#until it’s second nature. until he thinks in terms of vessels and possession and ‘did his body consent?’

[quietwingsinthesky]

Okay, see this raises an interesting question. I think I’m going to go with ‘yes, soulless!Sam could be possessed’ because there’s nothing in the show that tells us he couldn’t. He is a vessel, theoretically, soul or not, the blood and bone of him should be able to contain an angel. I think the soul thing is actually a whole different issue. Not ‘can Sam be possessed without a soul’, but ‘how does possession work sans soul?’ And I’m of two minds about this.

First, I’m going to work with the closest equivalent we’ve got, which is that Sam’s soul does kind of possess his own body? Given what we know of demons and ghosts (both previously human, both divorced from their original bodies, both able to possess other humans,) this isn’t that out there of an assumption to make, I think. And second, given that, why did soulless!sam’s very vocal denial of consent not matter towards that possession, and what does that tell us about how an angel approaching him would work?

So, option one: Sam’s soul doesn’t require his body’s consent to re-enter it because human souls just don’t work on angel grace rules. Angels need consent. Demons and ghosts do not, and so I think it would be reasonable to assume that their common ancestor, the regular old human soul, doesn’t have to follow those rules either. Now, if true, theoretically, this would mean you could juggle whatever souls through whatever bodies you want like it’s the scene from the live action scooby-doo film, which could certainly be used for Hijinks.

(Wait. Wait, hold on. Okay, this holds up, actually. Granted, it’s a case involving a spell, but Swap Meat, yeah? The episode where a random teenager gets into Sam’s body? Human soul traded for human soul across bodies, and neither needed the body’s consent to get inside. Also, while Gary is in Sam’s body, his consent could technically allow Lucifer in as well, hinted at by the demon in the episode, so that’s something to think about. Whether Lucifer would be happy it’s not Sam letting him in, that’s a whole other discussion, but it could happen and that’s what matters here. The body and soul don’t technically need to match up for the consent to matter, the invasive soul’s consent overrides the body’s and that of the original soul’s.)

Option two: Human soul do need consent to possess people, but soulless!sam doesn’t count as people. He doesn’t count as someone who can consent. He doesn’t even count as someone who can’t consent. I mean, obviously to us, we can tell that soulless!sam is pretty clearly an individual with some level of autonomy outside of the presence of Sam’s soul, and that he very loudly protested being forced to take his soul back, and that he continued to exist as a separate entity behind Sam’s wall until Sam reabsorbed him. So like. Soulless!Sam was a being whose consent was violated in this instance. To us.

What I’m getting at here is that, in the universe of the show, it wasn’t. Because soulless!sam, as a body, as a vessel, does not have the ability to consent or not consent. It’s a non-issue. He is empty, and that’s all that matters.

So, depending on which of these we go with, that leaves us with either:

option one, an angel would require soulless!sam’s consent to enter his body, but as usual, no human soul/ghost/demon would. So he works just like everyone else in the universe.

option two: an angel would not require soulless!sam’s consent to possess him because he’s free real estate, babyyy. he’s an empty house. he might be a person but that doesn’t mean the universe is going to treat him like one. If Lucifer strolled up to him, he wouldn’t even have to ask, he’d just jump his bones then and there and have himself a nice tall person-suit.

Which, in a way, means Sam’s right. His body is just a vessel. It doesn’t even get to choose who enters or leaves it, not like Sam might get to throw other beings out once he’s inside.

Does Sam think of it as his body or does he, in the (occasional) privacy of his own head, refer to it as his vessel?

[oftenderweapons]

Steamy Waters — Taehyung

Pairing: Taehyung x reader (nicknamed Lace)

Wordcount: 7.6k ( mostly edited✌️)

Genre: smut, pwp, fluff, slightest angst, established relationship, idol!AU

Rating: 18+ (As usual, I know)

Hello baby bears! Welcome to Taehyung’s Steamy Waters. I must admit this episode is going to be a lot steamier than planned, but I cannot lament. Recently we celebrated Taehyung’s birthday, so I thought I could add a little extra as a late celebration.

There’s not much plot, honestly. Tae and Lace are bathing together in true Kim Taehyung fashion when the intrusive presence of mirrors on every bathroom wall makes it hard not to stare at each other. And when wandering hands — and wandering feet... and wandering mouths — start wandering too much the temperature in the room becomes too hot to handle. Chaos ensues. Especially when Taehyung is... at her service.

TRIGGER WARNINGS: swearing. Wine drinking. Humping, bathtub sex, unprotected sex within an established relationship (don’t make me tell again that you and your partner(s) should be clean before going condomless); massage, slight footjob; oral fixation (not only in terms of oral sex, both male and female receiving btw) but also foot worship, breast worship, body shot, face riding (male receiving), cum eating; spanking, one (1) pussy spank; masturbation (female receiving), also anal fingering (external stimulation only); maid!Taehyung, switch!Taehyung, hard dom!Taehyung, big dick!Taehyung, soft domme!reader, very sub!reader; hair pulling/grabbing; choking kink, degradation kink, overstimulation, squirting, sensory blackout. Taehyung uses a safeword (yellow); did I mention that MIRRORS ARE BACK BUT THIS TIME IT’S WORSE? And if you didn’t guess VOYEURISM 24 out of 10. Also, the softest aftercare and mentions of sleeping pills to help reader relax after... ahem... all of those. Things. In the trigger warnings.

In case you need my masterlist, here it is :)

Enjoy! 💜✨

A jazz piece was playing on the modern gramophone in a corner of the bathroom, somewhere far from the tub, where you and Taehyung would most likely make a splash and quite surely ruin the device.

Taehyung was laying at the opposite side of the tub, head thrown back as your foot rubbed his thigh.

You were pretty chill yourself, arms pressed against the edge of the tub, keeping you from relaxing too much and going under.

“Baths are magic.” You murmured, your toes meeting his hip before sliding back down again.

He hummed in confirmation. “The only problem is with washing one’s hair. It’s so uncomfortable.” He caught your foot underwater, his thumbs digging in the few knots you felt there. If the bath was magic, his hands were miraculous.

You felt your whole body melt and slide half an inch lower, your self restraint too weak to stop you from moaning.

Taehyung smiled fondly and sensuously. “You like it there?” He asked, his fingers moving to the heel, pressing against all those spots he knew from his acupressure appointments.

Your whole leg went insensitive in a very pleasing way. “Yes, you like it, dove.” He said, grinning and moving to your calf, specifically to the spot where the muscle met the bone near your ankle.

“Don’t want your ankles to swell.” He said, pushing your foot into slow, articulate circles.

Your soul definitively abandoned your body.

“We’ll put ice packs on these bad girls as soon as you’re out of the tub.” He said.

“It’s not that bad.” You said, just as he drew two parallel lines with his thumbs digging into your muscle reaching the back of your knee.

You had to grip the rim of tub to keep yourself from end up with your head underwater.

“It is that bad.” He said, rubbing small circles and making sure that all the exertion was magically sucked out of you. “No need to lie to me.” He said, looking at you with his dark eyes, his hair all curled up due to the steam coming from the water and filling the air. His own foot ran down your inner thigh, the sole of his foot ghosting over your pelvis.

There were too many reflective surfaces all over the bathroom.

Angles of him appeared everywhere. Specifically when he lifted your leg and placed a kiss to the upper arch of your foot.

“Shall I move to the other leg?” He asked, lowering your calf back in the water.

You nodded, trying to scoot your hips forward, against his heel.

“Feeling needy?” He asked, as his fingers repeated the procedure he had performed before on your other leg.

“So much.” You replied, using your freshly rejuvenated foot to tease his erection. His massage had activated nerve endings that had probably never really been there before he touched you.

“Let’s finish this leg then,” he said, as he kept pushing your ankle in wide circles.

“Tae,” you called, just as he moaned, your toes tickling his belly while the ball of your foot, way fleshier, teased his head.

“I never thought I could like this.” He said with a small surprised smile before he threw his head back, the cords of his neck tensing, the veins throbbing so clearly under the complicated game of shadows originated by the soft lights in the bathroom.

You loved his bathroom. It was soothing, with all the dark hues and the orangey lights.

His hands stopped for a second. “You’re distracting me.” He said.

“I wanted to treat you nice. For your birthday.” You replied. “I still can’t believe we went vanilla on your birthday night.” You said, still teasing him, hoping you could have him speaking in that soft, deep, dreamy voice he has whenever you’re getting him in the mood.

“It was good vanilla though.” He commented, his hips jerking forward with a small grunt before he felt his spine turn into putty.

“Very good vanilla.” You said, removing his leg from between yours, deciding to be generous and focus on him.

“Still, I owe you birthday sex.” You said, noticing his slow chuckle as you made him part his legs wide.

“Come here.” He said, removing the drain stopper with his fingers and bringing his hand between his legs as you bent your legs underneath your torso and crawled to him, straddling him and grinding your pelvis against his. “This is way better.” He purred, one of his hands keeping him upright while the other one landed on your ass. “You’re so soft.” He said, pushing his crotch up and against you. “I could just...” Once the water was low enough that his cock emerged freely from the surface, he put the drain stopper back in place, taking in your lustful expression as you ground on him.

“I think you’re the one who wants birthday sex.” Taehyung said, grabbing your hips and squishing the skin there.

His touch was always something that set you on fire. Ever since the first time, since your very first touch, he had completely possessed your entire being. Whenever his body connected with yours it felt like your skin and his were ready to part and like the raw extremities of a wound, and heal together, his blood vessels becoming yours, or maybe yours becoming his, until there was no distinction anymore. It was the exact opposite of that kind of surgery performed to separate conjoined twins.

And no surgery, no cutting was necessary. It was just. Preternatural. And so, so natural at the same time.

“Do you need me to stretch you?” He asked, his thumb massaging your clit.

One more bridge between you and him.

“I can take you. I’m so turned on.” You said, bending to kiss his neck and drink the small droplets of water glistening there.

“Was it the massage?” He asked, rolling his head back, offering you even more skin to kiss.

“I don’t know,” you said, licking him. Meanwhile you started noticing it wasn’t water, but rather your own slick making you slide on him.

Water was too unreliable, it would leave you dry and make the whole experience traumatic; especially, considering his size, both in length and girth.

“We can act like it’s your birthday.” He said, kissing a soft spot under your jaw. “Have an early birthday for my Nymphette.” He said, this time nibbling against the sweet spot on your neck.

You chuckled and brought your hands down his chest, scratching his stomach gently and playfully pinching the soft flesh of his belly. You loved him being so lithe and at the same time a bit fluffy in such an adorable spot. It made you think of childhood games, like blowing raspberries of his sensitive tummy. It always makes him so happy that his eyes spark up with pure, innocent joy, his mop of hair immediately coming for your neck and bosom, where he nuzzles in to tickle you before rubbing his face against your breasts like a cuddle some cat.

Once your face parted from his neck and chest, he cupped your face, holding you still. “I love you.” He said, staring in your eyes. And it felt so simple: no big statements, no poetic words, no useless rethorics. “I love you.” He repeated.

You mirrored his hold on you, placing both hands on his cheeks and rubbing your thumb against his divine features. “I love you.”

It holds more meaning than you could ever explain. The obliterating need in both your eyes and his, the urgency and the fondness. You felt like a pot boiling and overflowing with ten thousand ingredients that were a specific mix of his taste and your taste and his smell and yours and all the tastes and smells you’ve experienced together.

The candle burning in his room the first time you made love. His aftershave. Strawberries. Your shampoo, which became his shortly after you moved in. Champagne and that bubbly feeling of having butterflies in your stomach. French macaroons. The first breakfast in bed. The tteokbokki you had eaten with his parents the day he introduced you to them. The light, talk scent of Yeontan’s fur after the first time you bathed him together.

Now you were horny and emotional.

Taehyung seemed to notice. “Are you feeling okay, honey?” He asked, dragging his thumb against your lower lip.

“I just realised how important you are to me.” You said, bending to his face and kissing him.

“Just now?” He asked, slightly surprised as he raised an eyebrow.

“No,” you replied, closing your eyes and touching your face with his, feeling the slight stubble of his cheek against yours, brushing your noses together, focusing on the intense sensation of his face against such a personal, private part of your own body. “Sometimes I just… get lost in the feeling. It feels like being overwhelmed by all the things we share, all that we have together. How many things remind me of you.” You murmured against the tender spot behind his ear.

“I know.” He said. His hands moved to your waist, fingers sinking in the flesh as he invited you to sit up.

You followed his direction. Once he could look at you, all of you, he took his length in his hand. “Inside?” He asked, checking in on you.

You nodded. “Please. Inside.”

He closed his eyes and smiled, pulling you close to his chest once more with one arm wrapped around your waist.

With the hand on his cock, he rubbed his tip up and down your slit, making you moan a couple times, whimpering when you felt his soft tip breach your walls.

“Tae...” You whined, his lips meeting yours and trying to suffocate your lament.

“Hush, Lace,” he said, touching your spine. “Is it wet enough?” He said, pressing his mouth to your temple. “Take your time, love.”

You inhaled and lifted your hips up before sliding down again, one inch at a time, your muscles constricting around him so hard that you had to stop.

“Too tight,” he said, trying to lift you up slightly. “I don’t wanna hurt you.” He said as he kept kissing your face. “Let me stretch you first, love.”

“No.” You whined, your hands stopping his as he tried to slide out of you. “I want it like this. I can take it, just… Easy.” You said, begging. “Please.”

“If it hurts, we stop. Immediately.” He replied, still unsure.

You nodded eagerly and let your hips lower some more. “Kiss me?”

His eyes turned into warm, happy crescents as he obliged, moving his lips against yours. His hips inadvertently jerked upwards, forcing one more inch into you, making you gasp and offering him the perfect chance to let his tongue slide into your mouth.

The kiss was the sweetest poison, with playful flicks and demanding swipes, the tip of his tongue licking the underside of your own as yours arched up toward his palate. In the erotic frenzy of it all, you completely lost control of your legs and before you could notice, he was completely sheathed inside you as he kept sucking on your wet appendage, bobbing his head slightly as your tongue, fully stretched out, methodically appeared and disappeared past his lips. It felt right, your tongue penetrating his mouth as his sex penetrated yours. It felt balanced.

It didn’t take long before your hips started moving, riding him, making him moan and lose the suction he had on your appendage.

Parting from him was a mess of spit, both your eyes and his opening and staring at the silvery string connecting your lips to his. “You’re so hot.” You murmured as his hands landed on your hips, helping you, just as your brought your own palms to your chest, pressing your breasts together, massaging them as they rolled with the way you were simply moving back and forth, not really focusing on bouncing but rather sliding.

Taehyung was immediately captured by the sight of your breasts caught in your palms, his hands staying on your hips to help you while his mouth landed on your left nipple. You quickened your pace as his thumb met your clit, making you whine. “How close?” You asked, brow furrowing as he tugged at your nipple while suctioning it inside his mouth. You moved even faster in reply, gyrating your hips too as he grew more and more eager on your skin, until his teeth had created an indentation on your areola and your nipple was too sensitive to stay inside his mouth, subjected to the ruthless whipping and flicking of his tongue.

“Oh my god, Tae, please, I’m—” You couldn’t put a finger on what was making you so desperately horny, maybe it was simply because you were just out of your period and you had been starving for him for almost a week, but unexpectedly you felt yourself near your edge.

