Monthly Roundup!

On the first weekend of every month, we’ll be providing you with a series of cool links to stories, projects, and other awesome stuff that we’ve found on the web. We may also stick in there a few things we’ve loved offline during the month. Just because we’re angry punks, doesn’t mean we don’t have our softer side.

The list this month is pretty diverse, including upcoming events we want to alert you to, events which have been, projects ongoing and cool activist stuff.

February Round-up

Firstly, we want to start with LGBT History Month. This February was particularly special, this year being the 50th Anniversary of the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in England and Wales. The heritage sector will be working to celebrate this event throughout the year, and this post from HLF gives an insight into the work of the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum. Ian McKellen was also at the The People’s History Museum to open the new “Never Going Underground: The Fight for LGBT+ Rights” exhibition, so keep an eye open for events and online material related to that.

We also want to alert people to the Prejudice and Pride project, a collaboration between the National Trust and the Research Centre for Museums and Galleries at the University of Leicester, which will be informing the Trust’s 2017 programme, and contribute to a need in the heritage sector to willingly tackle histories they find challenging.

As part of LGBT History Month, the University of Oxford held a series of lectures, and this one, from CN Lester, talks about the need for queer/trans history, and the problems caused by historical trans erasure. It’s a timely reminder, in the present political climate, that a reliance on a nostalgic past that removes, or makes tragic, LGBTQIA+ lives in previous eras, is one which discounts the fullness of being queer, throughout the ages.

Another exciting new project is the podcast “Queering Museums”, highlighting the diverse voices from the LGBTQIA+ community working in and around the museum sector, the projects being developed and why representation is so goddam important. 

February also saw Museums Advocacy Day, an opportunity to make the case for the value of museums run by the American Alliance for Museums. This year, given the cuts happening in the States which threaten cultural organisations, it’s not surprising that it was quite...active.

There have been several actions museums have taken to show resistance to specific events and policies in recent weeks. For an overview, considering taking a look at the wearemuseums.com article “#MuseumActivism Trump’s presidency make museums go from soft power to counter power”.

Diversity in museum workforces and employment practices was also highlighted this month by the AAM with their “We’re not that hard to find: Hiring Diverse Museum Staff” feature. It’s a slightly refreshing take on the handwringing about how unrepresentative museum staff can be, offering concrete actions to overcome the mechanisms that exclude and hinder people from a broad range of backgrounds from flourishing in the sector and the importance of strategic planning. The Museum Association also has some of their sessions online from conference last year, “Working Class Heroes” broaches many of the topics highlighted in the report. Also check out the work of MuseumDetox.

Coming up in March

20th March will see the Culture24 LetsGetReal Conference at the Museum of London, questioning how museums can make themselves relevant to young people, weave digital into practice in a meaningful way, and understand what young people want from the cultural sector. It’s also worth noting, at this point, this We Are Museums article on the value of teen programming.

March 29th is also #MuseLocalLinks, which asks people to visit online collections and share an object representing where they live. It’s a fun idea!

Black Country Visual Arts have been awarded a Heritage Lottery Fund Grant to bring together the Apna Heritage Archive in Wolverhampton, UK, pulling together historic and contemporary material of the Punjabi community in Wolverhampton from the 1960s to the present.

March is also Women’s History Month, and so I really want to draw your attention to the IndieGoGo for the East End Women’s Museum. There’s an interesting story behind how this came to be, so please go to check them out, and support them.

Sign-up for a free webinar on The Great Evolution of European Museums via NEMO on April 5th, which will look at prevailing trends over the last decades in museums, especially the shift towards museums as social agents. Hopefully this should offer a broader European perspective, getting us off the island a little.  

Showcase: Arts Emergency

Finally, we want to showcase a really important project that we can all get behind – Arts Emergency. They’re a reasonably new group, offering mentoring and support for young people from diverse backgrounds who want to get into the arts and culture industries. There are many of us who are aware that we are lucky to get any way into the industry that we have – right place, right time – but for whom it would be exceedingly difficult now. Why not offer something back? Give someone else a chance that they might not otherwise get. Their podcast also offers emerging artists and a broad range of people working in the cultural sector (both emerging and more established names) a platform to talk about their work.

See, being punk, as we’ve said before, doesn’t mean you have to believe in No Future. We’re fiercely keen that we remember what is yet to come. Despite appearing to be about remembering the past, museums and the heritage industry are just as much workers for the future, grounded and performing in the present. Especially when that present is filled with fear and sadness and intolerance.  

Current events demand that we do something. Say something. We said in the intro we have our softer side, but we also think that love is an incandescent thing, a tetchy anxiety and fierce bright rage. Harness them, and hope with all there is left in you that we can use them to do what is right.  

Book of the Month: Kylie Message, Museums and Social Activism: Engaged Protest

“This books aims to diminish the authority of polarised modes of thinking. Rather than seeing politics and culture as mutually exclusive terms, it seeks to demonstrate the productive exchanges that can occur when cultural and political sectors come into contact.”

“Curatorial activism can be understood as attempts by individuals to engage with, represent and often contribute to social and political protest and reform movements.”

Track of the Month: David Bowie, Heroes

“Though nothing will drive them away

We can beat them, just for one day

We can be heroes, just for one day”