“Lace for fuck’s sake, we’ve just started.” He grunted as he recognised your kegels pulsating around him faster and tighter. “Already?”

You nodded.

“Damn. So hot.” He huffed out before pressing his mouth to your other nipple, giving up on sucking it and deciding to simply loll out his tongue and press it flat against your chest. “Come on, nymph. Cum on my cock.” He swore as he felt you get impossibly tighter. “Fuck it, Lace. Ride it.” He said, removing one hand from your hip before you heard a loud smack, followed by a prickling, burning sensation on your left glute.

The muscles of your ass and legs quivered as you stopped for a second, his thumb restless at the apex of your labia. “Did you—” You shivered as he hit the perfect spot, “Did you just spank me?” You asked, all your muscles tense.

He froze. “… did it… I’m sorry…” He said, confused.

“No, I liked it.” You corrected him. “I was toying with you.” You said with a small smile.

He knew sometimes you weren’t in the mood for spanks and power play. Sometimes you just wanted to be equals and simply get lost in pure, extreme sensations.

He shook his head, incredulous. “Then keep going, nymph.” He said, before surprising you with another spank.

You gasped and chuckled before cupping his jaw and joining your mouths, your hips moving carelessly.

This time he grabbed your ass viciously before slapping it one more time, his tongue being twice as lively as usual as he licked your own tongue, revelling in the velvet paradise of your mouth. Once he felt your hips grow impatient, your movements irregular, he parted from you, throwing his head back, eyes opening, his long lashes fluttering dreamily as he let his mouth hang open before silencing a moan by catching his lower lip between his teeth.

Finally you felt pleasure taking over your body, Taehyung’s eyes opening and focusing up.

He gestured at the ceiling with a jerk of his chin. Following his tip, your gaze turned up. And met the mirror.

In that moment you realised how furiously you were moving on top of him, how eager and desperate and sexy you looked.

“Look at you. So messy for my cock. My little nymph.” He said, smacking your ass once more.

A short whimper exited your mouth as the hit took the air from your lungs.

Your high exploded while his thumb teased the underside of your clit, unprotected by the hood and painfully sensitive by now.

For a second, everything felt too intense, your hair wet and dripping down your back, the water grown cold by now, and his skin so hot, his nipples hard under your thumbs, his hands moving to your breasts once you didn’t need him on your clit anymore, his palms sliding on your half-dry skin and pressing your boobs together before he dove his head forward, dragging his whole face against the soft crevasse that your tits formed together. He started ramming his hips up, fucking into you as your movements slowed down.

He loved suffocating between your breasts, gasping hard as your heartbeat drowned his ears, your breathing like a feral, powerful creature beckoning him toward your dark lair of consuming bliss.

Biting his lip, frowning and groaning repeatedly, he slammed his hips hard against the back of your thighs, four, five, six times before he stilled and screamed in pleasure, the dark granite of the walls amplifying his animalistic sound before he bit into your breast, almost painfully.

Too bad you were still lost somewhere in pleasure, his body finally joining yours.

Maybe you would complain about the bite in the morning, when it would be red and sore and maybe swollen.

“____, fuck. Can we have monthly appointments like this?” He said, gyrating his hips tentatively while you gripped the tub, trying to find purchase as your body betrayed you and collapsed almost entirely.

“Monthly birthdays...” You mused, mouth brushing against the column of his throat.

“Do we really need an occasion to fuck like this?” He asked while his hand kneaded the soft folds of flesh around your torso. He found endless pleasure in feeling every aspect of you under his fingers.

And it never made you feel conscious. Rather, it made you feel appreciated, not like he was avoiding your absolutely average and healthy body fat, but more like his fingers were appreciating every detail of you, singing a hymn to your whole body completely devoid of flaws, praising it in the unwavering, glorious materiality of it.

You felt worshipped.

The shiver that ran down your spine rose him from his blissful slumber. “You’re cold?” He asked, pressing you closer to himself.

You nodded and mouthed at his neck. “You feel too good inside, though.”

He chuckled. “It feels good inside you too.” He replied fondly. Sometimes you wondered how this cockwarming thing never made sense to you before you met him.

“But you need to dry your hair, love.” He patted your ass a couple times. “Don’t want you to get sick.” He said, “Plus, we’re going to be uncomfortable here.” He tried to raise his torso from his slumping. You helped him by sitting up yourself, his dick pulsating inside you and making your eyes roll back in pleasure.

He cackled. “Later.” He said his hands circling your waist and helping you up and off him.

As his cock slid out completely, landing on his belly, completely covered in your and his cum, you licked your lips.

“No.” He said, smirking, already placing his hands on your shoulders, keeping you from bending down and sucking him clean.

“Please, sir?” You whined, arching your brows and pouting.

He looked at your swollen, red lips, at your tongue lashing out to wet them seducingly.

He took his hands away. “Have your fun,” he conceded, his nails scraping your shoulders delicately as you bent forward, one of your hands catching your hair before it got messed up.

With your tongue you licked a thin stripe from the base of his cock all the way up to the tip before engulfing it in your mouth. You easily swallowed a good portion of him before pulling him out, nudging his shaft to the side with your nose and cleaning the messy marks on his belly and his pelvis where your mixed fluids on his flesh had imprinted the shape of his cock.

His moan was dark and sinful before he pleaded for a yellow.

You let him go without hesitation. “Are you okay, pup?” You asked, not even enjoying the mix of your and his taste in your mouth because of your sudden, urgent worry.

“Yeah. I just… I need a slowdown, please.” He said, touching your face weakly. “I’m getting cold.” He said, with soft eyes.

Your worry increased tenfold in your chest. First, you sat up and helped him up yourself. “Okay, Tae. Let me just rinse you, yes?” You called, removing the drain stopper and letting the water flow out before you cleaned up both you and him. The water from the tap ran warm — almost hot — a few seconds later and you managed to rinse him properly before he climbed out of the tub. You followed him and wrapped him up in a towel. “There you go, baby.” You said.

He smiled fondly. “Thank you.”

“Would you like me to dry your hair?” He asked, his beautiful hands balled up in cute fists as he held the large towel around his shoulders.

“No, baby, thank you.” You replied kindly and warmly. “Let me just rinse myself before I dry my hair. I’ll join you in bed in twenty.” You said as you noticed him linger close to the door, showing himself a bit too impatient and excited to head out, possibly to bed, with you by his side. Or on top of him. Or below him. Probably below him, considering you had just ridden him.

Caught in your head, you went back to the tub, rinsing yourself quickly and briskly before stepping out and drying yourself up gingerly, leaving your body slightly damp so that your body lotion would dilute a little with the sparse droplets left on your skin, so that it would absorb better.

Once your body smelled like roses from your breasts down, you rinsed your hands, applied your favourite hair care oil and started the hairdryer. It didn’t take long, fifteen minutes at large, before a rapping at the door interrupted your hair ritual.

You frowned. Taehyung wasn’t one to knock. Just to make sure, you lowered the setting of the hairdryer, waiting in case he did it again and making sure that you had heard correctly.

The sound reappeared.

You switched off the device and placed it in its drawer. “Yes?” You replied.

The door opened.

First, Taehyung’s face appeared, his hair ruffled and dry, his expression sweet and innocent. Was he wearing makeup?

No. Impossible.

He hadn’t actually washed his face yet, but he was definitely without makeup earlier.

His lashes looked longer. His lips redder. And he most definitely had enhanced those beautiful eyes of his with dark eyeshadow lining his upper eyelid, making his stare even more intense.

And was that a heart drawn on his cheekbone?

Indeed.

“May I?” He asked, suspiciously formal and courteous.

“Yes, of course.” You said, with a confused smile.

Next, everything made sense.

God bless him. You thought, your heart skipping a bit and stumbling down approximately sixty flights of stairs.

There, with a fancy silver tray and a fancier glass of red wine on top, stood your amazing, extravagant, glorious, mind blowing, seductive, sultry, indecently sexy, wondrous boyfriend. In a maid dress.

Your body did a strange thing, your mouth hanging open basically already drooling.

Was this how he felt anytime he saw you in lingerie?

“I thought my lady deserves special treatment.” He said, coming closer, placing the tray over the small counter near the sink.

The vinyl playing on the gramophone chose precisely that moment to come to an end.

The mechanic arm lifted and moved away, the plate slowly coming to a stop after all the spinning.

Not that you noticed, you were too busy staring at your boyfriend, imagining what you could possibly do to him.

“I’m sorry I didn’t assist you with your lotion, ma’am.” He said, standing, his hands joining before his stomach. “The uniform is a bit difficult.”

“Don’t worry, darling. All forgiven.” You said, your hand shaking as you reached out to touch his face. “You look incredible.” You said, completely dazzled. “Breathtaking.”

He blushed. “Thank you.” His eyes lowered coyly.

“Really, Taehyung. You look… I am speechless, darling.” You said with a big smile plastered on your face. “You’re unreal.” You said, drawing the shape of his lips, the pink lipgloss looking impossibly perfect on his face, emphasising the desirable curves of his mouth.

He stared in marvel too as you looked completely enraptured by his looks. “You like it?” He asked, insecure.

“Yes, of course I like it, love. You look too good, baby.” You reassured him, feeling a tad underdressed standing naked in front of him, while he had several layers of satin, ribbons, lace and of course, the classy apron. He even had puffy sleeves. And the corset tightened in a complicated lacing on the front. You took in every detail. “Do you feel good in it?” You asked, letting your index finger slide down his jaw, along the curve of his neck, to the small mole on his breastbone.

He nodded. “I’ve been tiptoeing around this for a while.” He said, his hand hesitant, his eyes asking for permission to place it atop of yours.

You agreed with a short nod.

“I didn’t know how you would react.” He said, his gaze guarded.

“I love it.” You said, tightening your hand around his fingers and rubbing his knuckles with your thumb. “And I love you.” You reassured him, pulling your joined hands to your face and placing a small kiss on his ring finger, where someday his wedding ring would lay. “Although we could do a few adjustments,” you said, staring at him with the eyes of a trained lingerie maker. “It could fit so much better on you.” You said, walking around him, observing the few points where the fabric slouched and flopped, unfit for his lithe body. On the back you noticed a zipper. You would remember that for later.

“Here,” you said, pinching the loose fabric around his slim waist. “And here.” You said, fingering the ribbons over his chest. “With slight modifications, we can make it more comfortable for you. And make it look like an actual uniform.” You said, standing behind him as he stood in front of the mirror. You bent to place a kiss on the crook of his neck. “How beautiful.” You said, your hands wrapping around his waist, appreciating how small it was, how elegant and expensive he looked. “Would you like it if I added a small accessory,” you asked, moving your middle finger to trace the column of his throat. “I was thinking about a choker.” You said, “something frilly. Maybe with a small kitten bell. Plenty of soft ribbons and lace. Make this neck look even prettier.” You suggested, placing another kiss on the other side of his neck, this time letting your mouth open and suck just a little.

You weren’t allowed to mark him there with all the upcoming music shows.

He nodded. “I’d love to.” He said, looking in your eyes timidly in the mirror. “But first I’d like to make myself forgiven for being late for the lotion.” He said, bowing his head. “Please, miss.”

Your head rolled back as pleasure travelled from his mouth to your ears to your core.

“Of course, kitty. As long as this is the way you want things to go.” You stated clearly. “I need your consent, kitty.”

“I want it, miss.” He assured you.

“Then proceed, kitty.” You said, wrapping your hand around his throat and tightening it affectionately.

He turned around and looked at your lips. “May I kiss you, miss?” He asked, eyes still deflecting your stare.

“Yes, kitty. Of course, darling.” You replied with a gentle smile.

He bent down slightly and swallowed nervously before placing his lips on yours, the taste was immediately familiar.

“This is not lipgloss, am I right, kitty?” You asked, raising an eyebrow inquisitively.

“Yes, miss. You’re right, miss.”

Damn him. It was lube. Specifically, watermelon-flavoured lube.

You thought how long it would take for this to become too much. For him to become too hot and melt you until all there was left of you was a bottle of sap stored in the fridge.

And your title.

Your ears basked in victory at his perfect speaking manners. You had educated him properly. He was by far your best exercise in domination so far, his manners impeccable at all times when his submissive persona came into play.

“Come on, kitty. Show me how you intend to gain forgiveness.” You spoke sweetly, caressing the hair at his nape.

Soft. So soft. Always so damn soft.

He knelt. Slowly. Very slowly.

Looking up at you with pure, angelic eyes, he poked with his index finger first at your left thigh, and then at his left shoulder.

You grinned.

“You want my leg on your shoulder, kitty?” You asked with an amused smile.  

He nodded eagerly. “Yes, miss. Please, miss.”

You smiled proudly. “That’s a very good kitty.”

Taehyung kept a fond expression, saving his intentions to himself.

Let her think she won, he thought just as his hand landed at your ankle, his fingertips running up the back of your calf, your knee, your thigh, until he applied gentle pressure, inviting you to lift your leg.

Your cunt was right in front of his face, his nose sniffing at your smell, slightly adulterated by your body lotion.

He nuzzled his nose against the tiny patch of hair you kept atop your labia. He loved it without even knowing why. It simply turned him insane. All the time. Especially when he went down on you.

Your hand gripped the hair on the crown of his head, massaging the scalp delicately, but also trying to protect him from potentially bumping it against the drawer under the sink.

“Does it smell good, kitty?” You asked, smiling at him, taking in the view of him.

“Yes, miss. Can I please lick you, miss?” He asked shyly, his voice slightly more high pitched than usual.

“Yes, darling love.” You practically cooed at him.

He didn’t waste a second, his tongue ready to lunge for your opening before he stopped himself with a small gasp. “Thank you, miss.”

You felt even prouder.

God, he really is perfect.

“You’re welcome, kitty.”

And at that, the tip of his tongue brushed the tight rim of muscles lining your entrance, collecting your taste before flattening the muscle and dragging it all the way along your slit, delivering a series of hard flicks as his hands travelled to your ass, helping you ride his face straight away.

You enthusiastically followed his instructions, especially once you felt two of his fingers run from your backside to the front, sliding inside your dripping hole.

“Kitty, that’s very nice.” You said, huffing out an enthusiastic chuckle before it transformed into a sinful deep moan. You started directing his head, his tongue stretched taut past his lips while you ground your crotch against it. “Kitty, this is a very good surprise.” You said, praising him, petting his hair, your eyes closing as he moaned in approval, watching you as you grew more and more lost. You took the glass in your hand, taking a sip of wine and feeling it bloom in your mouth instantly, your cheeks warming up, your veins throbbing with the wild beat of desire awakening your every limb.

Your head rolled back, your hand immediately placing down the glass as you felt your high approach, his fingers sinking all the way to your cervix, tapping against it.

His lips captured your clit, sucking it a couple times before releasing it, pressing it to his front teeth with his strong tongue.

“Tae,” you called, too fucked out to care about pet names and stuff. Your edge was there, waiting for you, all you needed was…

He pulled out his fingers, making you cry out before they returned to their place. Shortly after, his thumb landed on your skin. Wet. Slippery. Right against the oversensitive skin between your cunt and your anus.

All it took was two gentle rubs and your body crumbled, all your weight going to the hand on the sink while your legs shook wildly, your knees too wobbly to survive your high; your other hand too moved to the sink, too scared of hurting your lover. His hands gripped you tighter instead, pushing you harder against his face while his tongue lashed out, the hard muscle grinding against your clit as he moved his head furiously in a nodding motion.

You weren’t sure you called his name or screamed or simply held your breath and stayed silent, your ears were completely out of order.

If it weren’t because of being on your feet, you would have thought you had passed out. Taehyung’s arm stayed tight around your waist while you removed your leg from his shoulder, trembling as you placed it down. “Holy hell.” You said, still gripping the sink for support. You looked at Taehyung. His whole face was covered in wetness, the heart on his cheekbone completely smeared, the only lube left on his mouth being the wetness coming from yourself. “You look amazing, Tae.” You complimented him. “A damn masterpiece.” You said, proud to your very core.

He grinned.

Kitty out. Tiger in.

“May I have some wine now?” He asked, no honorifics, no submission.

You grinned and bit your lip, wiggling your eyebrows.

He wiggles his right back.

Holding the glass, you took a large sip in your mouth, leaving a scarce finger in. You took a step back, bending at your waist and placing your mouth near Taehyung’s. He opened his mouth invitingly and you let a small amount dribble past your lips and fall into his mouth.

He patted his lips wider before stretching up surrounding your lips with his, making sure that not a drop got to waste.

Once he was sated, he placed a finger under your chin, moving it to your throat and wrapping his hand there.

“Now you’re gonna stand up and bend over, Lace.” He ordered, no trace of pliability in his demeanour, and no sign of mercy either.

You obeyed immediately.

“Hands on the sink. Keep them there.” You heard the sound of a zipper. Looking up you noticed that he was naked.

And that he was hard.

You licked your lips nervously.

“Lower your head.” He said, spanking you out of the blue.

So he was in a spanking mood. Mentally, you agreed.

“I know you want me like this. Uh?” He asked.

“Yes, sir.” You replied, inhaling deeply as his fingers drew the line of your spine.

His finger stopped at the middle of your back, pressing on your spine to make it arch until it became almost painful.

“Stay.” He said, grabbing the silver platter and balancing it on your ass. The cold made you hiss, but you focused on staying perfectly still. “Stay.” He repeated, “I need to wash my hands.” He said, before abandoning the platter on your behind and coming to your side, standing right beside you as he washed slowly poured some soap on his palm, opening the tap and wetting his hands rubbing them together as he closed the tap with his elbow.

“It is always a pleasure to look at you like this.” He said, taking all the time in the world.

All you could see was his legs, midthigh down.

“You look like you don’t have a dominant bone in your body.” He mused, making sure that the thin foam reached between his fingers too. “You say ‘yes, sir’ and you sound like the single, most obedient, pliant creature in the world. Like you were made to please me.” He continued, looking at the platter tremble slightly.

He decided he could rinse his hands and dry them.

In half a minute he was standing behind you once more.

With your head hanging low, you felt the weight on your backside diminish imperceptibly. The platter disappeared next, landing on the counter.

Taehyung’s left hand laced with the hair on your nape, moving your rebellious locks aside. Now he had the whole expanse of your back before him, naked and richly arched.

Considering the situation, he cocked an eyebrow, clicking his tongue.

Something cold, like a blade pressed to your lower back, your spine arching even further.

“Stay still.” He said, bending to your ear. “If you move I’m gonna whip you.” He said minaciously.

He didn’t expect a reply, so you didn’t offer any. Cold liquid slid down the crevasse between your shoulder blades, sliding down the dip connecting your neck to your ass. Then something hot and soft appeared at the saddle of your back, where it reached the lowest spot. You put two and two together.

He was doing body shots down your spine.

You were sure when something that must have been his tongue slid all the way up to your nape. “Delicious.” He said, his hand placing down the empty glass on the counter, his erection pressing against your ass. “Let’s see if you can take it.” He murmured, standing straight and tugging at your hair until you were perched on your elbows, his reflection and yours appearing in the mirror in front of you. Which reflected the mirror behind you. Which allowed you to see Taehyung’s handsome figure.

He licked his lip and tipped his head back, looking at you cockily before gripping his hard on, rubbing the soft, velvety head against your labia, spreading your wetness before he let the tip sink in.

You moaned desperately. “Oh god.” You called, closing your eyes and looking away.

He gave a sharp tug at your hair. “Look how good you take my cock.” He said, staying perfectly still until he saw your eyes open through the reflection in the mirror.

“Please.” You begged weakly.

“What?” He asked.

“Please, sir. I’d like you to wreck me, sir.” You whined, pleading for his harsh ministrations, looking at him through the mirror.

He grinned and sunk all the way in.

You screamed.

He spanked you.

You took it with a tiny hiccup.

“Does my cock feel that good?” He asked, backing out.

“Yes, sir.” You replied meekly.

He slammed in again. “This is how you like it?” He asked sadistically, beginning to drive his hips into yours with a punishing pattern.

“Yes, sir. Please.”

“You’re such a slut for this cock.” He said, gritting his teeth, the veins at his neck bulging as his tendons flexed.

“I’m your slut, sir.” You said, ready to cry for him, completely shameless.

He grinned evilly. “Just for my cock. Such a horny fuckdoll.” He teased, delivering one more spank and making you arch your back, the tip of his cock hitting the most perfect spot, “drooling for my cock. Spitting in my mouth. Riding my face.” He rammed in even more furiously, your brow furrowing as you stared at the view of his back muscles flexing as he railed you, his glutes flashing as he hammered into you recklessly. “You’re such a dirty slut. You love being spanked, don’t you?” He asked, landing a loud smack on your other asscheek.

“I do, sir. Please, sir, please please… pl— I’m— Oh, sir.”

He went even harder, his middle finger reaching your clit and rubbing it as fast as he could. “Is this what you want? To cum on this cock? You want my fingers, little fuckdoll?” He asked deviously. “You’re such a pretty nymph. Living to get fucked.”

As you tried to turn toward him and lock your eyes with his, looking for reassurance, you spotted the side mirror, offering you the whole scene as it appeared on the right side. You ended up hypnotised by the motion of his cock sliding in and out too fast for your unfocused eyes to actually capture the whole vision.

Your high crested before you even felt it grow. It overthrew you, your arms failing you, your knees bending and your thighs pressing together.

Taehyung had none of it. His hand forcefully parted your legs again before landing a hard spank on your labia.

“Stay still and take my cock.” He said, angrily keeping his hand on your clit and rubbing it faster while he made you stand straighter, your tits appearing in the mirror in front of you, bouncing as he rammed violently into you.

The high didn’t stop. It grew even more.

He felt you milk him harder and harder. “Cum again, nymph. Cum on my cock again. Make it rain and wet the fucking floor.” He said, growling at your ear. “Look at those tits. So fucking good.” He growled, just as you shook your head in complete helplessness. “I’m gonna suck them like a baby before I fall asleep.” He said, gently slapping one until his strokes became irregular and even more ruthless.

You pushed your own hips hard against him until you finally felt that uncomfortable sensation leave your womb, eyes closing, shoulders collapsing, knees shaking and wobbling until they completely gave out, Taehyung’s body following yours and saving you from the tap as your torso landed against the sink, your legs spasming and leaving the floor as you screamed Taehyung’s name, his hand strumming your clit until you went completely silent and he heard you sob and pant. “Tae.” You called, voice thin before every sensation stopped.

You awoke to Taehyung’s hand touching your face.

“Lace, darling.” He called, “____, love.” He murmured against your ear.

First you realised your legs hurt. Like you had done too much exercise. Next, you realised he wasn’t inside you still. Some part of you felt cold.

“Tae.” You said, confused.

“Oh, baby.” He said, smiling his biggest boxy smile, touching your cheek again, dragging your hair off your eyes. “Are you okay, dove?” He asked, simply looking at you.

You nodded, confused. “I think I blacked out?” You said, trying to stand straight.

He was immediately close to you holding your hand and offering you his body as your support. “You did, love.” He confirmed. “Are you okay?” He asked again, just as you felt your foot land on a wet patch on the floor.

“Did I… ?” You asked, looking at the small puddle there.

“Yeah… ” He smiled sheepishly. “I have your blanket if you’d like.” He said, hugging you to himself.

You shook your head. “Shower?” You asked.

He nodded. “Let’s go.”

He opened the glass door and switched on the soft lights there, set them to the softest tone and helped you in, holding your hand as he used the other to open the tap and test the water for the right temperature. He grabbed your hair tie near the body wash and offered it to you.

“We’ll just rinse real quick, yeah?” He said, leading you under the spray and pouring a small amount of soap in his hands, foaming in up and rubbing it against your legs, before reaching your crotch. “I’ll go easy here,” he warned before his hand skimmed your skin, making sure that you weren’t dripping his seed anymore. Once he was done there, he rinsed his hands and poured some more body wash, repeating the procedure and removing any stain of wine from your back. Satisfied, he pulled you into his arms. “I love you so much, Lace.” He murmured in your ear. “You’re safe here, love.” He reassured you, protecting you. “You are beautiful and strong and sexy.” He said, healing any wound he had caused with his dirty talking, putting you together after pulling you apart. “You are worthy of affection, and respect and love.” He said, watching as you turned and tried to clean him up yourself, his messy eye makeup dribbling down his cheeks.

Once done with the shower, he wrapped you up in his bathrobe, a bit too big for you, making you feel hugged and extra-pampered.

He patted your head with one hand as he removed what was left of his mascara and eyeshadow. And then he placed an arm around you, back hugging you as you both brushed your teeth, his body clad in a towel before he swapped it for a pair of boxers and a sleeping shirt.

“Let’s put you into this.” He said, grabbing one of his robes from his sleeping clothes and wrapping you up in it, lacing your hands with his as you both reached the kitchen.

You stayed silent as he helped you sit on the counter, standing between your legs as he reached for a bottle of water and two glasses, stretching to reach your sleeping pills. He offered you a glass and got a pill ready, passing it to you once he managed to work it open. “There you go, love.”

You nodded and downed the pill, forcing yourself to finish the large cup of water, just as he downed his own, looking at you and making sure that you drank it all.

You placed the cup down and hugged him, waiting for him to finish.

He took your hand in his again, keeping you as close to him as possible as he brought the cups to the sink and led the two of you back to the bedroom.

You climbed the bed absentmindedly as he entered the closet, coming out with a rather large tiger plushie and a fluffy blanket with a polar bear print.

Crawling close to you, he waited for you to remove the robe and slide underneath the covers. Next he threw the blanket on top of your body, making sure that it stayed close to your face. After that, he placed the plushie in your arms, tucking the blanket tight. On his bedside table, he switched on the air purifier, the gentle scent of pine filling the room.

The lights went off.

His body came closer to yours and you cuddled in absentmindedly, his limbs tightening around your shape, warming you up immediately.

“I love you, Lace.” He said, again.

“I love you too,” you replied softly before a yawn.

“My pretty dove. Beautiful dove. My angel… My fairy… My joy… My peace...” And with a litany of sweet praises whispered in your ear, you fell asleep like a baby.

[lailoken]

“In his book The Return of the Dead: the transparent veil of the pagan mind Lecouteux exposes us to older definitions of ‘body’ and ‘soul’ that are ultimately heathen in origin. He shows in detail how Christianity went about ‘de-corporealising’ the soul and making it into an immaterial thing. To our ancestors there was no such thing as an ‘immaterial’ thing. Everything had a kind of body; some of them were just denser and more easily perceived by humans than others.

Emma Wilby also touches on this when she speaks of the question posed by many witch-interrogators: ‘did you do all this in your body or in spirit?’ Although Christianity was long established in Scotland by this time, these ancient ideas seem to have lingered on up until at least the seventeenth century. Today we feel very clear about what is meant when someone says ‘body’ because we are in the habit of believing that we have only one. We also believe that whatever the ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ is, it is something that forms the natural opposite to the body and has less reality value.

If you can try to imagine that your mental universe does not have a concept of something that is ‘without substance’ then you will find it more possible to understand how the notion of ‘more than one body’ could exist. Not only were people able to send out a Double of themself, a less dense body that could travel great distances while the other body slept, but they were also able to expel an animal form from their body.

This notion of the animal form has come down to us in modern Traditional Witchcraft as the ‘fetchbeast’ or ‘familiar’. And for those who experienced the presence of one in the past, the animal was believed to be a tangible part of the body that could be expelled through the chest or the mouth of the sleeper and cause literal effects in the world, including being seen by others.

This close connection of the animal self to the person is particularly pronounced in ‘were animal’ phenomenon, where the person experiences an actual transformation of their physical body into the form of that animal. The real, though highly plastic animal form was able to impose the experience of itself over the experience of being a physical man. So that whilst a scientist would say that the man had not transformed into a beast in his body, a person at the time might have seen a ‘man-wolf.’

It is easy to see when we think about this, how the appreciation of something like a werewolf requires at least two people, or preferably a community. It requires a man who experiences his fetch-beast’s form over taking his man form, and it requires someone to perceive his beast form as altering the status and meaning of his man-form. Today we seldom have two such individuals in one space to be able to comment on these things that were understood parts of life for our predecessors.

So let us dig a little deeper to try and better understand the older way of seeing the body and soul and the Double that goes forth. In Eva Pocs book Between the Living and the Dead she describes how the ‘Double’ of a person was a believed to possess substance, a literal ‘second skin.’ As she puts it: ‘According to the documentation, the alter ego is imagined to be a physical reality. This means that it was not a soul but a second body; and while it was of a more spiritual nature, it also had physical reality.’

But not all visitations from the dead or travelling witches was a case of this ‘second skin’, there was also the notion of ‘the Shadow.’ The term ‘Shadow’ was in the past applied to the soul that lives on after death and can become detached from the body dreams or after death. Some records on witchcraft are unusually precise about what part of the spiritual complex of a person they are referring to. In one case a woman went into the room ‘and there she could not be experienced in her person, she just walked as a Shadow.’ Or: ‘Not Mrs Moricz herself, but her image walked with me as a Shadow.’

So when it is claimed that something happened ‘in the body before the eyes’ this may often refer to the second skin that was believed to be tangible. Not all dead people or all sleepers who roamed during their dreams seem to have possessed this second skin or perhaps to have known how to detach it from their other body. The Skin was often given to the witch by a spirit, such as in the case of the gift of an animal form that a witch may henceforth project her Shadow into and go forth.

The revenant (a potent type of ghost) also had this corporeality, something derived subtly from its corpse, which was deactivated if the dead body was destroyed or dismembered. As it was not unusual for the medieval and post medieval person to believe in Shadows and the real occurrence of dreamed events (more on this below) we are hitting upon a crucial point here. This ‘second skin’ that belonged to the witch, either in the form of a Double of themselves or an animal form, is one of the things that makes the difference between a witches nocturnal adventures and those of the ordinary dreamer. The ordinary dreamer goes forth in Shadow form, something that is generally invisible but may sometimes be perceived by those with The Sight, whereas the witch is able to project the Shadow into forms, as it testified to by the old term ‘dressed in forms.’

The expression ‘turnskin’ makes a lot of sense when one considers that to our forebears this meant the literal donning of another secret Skin. It also helps us to make sense of the notion of witches appearing in ‘someone else’s form’ or ‘riding’ them. We know revenants were able to use some subtle part of the corpse to send forth a second skin and that this only worked so long as the corpse remained intact. So we can deduce that all humans have such things but that only some humans have the gift of separating it out from the other body during life. We can deduce this because of the large amount of evidence to suggest that witches often stole or borrowed other people’s ‘Skins’ to get about the countryside disguised as them. This may have been simply for revenge or to implicate somebody else other than themselves but the tiring effects of being ‘hag ridden’ suggest another purpose behind this ‘skin taking.’ It is likely that sending forth the second skin requires a large power output from the witch and that, therefore, to send the Shadow out to occupy someone else’s and use their vitality instead has its advantages. To illustrate this I will present a detailed folkloric account of a witch attempting to ‘ride’ a man. The story was originally recorded in Appalachian dialect but I’ve rendered it in standard English:

‘I’m doubting if anyone can help me now. But I’m telling you this because when I die, I want you to know what killed me. Now, you know I never believed in witches but I’m afraid a witch is going to make a ghost of me. Every night of my life for the past three months, a witch has come through the keyhole [typical for a Shadow] to my bedroom. She changes me into a horse and puts a bridle on me and leads me outside. Then, she puts her witch saddle on my neck, plaits my mane into stirrups, jumps on my neck and rides as hard as she can till daylight. Then she brings me back to bed all petered out and there’s nothing I can do about it.’

This concept of being ‘hag ridden’ is in fact a form of possession, of a living person by a living person and the notion of riding the second skin allows us to explain the difference between standard dreams and ‘big dreams.’ We all know that there are some dreams that we have which seem quite insubstantial; our forebears would say that these dreams were true but that we only attended in our ‘Shadow.’ But those of us who feel called to witchcraft have often had experiences, open eyed experiences, lucid dreams or visions where we feel that we saw with, or were still in, our body. The ‘second skin’ separating from the physical skin and becoming filled with the Shadow, something that typically feels ‘very real’, can often explain these experiences of doing seemingly impossible things. It appears, given that the Shadow of a witch is attested over and over again to inhabiting the ‘Skin’ of other people, that the Shadow is the sentient part and the ‘Skin’ a kind of vessel.”

—

A Deed Without a Name:

Unearthing the Legacy of Traditional Witchcraft

by Lee Morgan

[ckneal]

So, I’ve had this idea kicking around in my head for a little while now, based on this premise: What if, due to some wire crossing that Chuck never anticipated, because he never anticipated Jack, or his powers, or that Jack might use his powers to tear open a portal to one of his cast off-worlds, allowing a scrapped draft of Michael to waltz over into the main canon universe, the OG Michael experiences some side effects? Such as, perhaps, his grace syncing up with the AU’s, causing his appearance to change for seemingly no reason, unaware that it’s corresponding with the other Michael changing vessels?

And as this is going on, Michael and Adam are at different stages in processing how they view one another. Adam’s just at the tail end of digesting the fact that he might be bisexual. Sure, there might be times when he and Michael are talking, and Michael says something, or—god forbid—laughs, and Adam feels this warm rush of affection, but that could just be something that happens when you’re part of a friendship that’s gotten this close. And, so what if he occasionally thinks about what might happen if they kissed, doesn’t everyone have that thought from time to time? That’s probably normal. And anyway, Michael looks just like him. Maybe he’s just getting vain.

But then, right in the middle of a conversation one day, Michael’s grace suddenly goes haywire. There’s this blinding flash, and Michael’s human form changes to that of the AU Michael’s apocalypse vessel. Dark hair, long coat, delicious beard, and neither of them have any idea why.

And this change is jarring for Adam. But it’s even more so for Michael, because, firstly, why did this happen? But also because, when he separated himself from Adam in the cage, for the sake of “privacy,” which Adam had made a big to-do about, Michael might have glossed over the fact that he couldn’t actually separate their minds completely. And, to a certain degree, a large part of maintaining their agreement, unbeknownst to Adam, involves Michael pretending that he doesn’t hear the odd fragment of a thought trickle over from Adam’s head. So, when Michael looks down at himself, at his hands and his new clothes, and then asks Adam what he looks like, he hears:

Holy shit—gorgeous—fucking hell—take me now. . .

“. . .Different.”

And with time moving more slowly in Hell than it does on earth, even though AU Michael only briefly wore this vessel after he crossed over, this new look sticks around for a little while for OG Michael and Adam. Which initially changes their dynamic a bit. Michael begins to wonder if he should tell Adam that his thoughts are not as infallibly private as Adam had been led to believe. However, there’s only so much entertainment in the cage, and there is something unspeakably gratifying about the fact that now, when he and Adam get into a debate, and Adam has a really solid argument going, Michael can stretch his neck like he’s trying to work out a kink, and hear Adam’s train of thought come to a screeching halt as he helplessly imagines what it would feel like to nuzzle into the expose skin. The thought generally only lasts a second or so, but inevitably costs Adam his footing the conversation every time, as it’s usually followed by Adam chastising himself for upwards of twenty minutes.

On one occasion, while discussing something called Kohlberg’s stages of morality, Michael evidently said Adam’s name in such a way that made him excuse himself to the far side of the cage, where Michael knew for a fact Adam spent the entire time scowling at the ceiling and thinking:

Creep—Stop staring at him—Not his fault he looks—sexy—gorgeous—fucking get it together. . .

Michael is aware that he has no business finding the whole situation as amusing as he does. After all, if Adam were to ever act on his errant thoughts, Michael would have to tell him that, as an angel of the Lord, entertaining any kind of relationship with a human would be utterly inappropriate. Angels simply didn’t do that sort of thing. . .

That said, a week or so later, Michael can hear Adam telling himself not to look at the dip in the V created by Michael’s new button-down shirt (it had arrived with the top two buttons undone, and Michael had refrained from altering it). Michael is getting ready to throw Adam off his game, again, when his grace flares. When the light subsides, Michael looks down at himself and sees that his human form has changed again. He looks up at Adam to ask what he looks like now, and Adam says. . .

Like an asshole.

“You look like Dean now. What happened?”

“I don’t know. . .”

Sadly, this change lasts significantly longer than the last one, and the awkward shift it causes in their dynamic is a lot less fun (for Michael). The second Michael’s face changes, Adam’s inner turmoil shifts from untoward appreciation, to a running loop of reminders that he’s looking at his brother’s face, which does not have nice eyes, and even if it did have nice eyes, the person looking out of them is a divine being with no interest in—in anything, and that the whole train of thought was sick, and redundant, and Michael didn’t mean to listen in, but he was already in the habit by this point.

Nor could Michael contradict Adam’s inner monologue, because of course Adam was right. Michael certainly wasn’t interested in—well, if anything, Michael was relieved that temptation had been taken out of Adam’s path. If Michael excused himself at one point to quietly explore the possibility of snapping himself back to the mysterious form from before, it was purely out of curiosity about the strange glitch in his powers, not for any other reason.

And, finding that, having never possessed or even seen the body in question, his attempts to revert to past vessels only brought up John Winchester’s form, Michael certainly didn’t feel disappointed. Nor did he spend the better part of an hour contemplating whether Adam’s father’s face would be an improvement over his brother’s, before remembering that he is not supposed to know or care about whether Adam is repulsed by his appearance.

Their rapport recovers, but nonetheless, they are both secretly relieved when Michael’s grace flares of its own volition once again. This time Michael is standing when the change happens, and the first thing he notices after is his height. This vessel was taller than Adam, or so it initially seemed, until Michael realized it was equipped with footwear that bolstered its natural height by a few inches. It was wearing fewer layers, and accessories securing its hair and dangling from its ears. Michael studied them with his hands.

“You look great,” Adam says before Michael has a chance to ask.

Obviously, Michael doesn’t care. By this point, Adam’s rush of lustful imaginings has become a relatively distant memory. Which made it all the more surprising when Michael was teaching Adam to speak Enochian sometime after the newest change. Michael was leaning forward, speaking slowly to show Adam precisely how he moved his lips and tongue around the syllables, but Adam’s accent was abysmal and distorted one word so badly that it threw off the entire sentence he was trying to say, and Michael briefly forgot himself to the point of actually laughing out loud—at which point, he heard the word Beautiful resonate through Adam’s mind.

Adam seemed to like this face. Words like “regal” and “stunning” crossed over from time to time, but, more significantly, Michael feels a surge of warmth come from him whenever Michael smiles—sometimes so intensely that the affection takes up residence in Adam’s eyes while they’re talking, and Michael can’t seem to look away.

After experiencing that, feeling his grace billow out of his control once again filled him with dread. Michael struggles to resist the change this time, but the flash of light comes nonetheless. Running his hands over his jaw afterward, and noting the familiar set of his legs, Michael knows before Adam says anything that he has changed into Dean Winchester again.

Adam chuckled when he saw Michael’s face. “You almost look disappointed.”

“Of course I’m not. I. . .I just wish I knew what was causing this.”

Once again, Dean’s face stays longer than it had any right to. To himself, Michael carefully thinks back over what he had been doing at the time of each change, wondering if he could possibly trigger another randomization. He had been talking each time—could it have been a key word or phrase, perhaps even a gesture or. . .thought?

Adam humors every experiment that Michael suggests, always with the same amused expression on his face. After the fourth or fifth failure, he says, gently, “You know, Dean’s face kind of suits you. Is it that bad?”

Michael retorts that this was not about vanity.

After all, Dean’s face is a reminder of their abandonment in the cage, and precisely what turn of events had led to Adam’s residency in particular. Michael would not force Adam to live with it peaceably when he should be capable of less offputting alternatives.

He’s overjoyed when the the now familiar surge of power finally courses through him again, and Adam has to bite his lip to stop his grin when Michael immediately begins running his hands over his new face. This vessel is the shortest to date; even with heels, Michael only stands as tall as Adam’s shoulder. This one also came with the most elaborate accessories. One of Michael’s new rings catches in the pins restraining his hair, necessitating the removal of both, and releasing a mane of shining red curls.

Adam helps him with the hair pins. And promptly grins when Michael’s thanks comes out in the cadence of a lilting Scottish accent.

Adam’s reaction to this one is easily the loudest since the first change. However, the words that Michael overhears run the gambit of Spitfire, Adorable, and Spritely—words that Michael is not accustomed to hearing in relation to himself, and not certain if he approves. He finally takes offense at the term pixie, and in the midst of a conversation about Purgatory, detours into a tangent about how angels and pixies are in no way similar to one another, regardless of humanity’s affinity for portraying the two specifies as humanoid beings with wings.

During this spiel, Michael fails to notice Adam raising an eyebrow at the abrupt segeway. He spends a minute, leaning against the side of the cage, half listening to Michael, while also trying to deduce how pixies came into the conversation. Then suddenly realization hits, and the fact that he is able to keep his face completely neutral is nothing short of a miracle.

Adam’s rather proud of the fact that he’s managed to get himself under control since coming to terms with his attraction toward Michael. Being around Michael after the first body swap had been difficult, and then confusing, after the second change put Michael in the shape of a blood relative, and not exactly a fondly remembered one at that. Self-control had become a matter of sanity for Adam, and, once he’d acknowledged his feelings to himself, vital for maintaining their friendship as it was. He hadn’t imagined making out with Michael against the side of the cage in ages. But now, with Michael’s tangent, with his fussing after each vessel change in mind, he had a hypothesis to test.

Michael was still talking when Adam’s fantasy hit him: Adam pushing away from the wall, three steps to close the distance between them, and then tilting Michael’s pixie-esque face upward to kiss him breathless. It was. . .very vivid. Michael could almost feel Adam’s arm slip around his waist, and the ghost-like caress of his tongue along his lips, requesting admittance. The fantasy cut short before request could be answered.

Adam bit back a grin watching Michael trip over his consonants. Even before he walked over, he could see the blush spreading out on Michael’s face. Michael doesn’t move back as Adam approaches him, coming in closer than he would normal go. Instead, Michael seems to lean into the closeness, tilting his own head back as his lips parted, eyes on Adam’s face. Adam’s tempted to run a hand along Michael’s jaw. 

Then. . .

“.. .I’m sorry, I got distracted thinking about something. Can you repeat that last part?”

“W—Yes, of course.” Michael practically flies three steps back. “As I was saying—”

“Wait, Michael. . .”

“Yes?” When Michael, flustered, finally looks at Adam again, Adam is giving him a look that normally means a joke has gone over his head—though what the joke could be is beyond him. Michael tries to listen into Adam’s mind, but all he can detect is vague confusion.

Meanwhile, Adam is not sure whether he’s being rejected, or if Michael had honestly just missed the part where Adam caught him listening in on his thoughts red handed, and maybe caught him in something else too. Judging by the look on Michael’s face though, Adam was going to have to ask the question outright. . .

“You know, I think we got off topic. Let’s take it back to Purgatory.”

. . .But he cops out.

Shortly after the pixie incident, Michael experiences the opposite of the power surge that marks the onset of a change. His grace seems to short circuit for a moment, and when the riotous flickering subsides, he’s reverted to Adam’s form. What this means, neither of them know. They carry on, neither of them saying it, but both secretly braced for the next change. Instead, the next time Michael senses an unexplainable rush of power, the cage door swings open, and the two of them sit there gaping at their freedom for an embarrassingly long amount of time before either moves to step outside.

When they do, Michael is wary. He doesn’t know of many beings that could simply open the cage, and he can’t dismiss the thought that this might be a trap of some sort. He pulls the two of them back into one being and ventures out cautiously. He knows where the doorway to earth is, and can get there as easily on foot as by wing. . .but then they happen to pass by the new queen of Hell, seemingly out on some kind of procession. Which is unusual enough for Hell, since festivities are not typically done there, but more importantly, Michael gets caught on the queen’s appearance.

“Michael? Why are we stopping?”

“That woman.”

“Yes?”

“Doesn’t she look familiar?”

“Um. . .I don’t know? Why, is she some important bible-y character?”

“First, we are not characters, Adam, but also—” Michael struggles to articulate his thoughts. He’d seen that woman in Adam’s fantasy! She was attired differently, in red and gold, with her hair arranged in waves woven through with braids, but it was her. He knew for a fact that Adam had once gazed at her in amazement that he could find anyone so unreservedly endearing while they were in a “mood,” as Adam had put it, yet now he hardly seemed to notice her. To think that Adam could be so offhanded with his affections was disconcerting.

Michael sets it aside, but the thought cycles back when he and Adam are at the diner later.

“You really didn’t recognize that redhead?”

“Jeez, Michael, did you?” Adam shoots him a look as he takes a bite of his pizza. It’s the one that usually meant there was something humorous going on that Michael didn’t see.

One thing that had slipped Michael’s mind when he bound Adam and himself back together in Hell, was that their proximity would make Adam’s thoughts significantly easier to overhear. As Adam chews, Michael distinctly hears:

Go on, say it—You’re not going to say it—Say it, I dare you. . .

“What’s with the frown?” Adam says after swallowing and wiping the corners of his mouth with his napkin.

“I’m still figuring that out.”

Adam chuckles as he picks a french fry off the plate of his first entrée. . . .Yeah, you’ll get there. . .

[caspersscareschool]

Being near Sanemi made Giyuu want to ruin him, to take some of that goodness for himself, so that Sanemi could be selfish, and Giyuu could be brave. 

Brave enough to say something dangerous, like I love you.

don't look at me

Surface Tension

Giyuu had spent so much of his life indulging in mourning. 

He used to think that to mourn was to punish himself for his selfishness. He’d blamed himself for the deaths of his sister and the boy who had called him a brother, so he’d carried the two of them on his back along with the sword at his hip. He’d occupied his meaningless time on this earth with repentance. He’d hoped the weight of his guilt would bury him in the earth. 

He’d lived here with Sanemi for months, and not much changed throughout that time. Funny how the most suicidal of them all had become the only two to survive. They’d bonded over this, fallen into a fast, unspoken rhythm, and when the time came to leave the Flower Estate, they’d built their own cabin, feeling like strangers in their own separate homes. They moved in together. Took care of each other, when necessary. And they stayed in the same routine. 

More loss made Giyuu realize that his loved ones couldn’t live with him forever and that mourning only distracted him from what he still had. After Muzan’s fall, he came to terms with this. What he couldn’t come to terms with, with the weight off his back, was the absurd lack of guilt--and the foreign feelings that had come to replace it.

It was a rare day that Giyuu woke up earlier than Sanemi, but once he got up these days, he stayed up, not liking to wallow in depression as much as he used to. Sanemi looked exhausted, so Giyuu tiptoed outside, resolving to stay there until he woke up. The sun just barely kissed their greying garden. With all the birds gone south and the frogs in hiding, silence hung thick. Giyuu sat by the pond for nearly an hour, fall chill biting his face. 

The sound of Sanemi’s footsteps, then, and the brushing of his clothes as he sat down sounded deafening in the dead silence, the same way a dim torch looked bright in the pitch black: like a lighthouse. Then, quiet overtook the pond again. Sanemi studied him. He must have noticed his pensiveness, because he tread carefully. Giyuu stared ahead.

"How are you?" Sanemi tried. 

There's something wrong with me, Giyuu thought. I'm feeling things that I shouldn't. I'm not feeling the things I should.

"Fine," he answered.

"What are you doing?"

Mourning something that hasn't died yet. Maybe that hasn’t been born.

"Enjoying the quiet."

Sanemi was more perceptive than him--maybe if Giyuu thought loud enough, Sanemi would hear. Then, they'd never have to say it out loud. They could go on like this forever, just the two of them, and Giyuu found he wouldn't mind being alone so much if it was with Sanemi. As long as they could stay like this. Usually, Giyuu spoke his mind and took what he wanted, but he knew there were invisible lines somewhere dangerously close that if he crossed, would make Sanemi leave forever. He just had to keep absolutely still.

"I'll enjoy it with you."

Giyuu felt like the two of them were sailing, swaddled in a shriveled leaf barely light enough to stay afloat on the pond. The water cradled them, but if it rained, they would grow too heavy and drown. The wind rocked them, but if it grew too strong, it would blow them away and they'd lose their ship forever. Neither moved a muscle, on opposite sides of their fragile vessel, for fear that the weight of them both might break the surface. The surface tension of silence was the only thing keeping Giyuu and Sanemi from unknown depths.

Still, he reached for his hand.

The two of them said nothing for what felt both like seconds and hours. Sanemi said nothing of Giyuu's hand finding his own, sending ripples in the water, absently rubbing the stumps where his index and middle fingers used to live. Giyuu said nothing of the naturalness of that gap: the fingers must have hurt to lose, but the space they left was the perfect size for Giyuu's thumb. It felt like home. So did Sanemi’s hand when he slotted it under Giyuu’s right stump to prop him upright sometimes, though Giyuu would never say so out loud. 

They'd both lost so much. Saying it out loud would only give them something more to lose.

Giyuu was selfish at heart.

“It’s so still, huh?” Sanemi mused. “You’d think it was frozen over.”

Giyuu hummed in reply. 

“You cold?” Sanemi asked.

“Not really,” Giyuu answered, but found his shoulders tucked under Sanemi’s haori anyway. More ripples. He froze.

It had occurred to Giyuu from the very start that Sanemi embodied everything Giyuu wished he was. A true pillar. Someone able, even eager, to protect others, even at the cost of his own life. He didn’t even have to think about it. Maybe that was why Giyuu had resented him at first: he was just like Sabito. But in the end, despite his bravery, confidence, and ineffable strength in the face of loss, Sanemi was every bit as dumb as him, and on some level, maybe that had spurred Giyuu to let a little bit of that strength possess him toward the end. He only wished it had come sooner.

“I’m gonna start on breakfast.” Sanemi ruffled his hair. He leaned towards him standing up so that his nose--and lips--brushed the top of Giyuu’s head before he tipped back to his center. “Don’t stay out too long.” 

He walked away.

Before Muzan's defeat, Giyuu had thought of Sanemi as stupid. He still thought as much. But Sanemi was brave, and selfless in a way that Giyuu never was. Giyuu had never so desperately wanted to make another person happy. Being near Sanemi made Giyuu want to ruin him, to take some of that goodness for himself, so that Sanemi could be selfish, and Giyuu could be brave. 

Brave enough to say something dangerous, like I love you.

When Giyuu slid back inside, the smell of eggs and rice welcomed him. Sanemi’s back faced the entrance, clad in that faded purple yukata, and not for the first time Giyuu wondered how he managed to spend so much of his life killing and still look so at home in a kitchen. He must have been born to provide.

Giyuu could stare at that back from the door all day, but he was tired of being selfish, so instead, he squeezed in beside him at the counter and picked up a knife. The tension between them wavered again, but he ignored it. Saying nothing, Sanemi held a bundle of chives still with one hand so that Giyuu could chop it, his attention still on the eggs he was whisking, trusting Giyuu completely not to chop his fingers off. Giyuu worked slowly in comparison to Sanemi’s confident dashing, sprinkling, and whisking; he aligned each chop with care. 

Even without the pond in front of them, Giyuu still felt that he could slip at any moment and drown. He considered going back to bed until he felt more stable. He didn't.

There wasn't much else Giyuu knew how to do in the kitchen department, but Sanemi never asked him to leave, only gently elbowing him aside when he stood in the way. Giyuu watched Sanemi season the egg and roll it, with unreal gentleness, into a lovely cylinder. 

"You wanna eat in bed?" Sanemi offered. It was a habit Giyuu had picked up over years of living alone, and Sanemi never teased him for it. In fact, it felt a little less pathetic when someone joined him.

"Sure," he said despite himself.

They only ever ate on Giyuu's futon, because Sanemi liked to keep clean and Giyuu didn't give a shit. Dim light seeped in through the walls. Plates sat in their laps. He was glad Sanemi sensed his need for quiet, because he thought that if he spoke now, something he'd regret would slip out, and there would be no going back. At the same time, Sanemi's presence at his side, and the fact that he knew Giyuu well enough to stay quiet, drove him crazy, and he might just say it anyway. Giyuu stuffed his face to keep from talking. 

Sanemi picked at his food. Giyuu forced himself to speak.

Don't be selfish, don't be selfish, don't be selfish. 

"Is…" Giyuu swallowed, restraining his thoughts. "Is something wrong?"

Sanemi blinked as if he'd forgotten Giyuu was there. "Huh? No, I…" He met his eyes, making Giyuu's breath hitch. "Actually, I should be asking you that."

"Nothing's wrong," Giyuu whispered. 

After a long moment, Sanemi averted his eyes again. Then, just as fragile as Giyuu:

"Okay."

The two were sinking. He could feel it. He tried to stuff his face some more, but he'd already cleaned his plate. He pointed to Sanemi's.

"Aren't you hungry?" 

Sanemi misread his concern, pushing the plate toward Giyuu. "Knock yourself out."

Selfish, selfish, selfish.

"No, I…"

Sanemi looked so earnest, and Giyuu realized that every time he tried to show concern like Sanemi showed for him, it turned out like this. He always twisted it around so that he was accommodating for Giyuu, like he couldn’t imagine Giyuu wanting to be around him for any reason other than to take and take and take. Infuriating; endearing. 

He thought about little Genya, and the happiness he'd wanted for his brother. Giyuu was the only one left to make that wish come true, if Sanemi would only let him. Their ship wavered dangerously. He wanted to scream. Finally, he couldn't stop himself:

"You're an idiot," Giyuu breathed.

Sanemi frowned. That hadn't come out right.

"Excuse me?"

Giyuu couldn't stop. "You're an idiot. Oh my god. You're so fucking stupid." The unmistakable urge to laugh bubbled up in Giyuu's chest, something he'd only learned to recognize over the past few months. "I can't believe this."

Giyuu laughed, clear as a bell, cutting through the tense quiet. Ripples exploded throughout the water, but the more he tried to stop them, the more the boat rocked. Sanemi had an unreadable expression, but he didn't look amused. He didn't even look angry. The closest thing Giyuu could compare it to…

Concern. Giyuu laughed harder.

"Moron," Giyuu wheezed, knocking the empty plate off his lap. "You absolute moron."

"Giyuu--"

"Sanemi." None of it mattered anymore. Giyuu was selfish, but that was okay; Sanemi was selfless to the point of stupidity, and if Giyuu didn't take what he wanted, no one would. "I want to take care of you. I care about you."

Sanemi stared dumbly. To get it through his thick skull, Giyuu moved closer, cupped his hand on Sanemi’s cheek like he always did for him, and spoke with absolute clarity:

“I love you.”

Any lingering doubt in Giyuu’s mind dispersed. Sanemi’s eyes went huge, reverent, and he stilled like if he breathed, Giyuu would turn to dust and disappear. Brave Sanemi--usually so brash, so confident. Giyuu felt a surge of pride that he could reduce him to this. He wanted to do it again. And again. And again.

"... Oh."

There was one more thing left to break.

"Sanemi," Giyuu breathed, breaking the last wall of silence, "can I kiss you?"

Sanemi didn't look away this time. He didn't even answer. He leaned in, so no barriers stood between them...

And he kissed him. And there was nothing left to mourn. And Giyuu kissed him back. And over the pounding in his ears, Giyuu couldn’t imagine ever sailing in silence again. And they kissed. And they kissed. And they kissed.

Giyuu drowned.

😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

thank you so so much again louie and aya for beta reading this!!!❤❤❤

[stusbunker]

It’s Who You Know

A Supernatural Fan-fiction

Featuring: Michael!Dean/ AngelReader!Bela, mentions of Bela/Dean, a smidge of Michael!Dean/Bela

Written for: @deanmonandnegansbitch​ for my 800 follower celebration

Word Count: 1210

Summary: After traveling across dimensions you find yourself seeking the aid of the one being you’ve been trying to stop. Is it worth the risk?

Gorgeous header done by the incomparable @there-must-be-a-lock​

Warnings: Possession, dub!con elements, fingering, face fucking, dirty talk, Michael being the supervillain. Italics are internal conversation or thoughts.

    Dean instantly tenses inside his mind. A memory of another tux and a different night flashes by as the hunter lays eyes on the upstart angel’s vessel. 

    “Well, did you?” Michael asks Dean. “Have angry sex?”

    Dean nearly growls at the intrusion, but the regret is palpable.

    “Shame, she is stunning, for a human. It’s too bad the angel inside her is beyond saving,” Michael disingenuously laments.

    The archangel finishes his drink and turns to face the pathetic coup she brought upon his evening. Her bright eyes flash in appraisal, she wasn’t expecting his new vessel. Dean wonders pointedly about the poor girl trapped inside the trigger happy angel. Michael ignores him.

    “Michael? Well, it’s good to see you haven’t lost all of yourself in your mad crusade. Still one to imbibe in luxury after all,” she greets him as if she isn’t armed to the teeth, with soldiers at every exit.

    “Well, some of us choose to accept our natural superiority and not stay in the dirt with the mongrels,” Michael doesn’t blink as he insults her.

    She inhales through her nose and shakes her head, raising her glass in a mock toast. “To life among the swells.”

    She sips her champagne as Michael scans the room, waiting for the ambush.

    “I seem to have lost my invitation, what’s this party for again?” She looks at him expectantly.

    “Does it matter? We both know why you’re here.” Michael is losing his patience.

    She sighs, before grinning mischievously. “I think you’ve got your signals crossed, Old Man. We’re not here to fight you. We’re here, I’m here seeking your aid.”

    “Is that so?” Michael doesn’t buy her suddenly soft underbelly.

    “Perhaps we can discuss the terms somewhere a bit more private?”

    “Isn’t this what you wanted? Even though you hated her, honestly, deeply despised this girl; you wanted her. You wanted to hear her sigh your name, knowing you were able to turn her into a whimpering mess?” Michael taunts Dean, who has been screaming at the archangel to stop.

     But the angel who wore the body of Michael’s version of Bela is more than willing to continue.

    Michael’s hands trail down her trim hips, reveling in the soft, fragile flesh. The supple curve of her ass is bared to him, her dress bunched at the waist. Humans were weak, but even he finds pleasure in the way her body responded to his. Michael enjoys the control and he relishes feeling Dean fall into his baser instincts; showing Dean he isn’t the righteous man he thinks he is.

    Dean is simply human and Michael is beyond his influence.

    “So what are you willing to do for me, Y/N? You suddenly need my help, which means you must be desperate. How desperate exactly?” Michael bites the last word, his breath is hot against her ear. He is completely draped over her back, pinning her to the desk. His interest prods betwixt her damp thighs.

    “We’re lost here, Michael. There’s barely any of Heaven left. Even if He does come back, we can’t survive on our own.” She whines when he steps back to spread her open; her folds dripping for him. For them, Michael thinks, reminding Dean the power his touch holds.

    “So you want me to embrace your band of traitors? Trust you among my own ranks?” Michael slips two fingers inside of her and she gasps, legs weakening by the second.

    “Yes, please!” she begs before trying to make a coherent reply. “We-weee want to make a-- amends, Michael. We are the same--- we need each other to survive.”

    Michael laughs darkly behind her, pulling his fingers out of her sodden cunt and wiping them off with his handkerchief. He grabs her by the scruff of the neck and pulls her up to look him square in his glowing eyes. “You may need me. But don’t think for a second that I need you or your pathetic followers to finish what I have started here. To find God and end him.”

    Michael’s eyes dim to a shadowed jade. He smiles, but it is mostly snarl.

    “Get on your knees and show me how much you need me.”

     Her breath catches in her throat as he steps back, waiting. Quickly, she becomes penitent before him. Michael unbuttons his jacket and moves on to his fly. Once he is revealed to her, in all of Dean’s glory, Michael sighs. “Well?”

     She crawls to his feet, her hands tentatively brace against his strong thighs and she takes his menacing tip into her hot, pink lips. She lets her vessel take over, showing her the intricacies of human pleasure while she remains on edge in the periphery. Michael groans, taking a fistful of her hair in his hand and he thrusts into her mouth.

     This is just what she needs, he thinks. Suddenly, he has to see her at her lowest, before he entertains even beginning to feign compliance. He wants to see Y/N fall once more.

      “Such a whore. I should have known you’d never meet your potential. What a waste of heavenly power,” Michael pulls her off of his throbbing cock, disgusted.

      The vessel bats her eyes and grins up at him. “Too bad she didn’t tell you the truth.”

    Michael cocks his head.“Oh, is this Bela now? How, interesting. Say, my dear, how did you get out?” Michael folds his arms over his chest, pants still askew as she stands.

    “So, you’ve heard of me?” Bela raises her eyebrows, impressed.

    “Let’s just say someone very near to me knows some version of you,” Michael humors her.

    “Well, what Y/N didn’t tell you was that she knows what God’s after,” Bela explains, letting her fingers walk up his chest. 

    Michael hums, he grabs her by the upper arms and spins her until she’s sitting on the desk. His thumbs tease her covered breasts, seemingly distracted by the sheen of her dress.

    “And why are you telling me your angel’s secrets?” Michael asks, lifting her chin up by the tip of his index finger.

    “Because, I’m here to make a deal,” Bela smiles without teeth.

    “Well, I don’t make deals without all parties present. How about I let you tangle with my vessel and I’ll negotiate with Y/N myself?” Michael offers.

    “Your guy’s still in there?” Bela asks, the first flash of emotion coats her features.

    “He’s got nowhere else to go,” Michael winks and kisses her breathless. “Now---- Can I have Y/N back, please?”

    Bela closes her eyes and shutters, the bright blue glow of grace shines through as her eyes fly open once more.

    “Michael, I don’t know how she did that! What happened?” Y/N gasps, as her hand clutches Michael’s wrist.

    “It was nothing. We were just agreeing to terms.” Michael leans in and kisses her filthy, then lays her back across the desk. He carefully gathers her dress up while pulling himself free once more.

    She whimpers as he centers himself, hooking her ankles around his waist, pulling him closer. At long last, Michael sinks into her, promising Dean he’ll have his turn next. Michael just needs to debauch Y/N first.

    Dean knows he’ll never get to Bela in time.

Prompt #5 of 8

Michael!Dean x Reader, season 14, rivals to lovers? 

I figured only another angel could really be one of Michael’s rivals, I hope you don’t mind I gave the reader a vessel.

Tagging: @flamencodiva​ @dolphincliffs​ @dontshootmespence​ @thoughtslikeaminefield​  @fangirlxwritesx67 @dawnie1988 @mrswhozeewhatsis​ @cosicas-cuquis​ @foxyjwls007 @tumbler-tidbits @defenderrosetyler​ @ericaprice2008 @princessofthefandomrealm @wingedcatninja​ @akshi8278

[lostsoulaltair]

OnS Theories (13S). Second Theory (Special Theory and Analysis) - Sika Madu and Shinoa, the journey and their relation with Yuichiro

Hello everyone, I hope everyone’s doing well! This is the 2nd theory and the last I post for the moment until a new chapter comes for the manga story; in the meantime I’ll be thinking more about it and perhaps update, but nevertheless, I’d like to thank everyone for their constant support!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vfcrC87v8A

NOTE: You might wonder why I gave the theory such title when I don’t involve ships. As I’ve stated so far, ships aren’t included in theories; the theory itself will focus on the reasons why these two characters ended up interacting or meeting along the fact that a third party mostly known as Shikama Doji, is involved with this.

Therefore, let’s begin!

Shinoa Hiragi and Yuichiro Hyakuya are well known to be the main lead protagonists of Vampire Reing Story; of course, that doesn’t mean everything resolves around them; every character is important within the story. But then, why do I state that Sika Madu and Shinoa have made a journey?

First of all, in older theories, I’ve stated that Shinoa is literally a part of Shikama Doji or a reflection, what do I mean?

Shinoa has a lot of mannerism Shikama has and that’s not because he influences her decisions, instead, it’s more that her personality was molded towards what Shikama or Sika Madu is like but with one sole difference, what kind of difference you might ask.

There’s a reason why Shinoa is the perfect vessel for Shikama Doji and this is because there’s compatibility, Shinoa was a being that lacked lively emotions,furthermore it was stated by Shikama that she herself is a part of him.

But, to give you a better idea why they are alike, there two pictures below speak about their way of speaking:

Now, you might perhaps believe the author is likely to repeat speeches but so far, those two are the only ones that have a similar way of speech whenever their dialogues appear.

Therefore, those two are two sides of the same coin.

Now, focusing more into the theory, you might wonder why I stated a journey, therefore, let’s start explaining about it.

Sika Madu’s journey and relation with Yuichiro

Sika Madu, before he revealed his true colors to Ashera Tepes, was displayed as a kind buyer, he made sure Ashera and Yu ate; but now, why do I state there was a journey and relation with Yu?

Sika Madu long ago used to use Yu as a test subject for his experiments, it can be said that the Yu from the past was made out of his real blood (The blood of the angel Michaela, the one sleeping in the coffin)  or certain composition that gave autonomy to Yuichiro which might actually explain why the Yu from Greece wasn’t very smart as for the aspect for his memories, it was due to the fact Yuichiro was killed along the fact that he was cloned when the experiments Sika Madu performed wiith persons he bought ended up in failure.

Still, what kind of journey did Sika Madu have with Yu?

Despite Sika being centered on his goals and experiments, he displayed a kind demanor, he was aware of human behavior and was quite intrigued by how Yu evolved once he was able to create young vampires; furthermore, it can be said that Sika Madu learnt more about how humans behaved, what their natural reactions were, their traits along the fact that he was aware that the vampires he sired adquired more traits than an average human.

But, within this journey, before leaving the progenitor council, he was focused on creating a new Michaela vessel, which is why the vampires that ended up being turned by him or by Yu’s blood in Ashera’s case were failures in terms to achieve becoming Michaela.

Once he found that a future vessel would give him what he required, he decided to leave the Progenitor Council and take Ashera Tepes with him for being the first vampire that wasn’t turned by him.

As for his relation with Yu, well, it can be implied that the way he saw Yu was nothing less than a test subject but was surprised by the changes Yu had within time; such surprise can be seen in chapter 74 when he calls Yu as a supposed empty vessel.

Shinoa Hiragi’s journey and relation with Yuichiro

Shinoa Hiragi was born as the youngest one in the Hiragi Family, she received the training other Hiragi received but, compared to her siblings, she was locked down from human sight except for Mahiru and Guren until the end of the world came in.

Shinoa was a person that ended up learning to grow alone, she didn’t get to experiment the warm love of a family, furthermore, when she got Shikama Doji back, she felt completed, as if the missing piece of hers came back to her.

Shikama Doji of course, told her about her desires along dreams she has deep within her heart but of course, Shinoa learnt very well how to make her heart being unreachable for demons, which is why he referred to her as the perfect vessel that could ever exist.

With the pass of time, eventually Shinoa was able to meet Yuichiro Hyakuya; it can be said that at the beginning, she saw him as another person she had to watch so said person could enter in the demon army, of course, such thing ended up in the creation of the Squad we’ve come to known within the story.

Within this, Shinoa taught Yu to be patient, to follow orders so there wouldn’t be deaths within the squad and family they ended up building with Mitsuba, Yoichi and Kimizuki; eventually, Mika and Narumi.; but, at the same time, Yu taught her the values of being a human, the meaning of treasuring those around you, the concept of a family, and furthermore, something within Shinoa grew, which is “love”.

Of course, many believe Shinoa is a lustful person because Shikama Doji in chapter 66 and 67 stated Shinoa’s lust would overcome her but, why do I imply that’s not the case?

To begin with, Shinoa within the story, started to learn what it meant to be human, furthermore, the emotions she experiments are something new for her, she doesn’t know what to think of said emotions, which is why she’s awkward whenever Yu got too close to her.

NOTE: Theories don’t involve ships.

Shinoa so far has displayed a selfless “love”. What do I mean?

She’s worried about Yu’s well being, and since he is the one that taught her the concept of a family, taught her the value of a human life along other details, she’s willing to put in practice what she’s been learning.

To certain extend, it can be said that she shows admiration towards Yu’s will and how he faces the world so he can achieve what he wishes for.Thus, it can be said that the emotion she feels so far is respect towards Yu’s will and a caring side that was eventually born within her.

Now, perhaps many might wonder where exactly is the journey between these two. The journey itself are the many adventures the squad has had, the new additions, new beginnings, losses, moments of sadness, etc. Along the fact, that both have learnt from each other to grow more 

Now, once stated these two points, there’s something Shikama and Shinoa share in common, what could it be?

Correct. Both have shared time with Yuichiro, both have viewed and learnt some things from him in a different manner; but then, does this mean Shinoa will eventually use Yu?

Of course not; despite the fact that I’ve stated Shinoa and Shikama are two faces of the same coin; there’s a huge gap between them, but what kind of gap?

First of all, Shinoa Hiragi is like the human side of Shikama Doji/Sika Madu, I mean, despite her being able to use the power she harbors or her being able to use her position as a Hiragi, she chose a different lifestyle, she didn’t focus on going through a path of ambition or keeping up with human experiments, instead, she seeks to put an end to the messed up world she and the others live in.

Furthermore, despite being possessed by the first, Shinoa’s mindset hasn’t changed, her goal is still firm along her mission, which is to ensure the squad ends up alive and survives; along the fact the end up finding a way to ensure their safety and priorities.

What do you think guys? Do you believe Shinoa might end up losing herself or not? Do you believe she has the power to actually turn the tables against the first? What are your thoughts about her or her future?

Let me know!

[adammilligan]

What do you think about the whole “chained to a comet thing” that Jimmy said about being a vessel? Do you think that Michael and Adam are like more compatible since Adams from the Winchester bloodline? Or is it like something else? Cause clearly Raphael’s first vessel got screwed and would that happen if Mike left Adam? Cas told dean it would be worse for dean. Michael and Adam are sooo fascinating! No other angel has appeared to their vessel as a specter and let them have so much control!

i think that feeling like you're being chained to a comet (or more, when compared to the archangels) is an experience universal to anyone who becomes an angel vessel, regardless of bloodlines! because, remember, jimmy novak was also of a bloodline⁠—just not one made for archangels (i.e. how castiel said that jimmy was deteriorating from the inside out when he was being possessed by lucifer)!

donnie probably got so screwed because raphael just didn't give a damn about his vessels⁠—they were only tools to him, whereas michael was saying as early as season 5 to dean: "oh, buck up. when i'm done with you, i won't leave you a drooling mess like my brothers would." and he also says that he'll leave john better than new (i think!). unlike raphael, michael always had some sort of respect for the vessels he used, even if that respect was only just taking the bare minimum of his power and using it to probably keep the human soul from feeling like it's being put through a blender because it's chained to a being that's a step down from god himself.

when concerning michael and adam, i love the idea that, in hell, adam's body adjusted⁠—as in, they spent so long down there in such stressful conditions that adam's body + soul eventually completely adapted to the feeling of michael's grace, until he felt less like being "chained to a comet" and more like it was just...normal. a thousand years is a long time for humans! adam would've probably went from feeling like he was being chained to a comet -> growing a little used to the feeling of so much power in him -> being completely fine with it because it's second nature to feel it, at this point.

do you know that feeling when you see something so many times (just sitting there in one place or something) that your eyes just naturally pass over it, because you always know and expect it to be there? i think that would be similar to what adam would feel, over time! as he grew older and older in the cage, his perspective on the world and how he experiences it was bound to change⁠—and, since hell is not a realm intended for the living, he would've had to grow used to experiencing two heavily stressful supernatural influences at once, and eventually, he did. i'd imagine the whole "second nature" thing applies to both adam AND michael, too! michael's probably extremely used to the feeling of adam's soul just being there, and he's most likely more accustomed to working adam's body, too, to the point where he'd probably genuinely be stiffer and more uncomfortable in the body of his "true" vessel if he were ever to possess him.

if michael were to leave adam, i think that it would be a very disorienting and uncomfortable experience for them, at least, at first. it's like the thing that your eyes have always passed over is suddenly gone, and suddenly the entire room's taken on a different sort of vibe because something is supposed to be there but it isn't. adam definitely wouldn't end up like donnie, because michael cares too much about him to leave him in such a state! i do think there would probably be a sort of "hole" that would metaphorically develop in both of them, though⁠—think of it like how, if someone in your life leaves, you can keep finding yourself turning around to talk to them, only to find them completely gone. michael and adam bounce ideas off of each other for everything, it seems, so that would probably happen to both of them quite a lot for the whole period of separation!

they ARE fascinating, especially when you wonder just how far that survival adaptation went when concerning the both of them⁠. let's take michael, for example⁠—we know that, in the apocalypse world, lucifer was said to "reek of hell" from all his time spent in the cage. would michael have that same sort of tinge of hell, now? obviously, he wouldn't reek of it like lucifer, since lucifer spent much, much longer down there, but he might have enough for people to be aware of the fact that he was in hell for a time. especially since michael's never had to spend any sort of long amount of time before⁠—and, to put it into science-y terms (sort of), i think the influence of external stimuli on any newer specimen hits the hardest when it's first introduced, because the specimen would be entirely unused to the stimuli and damage would be done before there's a chance to grow used to it and build up defenses. and given that lucifer's "reeking of hell" was so obvious that angels could see it, maybe it's also a physical thing? maybe a defense, of some sort? a way to harden one's self and acclimate to hell's harshness in order to be less damaged by the atmosphere?

so, using that sort of idea, adam and michael both would've probably grown to form some sort of defense against hell's atmosphere. and, in turn, they probably would've grown much more used to each other, since they were attached⁠—it isn't such a far stretch to think that they also would've evolved to better house each other, as well!

this got long, but i love talking about ideas for michael and adam's bond, in both the mental and the physical sense!!!! thank you for giving me an excuse to talk about it lmao

[kingdomheartsfaq]

KH3 Secret Reports

By completing Battle Portals 1-13 in KH3, you can obtain thirteen secret reports!  I couldn’t find a transcript of those reports online so they are listed below.

~~~SPOILERS~~~

Secret Report #1:

Recollections—

Am I alive?

I awoke in a cell, alone until the researchers came with their tests and their prodding to uncover my identity.

I had no answer to offer them.  Four friends, and a key… that is the sum total of my memory.  I could not even recall my name.  I was simply called “X” there.  My only solace was the time I spent talking with the two boys who would visit from time to time.

One day, A man came to take me from the prison.  I could not see him for the darkness, save that he wore an eyepatch.  Even now, years on, I feel no closer to understanding who or what I am.

May my heart be my guiding key.

—Unknown

Secret Report #2:

Mark of Mastery Journal—

Some days have passed since I set off on my journey to prepare for the Mark of Mastery examination.  Eraqus asked for leave to undertake the same pilgrimage, but apparently I am to be first to tour the worlds written of in the old fairy tales.

Until a few short years ago, I’d known only my own world, a spec of land surrounded by sea.  But how I’d dreamed of, reared for the World beyond… And, granted guidance from the future, I left that nest behind.  As I treaded the path to my master’s side, I came in contact with darkness in many forms.  I knew even then, as by instinct: terrifying as its power was, it could be harnessed.  Mastered.

Eraqus is a blue blood, descended from the very first masters in the age of fairy tales.  But I did not come this far to indulge in adulation.  I will be his peer.  His equal.  And to do that, I must learn to wield the power born from both darkness and light in proper balance.

—Xehanort

Secret Report #3:

Experiments of the Heart

Notes on Subject X, Excerpt 1—

Subject was found in the central square shortly after dawn.  Female, approximately fifteen years old.  After seven days’ observation, she spoke her first words, but could not provide a name.  Subject exhibits signs of profound amnesia, and displays concern about which world this is.  Her words suggest that she departed her home world with others, though she cannot recall the names of her erstwhile companions.  All efforts to explore those memories have been met with a rejection response.

After his initial experiments on me, Ansem the Wise ceased his research into the heart, his hand stayed by some fear I cannot fathom.  Yet this new subject is like me: devoid of memories.  She is the perfect sample upon which to continue my master’s work.  She, too, could benefit from it; by traversing the heart, we have a direct path into memory.  I myself have begun to reclaim my lost past thanks to these very experiments.

Who is she?  Whence has she come?  These are questions no scientist could ignore.  And the words she muttered, “May your heart be your guiding key”…

—Xehanort

Secret Report #4:

Experiments of the Heart

Notes on Subject X, Excerpt 2—

Subject’s memories have not returned, and our conversations remain less than lucid.  What fragments can be gleaned evoke a bygone world, like one out of fairy tales.  As improbable as it seems, the question may not be where she has come from, but when.  If she truly has crossed through time, the prospects of probing her heart is all the more compelling.

My pilot studies used a handful of subjects, but none possessed the fortitude to endure them.  Ultimately, all suffered mental collapse.  I knew it would be a heavy blow to lose a subject as unique as she.

Upon discovering the tests I’ve been conducting, my master demand that I cease my work immediately and destroy what research I have compiled.  Worse still, he ordered the release of my remaining subjects.  She is gone.

Where is Subject X now?  Has “wise” Master Ansem hidden her away?  Whatever the case, I will not be deterred.  I will take her place as the first subject in the grand experiment to come.

—Xehanort

Secret Report #5:

Memoirs, Excerpt 1—

That castle was a wonderland to us children.  Within its walls, Ansem the Wise conducted his research, and the fruits it bore allowed everyone outside to live in peace and happiness.  That alone was enough to stoke our interest, though not all of the rumors that escaped its walls were so benevolent.  By night, the muffled sounds of human wails emerged.  There was talk of dangerous human experimentation.  Lea and I couldn’t help but hatch a plot to steal inside and sate our curiosity.

The two who stood guard at the gates were researchers themselves, though you wouldn’t think it to see them, massive and barrel-chested as they were.  And slipping past that duo was only the first hurdle.  It proved one not easily cleared; we were found and tossed out on our ears, time and again.

On the day we finally secured our entry, we descended the long spiral stair at the heart of the castle to find a dark space below it, lined with cages.  There wasn’t light enough to see if they were inhabited, and we were in no position to call out to any occupants within.  Yet we could feel it.  A definite presence, there in the black.  Terror washed over us, and we immediately regretted coming.  But just as we turned to flee, we heard the faintest of voices.  The urge to run was nigh overpowering, but someone or something beckoned us on.

There, framed by a tenuous sliver of light, we found her.

—Saïx

Secret Report #6:

Memoirs, Excerpt 2—

It was too dim to make out her features.  We spoke to her in hushed whispers.  Who was she?  Why was she imprisoned here?  She had no answers for us.  Had no memories at all.  She was an enigma, but I knew I wanted to help her.

And so we continued our infiltrations, most of them stopped short at the castle gates.  When we did manage our way inside, we spoke with her.  That was all the comfort two children like us could offer.  But Lea had other ideas.  He was determined to free her.  We slipped into the castle that day knowing only that we wanted, with all our hearts, to save her.

But we did not find her inside on that day or the next, or any of our subsequent visits.  Had she been moved?  Had we simply imagined her?  Lea and I knew there was only one way to be certain.  And so we stand before the castle gates today, not as trespassing children but in order to become Ansem the Wise’s newest apprentices.

—Saïx

Secret Report #7:

On the Replica Program and Reanimation—

Following my erasure and my recompilation as a human, I did not awaken right away.  Perhaps the damage was exceptionally grave.  Even after waking, I remained in bed, pondering my next course of action.

In my work on the Replica Program for the Organization, I produced some twenty vessels.  Most of the early results were failures, not one of them granted a number.  The first success to emerge from that early lot was the Riku replica.  Subsequently, Xion (No. i) was essentially indistinguishable from a natural human, though she became unstable due to the influence of others.  Using those two as my foundation, I worked to construct a number of nigh-perfect replicas, but just as they neared completion, my efforts were cut short.  I suspect Xehanort aims to use both the initial lot as well as the unused replicas from my later work.

I arose today and decided to walk out to the square, my first outing in some time.  Yet my stroll was interrupted when a surprising visitor appeared with an unexpected offer.  Though younger than me, he’d risen to become Xemnas’s right hand.  I accepted his terms and became a Nobody once more—easier to gain access to the old Replica Program that way.

Whatever it takes to atone.

—Vexen

Secret Report #8:

The “Real” Organization—

Xehanort seeks to gather twelve vessels, which—together with his true, actual self—he considers the “real” Organization XIII.  Now that he has the numbers he needs, Demyx and I are being treated as reserves.

Several others who served Xemnas in the old Organization have followed the same course as mine, electing to abandon their newly restored humanity and rejoin the “real” Organization as Nobodies.  But not Xemnas.  Xemnas cannot exist in the present because there is already a Xehanort here: the old man in charge.  The old man’s humanity prevents his Heartless and Nobody, others vanquished in the past, and his younger self from being denizens of this time.

To circumvent this, Xehanort is using the prototype replicas I created in the past as containers, plucking his other selves’ hearts from the time they existed.  Xehanort ordered me to refine the prototypes, to make them closer still to the real thing.  Perfecting my creations so they my house true, flesh-and-blood humans suits my own purposes as well.  All that remains for my atonement is to devise a way to pass on as many of the vessels as I can to those who truly deserve them.  

—Vexen

Secret Report #9:

Ansem Code Conspectus, Excerpt 1—

I have pored over the data my master entrusted to Riku.  Here, I offer my preliminary conclusions.

Within Sora’s Heart are three compartmentalized “boxes,” each containing the heart of another.  One box holds Roxas.  Another holds a second heart that has been with Sora nearly as long.  The third has held its heart for much longer.  These hearts have melded with Sora’s and no longer have voices of their own.  Any attempt to mechanically extract them could prove as dire for Sora as what caused him to become a Heartless in the first place.

First, a vessel for each heart must be readied.  Then, a spark of some sort is required to induce its waking.  Obviously, the ideal solution is to restore each heart to its own body, but (whatever the case for the two unknown individuals) Roxas possesses no such thing.  The same is true for Naminé, who we believe resides in Kairi’s heart.  Still, if alternate bodies can be secured for them, all their hearts require to be awakened is that “spark”—people they cared for and who care for them, who can show them the way home.

Complete and perfect digitalization of the heart is impossible.  We can only hope to partially reconstruct it.  Thus, I see no way forward but to extract the hearts we so desperately need directly from within Sora.  Fortunately, the data stored in Twilight Town contains a near-perfect record of the memories of those who lived there—and for Roxas and Naminé especially, this is crucial.

—Ienzo

Secret Report #10:

Ansem Code Conspectus, Excerpt 2—

As for how to contain their hearts, the only conceivable option is the replicas.  If we transfer in the digital memories from the Twilight Town archive, the replicas should be able to reconstruct each individual’s human appearance with near-perfect results.  Then, their hearts need only the right spark to wake them, so they may find their way out of Sora and Kairi and into those newly made bodies.

The Replica Program was truly revolutionary, but it was incomplete at the time of the old Organization’s Dissolution.  Without Even, how are we to further the research?  We need at least three replicas: one for Roxas, one for Naminé, and one for the unknown stowaway within Sora’s heart.

These are difficult quandaries, but as I work through my master’s data, I find myself remembering the taste of ice cream.  When I was a boy, he would bring me some when we took walks together.  There will be time to regret my betrayal later.  For now, my focus must be on restoring Roxas and Naminé and proving my master had good intentions.

—Ienzo

Secret Report #11:

Observations, Excerpt 1—

I have seen it through; the Keyblade War unfolded exactly as written on the Lost Page.  Now, the Keyblade the Master enticed to me must be bequeathed to another.  Five Union leaders have been chosen from the surviving Dandelions.  I will pass the Keyblade to one of them, and then continue watching the future unfold.

Yet it seems that someone has pulled the old switcheroo.  One of the Five is an imposter, someone the Master did not choose.  They represent a virus in the program he so carefully wrote.

The virus has begun a strange undertaking: a reckless plot to allow the Five to escape into another worldlines.  Surely such a thing can’t be possible?  We’re talking about the same trick that allowed the Dandelions to transfer to other worldlines after the Keyblade War.  But these children are no Masters.  They haven’t the means… unless, of course, a certain lady of magic summoned here from the future knows more than I do.

The whole Union leader thing was supposed to be by the books.  Are these new events just another phase in the Master’s grand plan?

—Unknown

Secret Report #12:

Observations, Excerpt 2—

Even on a worldline with no Keyblade War, peace is but a dream.  In the absence of us and our Master, a “darkness” arrived—one that shall surely lead the World to yet another demise.

Amid the chaos, I bequeathed my Keyblade to one of the Union leaders, just as the Master instructed.  I watched as the Five were sent to another worldline—at no small cost—ensuring the line of Keyblade wielders will live on.  And now, Keybladeless, I must depart this land to fulfill my final task.  This means casting my own body aside and sojourning my heart in vessel after vessel—as many as it takes.

But I will continue gazing upon each passing era, one unto the next.  In time, be it years or decades, centuries or millennia, I will meet the Five once more.

Somewhere in this cyclical history of bequeathings, a chosen one will appear and reenact the Keyblade War.  

When this scapegoat arrives and takes my Keyblade in hand, that will be the time to take the stage and finish my role.

The Lost Masters will awaken.

—Unknown

Secret Report #13:

Observations, Excerpt 3—

It seems this body, this name will be my last.  The lives I have lived over the ages could fill volumes, but for now I must focus on what matters most.

The Keyblade has been successfully passed down, generation to generation, and it seems a Keyblade Master devoted to the darkness may finally arise.  Until now, I have watched over the course of events from a distance.  Perhaps the time has come to intervene.  I need only play the role of a fool desirous of the Keyblade’s power.  I will don the mask of his ally in order to keep watch over my Keyblade from close by.

The Gazing Eye: A Keyblade forged from the eye of the Master of Masters.  He passed it to me, as I have to others, and through it he can see the future—all that will ever come to pass.  Spanning the ages in body after body, life after life, my task has been to keep vigil over the Eye as it passes from hand to hand.  It has been a long time.  Longer than I can express.

But now at last the Keyblade War has begun, and Kingdom Hearts will open—a true and complete Kingdom Hearts, born of the clash between darkness and light.  I will soon be reunited with my old companions, and in that moment my long vigil will reach its end.  He will return…

—Unknown

[chaospenelope]

The Unbeaten Path

The Flowers that Grow in Darkness

Freddy took a deep breath and took off his hat to unsuccessfully slick back his fur. It seemed like every day there was a new feud that needed mediation. It didn't help that Chica's first solution to most problems was to throw someone at it.

He glanced back at Faye, who was dangling helplessly as Chica and Penny untangled his lower half. A dazed Jovi was propped against the far wall getting looked over by Billy and Philip had his arms crossed in the corner, still holding back a snicker.

He put his hat on and started to head for the elevator. The animatronic just felt really drained at the moment. He needed to get away. He paused as he reached the gallery exit. He heard a strange noise on the other side of the vent. He got on his hands and knees in an attempt to hear better.

'Is that a mouse?' It seemed to be an echo of something chewing. Unfortunately even with his optic lights he could not see the source. He moved to push himself in the opening only to remember his shoulders were too wide as they clanged against the metal. Standing up he figured getting into the control room might give him a better view. Since a lot of the floor had been opened to allow excess to all animatronics this was a bit simpler than it used to be, since the vent that connected the elevator to the control room was gutted. It was now a steep ramp leading to a makeshift door.

The sound was much louder now, the vermin was most certainly in this room. Hopefully could catch the critter before Philip sees it, kills it, Chelsea sees that, gets upset and- well, there's just so many ways it could go bad. He really didn't want to deal with that. He was careful not to make a sound as he opened the door. However, he was caught off guard by what was actually chewing.

Sitting on a table curled up and facing the wall was the original Foxy the Pirate Fox. The animatronic was hard at work and had not noticed the tall shadow that loomed over him.

"Kit? What are you doing?" He drew closer to see what his 'closest friend' was nibbling on.

The fox's ears perked up as he heard his voice. His tail even wagged as he turned to look at him. His gold tooth glinting in the light as he smiled. Freddy would have smiled back if he hadn't noticed the half bitten piece of rope tied around his wrist and a pipe connected to the wall.

"Who tied you to the wall?" He asked, concerned and restraining his anger.

"Hmmm" Kit stopped to think for a moment. "That, that wee Bonnie with the needle fingers." He wiggled his fingers as he said that.

"Plushy tied you up? Why?" He moved to free him, but Kit had already managed to break from it.

"Aye, that be the one!" He stood up and rubbed his wrist a bit. "They didn't want me ta go out alone I think. I almost got away but by Poseidon's beard are they a fast one! I've been bested, I have ta turn in me running shoes." He chuckled to himself.

Freddy showed a brief hint of amusement, but it was over shadowed by his serious grumble. "I'll have to talk with them later."

"So," He looked around to make sure no one else was listening. "Have ye thought about...The day?"

"Yeah, I haven't actually...Sorry." He looked down, dejected.

"Ey..." Kit tilted his head as he got a look at his bear's face. "Ya feelin' alright mate?" He put his good, non hook hand on his cheek. "If ye don't want to talk about it-"

"Oh, I'm fine." He rested his face against the metal palm. He gave him a reassuring smile but the fox's sharp eyes could see he was tired.

"Aye...Then, maybe ya wouldn't mind takin a walk with me?" His sad, puppy eyes were not something he could ever say no to.

"Yeah, I'd like that."

There was a loud crash coming from the breaker room. "What the D-"

"That's just Faye again. C'mon."

The elevator was currently out of order, again. A common occurrence at the moment. They'd have to take the ladder up. Freddy out of thoughtless instinct wrapped his arm around the slightly smaller animatronic and started to climb up.

"Ah," Kit didn't mind being carried of course. He did wonder, however, why exactly Freddy did this. Was he possibly reading his mind? He never actually told him he enjoyed it. Maybe he was just worried he'd get his hook caught? His tongue stuck out as he watched the busted elevator get further and further away, his tail and other limbs dangling high above it.

The wall slid open as they approached the motion sensor. He gently placed him on the old faded carpet. Parts of the floor shined like it was on fire as the last rays of the day died behind the wall of trees. Most of the house was quiet, everyone was underground except them and one other.

In the living room sat a possessed mess of stitches, the rabbit Plushtrap was humming as they sewed something. As soon as they noticed the two they jumped on their project, covering up what they could with a nearby blanket and their own body. "What are you doing up here!? What did you eat through like a rat?"

"Aye, I did!" He stated proudly.

"Plushy, you can't force Kit or anyone else to stay down there just because you didn't want him going outside. I know you mean well but it's ultimately his choice. You don't have to keep fixing him if it bothers you so much."

"Well, yeah, I guess I understand....But, That's not really why...I really didn't want him to ruin his surprise. I couldn't let him go up in the house til I was done." They said, still sprawled over the pile.

"Surprise? Be it Treasure?" The Pirate's tail lightly thudded against the ground. "Can I see it?"

"No! Not until it's done!" They bit at his hand as he started to reach for the heap of cloth.

"The next time you tell me and I'll help you."

Their eyes shifted suspiciously. "...I was gonna, but you were busy so I took care of it myself...Though I guess it didn't work out as well as I'd hoped, so you can help now and get him out of here until sunrise."

Freddy sighed. His voice stern. "Well, Since Kit isn't hurt we'll just forget it happened, but don't do it again. I don't care if you're throwing a surprise party you don't tie people up or put them in a dungeon."

"What about a broom closet?"

"Plushy!"

"Okay, okay fine! Now will you please get him out of here?"

"Aye, Let's!" He pulled himself on Freddy's shoulders, showing his fanged smile again. The bear smiled back this time. Then he let go and ran out the door. "Adventure awaits!"

"I thought we were just going on a walk." He said to himself and followed.

The ground sunk slightly under their weight. Air was crisp and a little quiet. Unseen critters scurried around them as they walked into the growing darkness.

"It's strange," Freddy paused as he looked at the natural leafy canopy above. "After all these years and attempts to escape. We just walked out here without a second thought. Just, left through the front door."

Kit nodded. He stopped so he could stay next to him, holding onto the other's paw. "There were many a days spent tryin to see the outside of the old place...You, remember the time Bonnie and I tried to pick the lock on the door?"

"Yeah, more specifically the part where Chica wanted to throw an arcade cabinet through the glass, while you two were still standing there."

"Well can't blame her enthusiasm. We'd been promised so many times."

"Yeah...Henry never was good at keeping promises." He muttered. "Not for our sake."

"Charlie was. She always came after school ta say hi, even after her friends took up most of her time." They started walking again, Kit looking in every direction noise seemed to permeate from.

Freddy resisted the urge to scoff. They didn't deserve the term 'friends' not after what they helped accomplish. "Charlie was such a great sister. She taught us how to draw, gave us the prizes she won to keep it safe for her, and sang with us."

The pirate chuckled. "Aye, At first ye started storin them in yer torso and the sticky hand clogged yer innards. It took hours to get out. We thought you were a goner. If we could cry back them we would've."

"Yeah, poor Charlie took the blame...You guys really thought a sticky splat hand was going to kill me?"

"It was the first time any of us broke down." He explained with a shrug. "It was worse because it was you. Being you were the voice of reason. Remember how much of a mess we were then?"

"It's hard to believe were the same people but I do. We used to talk about what we'd do when the restaurant was closed. We were going to get jobs and get an apartment until we had enough money to travel the world." He gave a wanting sigh, kicking at the weed that grew in the middle of the path defiantly. "I knew we couldn't do that as we are even back then but I had this secret fantasy that Henry would make us human bodies."

"Hmmm. What did ye think we'd look like?" The fox rested his hook on his chin as he thought ears twitching. "Ye think I'd be a handsome human? Fast with strong muscles and a skull Tatoo on me back."

"To me you would be handsome." He smirked. He closed his eyes as his fox poked his nose emitting the small squeak.

"You'd say that even if I was a scrawny land lubber weenie, wouldn't ye?"

"Mmm. Yes, cuz no matter how much spinach you eat you're still my Kitty."

He huffed in faux annoyance. "Yea, and you'll be me Snuggly Care Bear."

The larger animatronic nodded, feeling a little jolt of electricity as he heard that old pet name. It's been so many years since he called him that. Of course they were out of commission for a good half of those years but he felt it in his phantom heart, his wired vessels, his steel bones. Hearing it seemed to erase those eroding years.

As they continued walking the fox finally noticed something odd to him. He had been looking around trying to figure out what it was and it suddenly hit him. "Wonder what happened to the flowers?" Kit asked as he eyed a once flourishing wild flower patch. "I swear on me Mum there were millions around here."

"It is getting cooler. Maybe they wilted last night?" The brown robot smirked. "Wait, 'Mum'? Kitty is your Captain Morgan returning to us?"

"Errr, No. It slips in sometimes...Not me fault." He pretended to pout until his boyfriend gave him a playful smooch.

"I know, It's the old program still trying to kick in." He then patted him gently. "We really need Lolbit to check that out Kitty."

"I'm fine really, it isn't affectin me movements like it used to." He stopped and let go of his paw. "They did a great a job ye see?" He ran in place for a bit and stood perfectly still. "No twitchin or lockin up!"

His spectator leaned against the tree with crossed arms. "It doesn't mean it won't return. It's basically a virus, remember?"

"Freddy. I'm fine." He insisted sternly. "I'd know."

The bear didn't say anything. He sighed and shook his head.

"I, know yer worried about me, but ya don't have to! I'm not some scared urchin quaken in me boots anymore." He walked up to his boyfriend and put his arms around him.

"I just don't want to lose you again Kit..." He said softly. Voice strained with the memory of his loved one's broken, torn parts twitching and convulsing. Jaws snapping and hook swinging uncontrollably. He could still hear the screeching. Not being able to take his eyes off him, stopping mid performance. Unable to run to him.

"Ye ain't gonna loose me, if sledge hammers, wrenches, or sticky hands aren't strong enough to tear us apart nothin will." Foxy rubbed the bear's back. The body quivered a little. He could feel arms around him, returning the embrace. Wet substance dripped on his shoulder as they held each other tightly. He cried too, remembering that horrible day. The day he was the last to fall. His friends bodies beaten, scattered, and unmoving. A beautiful blue eye staring up at him seemingly asking 'why weren't you fast enough?' When the phantom tears dried they started walking, hand in hand. They were reaching the end of the path.

The lake water reflected their optic lights as they walked past the cover of trees. There was silence as Kit collected what he deemed good skipping rocks. "I wonder what the perfect day would be? Flowers bloomin everywhere? Can't have one without them, right?" The first two splashed right in as he got a good position. The third skirted along the water twice before giving up. "Hm?" He raised a perplexed brow. "Flowers?" "Ye know, Our super special day?" He glanced at him, making a motion like he was holding up an invisible dress skirt, humming a familiar tune. "Oh!...Oh, the Wed- I don't know." "If ye change your mind it won't hurt me. I'm a big pirate I can handle it." He said coyly, the fourth rock he threw actually skipped five times. "No, It was my idea. I want to, as soon as possible. We should tell everyone before that though. That sort of thing needs help planning, right?" "Not if you don't want to." The thinner animatronic threw another rock that made a few more skips before plunging to the depths with a 'plap'. "We can just do it in secret if it'll make ye feel better." "Well, I want this..." He looked into Kit's eyes, his lifted eyepatch showing his full attention. Freddy held his hand and hook in his own grasp as he continued. "I want this to symbolize our next step in...Life and what we survived. We're alive, together, and..." He looked away, contemplating the full implication of the word. "Free." Eyes focused back as he continued. "I want to involve them because they are a part of our bond too. Rosie, Chica and Bonnie who have been with us since the beginning and helped us through that awkward pining phase, the Rockys who had the strange inclination to gather us in a pile, which helped Penny and Faye find us all in the fire, Shiva who we couldn't find Rosie without, and the Nightmares who rebuilt us so we could all be together again. If just one of them weren't in our lives, we wouldn't be having this conversation. The Toys may not be here in person but, I'd like to think they'd be happy too. Teddy still making sure to keep the whole event child friendly and covering  BB's eyes when we kiss." "Aye..." He nodded with a laugh. Then his ears suddenly drooped as he asked. "Ye, ye think, Henry would be happy?" 'The old Henry would...' Freddy thought bitterly. He pushed it away with a warm smile. "Yea, he and Charlie would definitely be there with everyone." He let go and sat at the base of the large oak. "It'll be a great way to start our new chapter." "We should tell 'em today then! Start it as soon as today!" Tail kicked up a few leaves as it waved with excitement. "What are wee afraid of? Are they gonna think we're silly? Chica reads to her cupcake that's silly!" He plopped down next to his boyfriend. "Ha, I guess you're right." He pulled him closer, kissed him making his nose squeak. They snuggled together for a while. They stayed that way for some time even watching as the sky brightened with the glory of sunrise. Until the blue eyed machine spoke. "We'll tell them when we get back." "Should do that now, eh? Wouldn't want any morning hikers catching a glimpse of the likes of us." "Yeah, we better." He sighed. "And I was just getting comfortable too." He stood up and held a hand out to help his secret fiancé up. The door opened and petals danced along the breeze that flowed. Not a single soul in sight. "Oh no! I'm gone for a whole night and they go and preform some weird ritual sacrifice!" "We best be following it then. So we can get it over with and clean up what's left." Rows of carefully placed flowers lined up to form a path to the back bedroom and elevator shaft. They were tied to the ladder that led to the second floor, Lolbit's place. It was eerily dark as they climbed into the large room. "I think ye be right Freddy they gone and-" "Surprise!!!" Everyone jumped up wearing partial suits or formal dresses. Behind them two rows of random chairs lined up as nicely as possible leading to Lolbit's center screen. Their digital image was decorated with marrying pixel attire. Bonnie stood to the side with Jovi as they played a soft riff of the bridal march. The table in front of them were carefully placed white suit, tie, and top hat. Next to that was a lovingly stitched pirate Captain's coat. "Who's idea was this? How did you know?" Freddy asked in amazement. Faye shrunk a little as everyone's attention turned to him. Wires and eyeballs spilled out of the suit's arms and bottom. A nicely dressed spaghetti monster. "I-I heard you talking the other day and I thought, I thought it would be nice if we d-d-did it all for you. Got myself tangled-t-tangled on purpose. Made sure you'd hear K-Kit in the vents. Plushy was supposed-posed to lead you out in the woods to find Billy's kids but you left before they were all ready. Luck-Luckily it worked out anyway. Hee hee!" "That's, I don't know what to say..." Freddy looked at all the flowers laced together in a beautiful aisle and along the hanging wires. He felt phantom tears welling up in his eyes. "Aye, it sure is a sight." "I didn't exactly approve of the secret." Shiva admitted. He too was dressed in somewhat formal wear, suit coat over his vest. The sleeves were still almost touching the ground. "I felt like the date should have been your choice but I suppose they took it as me wanting to, 'tell' on them so Plushy locked me in a broom closet." "Dang it Plushy!" "What? I wasn't gonna let him ruin the surprise Faye worked so hard on!" Bonnie looked up as he realized something. "Oh, that's why you weren't around to help put up decorations. I thought you started protesting because FredBear had to start stealing all the flowers from that annoying lady's yard." "Borrowed." The yellowish Nightmare bear corrected softly. "Right..." "We made rings and everything!" Rosemarie stated cheerfully pointing at the Nightmare chicken that held the old couch pillow that had two metal circles resting on it. "I made them from that nonfunctional Toy bear's pinkie." "Chelsea. Don't tell them that." Billy half whispered, half grumbled. His suit already had little cuts from where his children held on, one popping their head up from his neckline to look out. "Oh, sorry." "Uh, um." Faye was a bit fidgety trying to judge their expressions. "H-Hope you l-ike it. I know you probab-bly want-wanted to do it your-sself and I'm-m sorry we got a little carried away..." "It's perfect Faye, thank you. The fact that you all did this together, for us-" Freddy looked over to Kit. They smiled at each other as they held hands. "-Means more than you can ever imagine."

[ask-blueeyedpops]

Character INFO

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This page will give you a brief introduction to all the characters in the AU so far. It should hopefully give you a good, quick look into the character’s personality, interests and bios. More characters will be added as the story progresses.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Jack Shurley

Species: Human (Hunter)

Personality: Jack is an innocent teenager who’s very trusting (a bit too much at times; which gets him in trouble during hunts.) He wants the best for everybody and is a very determined and hard worker.

Likes/Dislikes: Jack likes classic rock but like his dad, also likes ABBA. His favourite song is “Unopened Windows” by Set It Off.

Bio: After his mother died, Cas had raised Jack on the road. His dad constantly tried to give him a normal life – school, friends, prom – but Jack refused to accept it. He’d seen what his dad could do and wanted to help; he wanted to make sure no one else had to grow up like he did, and so Cas (reluctantly) taught Jack how to hunt. As a result, Jack has little to no friends and his dating life is nonexistent.

Castiel Shurley (Cas)

Species: Human (Hunter)

Personality: Castiel can be overly-protective but he’s also a really selfless person. At first, he can be blunt and presents a cold exterior but in reality he has a big heart and tends to think about others more than himself.

Likes/Dislikes: Cas is a bit attached to his Chevrolet Impala, but he also likes cats, board games, Twister, the band ABBA and burgers.

Bio: Cas’ dad had left him at a young age. His eldest brothers (with the exception of Gabriel) raised both him and his brother Balthazar to be hunters so that they could all search for their dad together. As Cas grew older he became tired of the hunting life and later abandoned it all together to settle down with the love of his life and his wife; Kelly Kline. Cas’ elder brothers resented him for his choice, whereas Balthazar still remained loyal and supported his younger brother. Gabriel remained neutral on the subject; the two of them are on okay terms but they didn’t contact each other much after that. Some time after giving birth to Jack, Kelly suffered a horrible death, leaving Cas to raised Jack alone.

Raphael Shurley (Ralph/Ralfe)

Species: Human (Hunter)

Personality: Ralph is creative and can be competitive, but he is also quite shy when you first meet him.. He has a vivid imagination and is very skilful at coming up with plans and solutions to problems. Ralph can be emotionally distant at times and like his brothers, won’t talk about his feelings.

Likes/Dislikes: Ralph loves any sort of art medium; he loves to express his thoughts and emotions through his art. Ralph prefers doodling when he’s emotional because it’s the quickest way to get his feelings out and he doesn’t have to bottle them up like most of his brothers do.

Bio: Ralph was loyal to his father and loved him unconditionally. But once his father went missing, he was upset, and became more emotionally distant from everyone, deciding to side with Michael and Luci. He tagged along to help his 2 older brothers search, but eventually lost hope and accepted that he most likely won’t see his father again. He still continues to help them with, what he thinks, is their “pointless quest to find dad”. Ralph is the strategist in the group; he comes up with ideas/plans to find their dad despite having lost hope. In his spare time, when he’s not busy looking for their dad, he likes to put his skills in art to use and paints.

Dean (Squirrel)

Species: Angel (Fallen)

Personality: Dean’s emotions are all over the place due to his lack of experience with handling them. Nevertheless he’s pretty hopeful and can be very faithful towards the people he holds dearest to his heart.

Likes/Dislikes: There aren’t a lot of things that Dean likes but he did have a strong attachment to his wings. Cas’ impala later catches his eye too, but nobody’s noticed that yet… at least he doesn’t think so.

Bio: Angels are normally assigned humans to watch over - people to guide and protect. Usually angels are given troubled souls to steer back onto the right path and every angel is assigned a human to watch over (with the exception of Archangels). If an angel were to fail their duty as a guardian, they'd be punished severely by being stripped of their grace and being reborn as a human. Angels lack free will and are bound to their duties. Sam and Dean found it hard to accept this hard fact and wanted free will like humans did - to be able to make their own choices. They rebelled against heaven and fell down to Earth, with Dean possessing a vessel called Jensen Winchester and Sam possessing his brother, Jared Winchester. The two of them had disposed of the guardian angels watching over Jensen and Jared prior to their possession and later went on to change their names for safety. Their current aliases are ‘Dean’ and ‘Sam’. Their real identities are unknown.

Gabriel Shurley (Gabe)

Species: Human (Hunter)

Personality: Gabriel is reserved and lonely, he’s very reluctant to talk about his feelings. Despite this, he can be quite humorous once you get to know him and he enjoys a good prank.

Likes/Dislikes: Gabriel has a big sweet tooth and loves any type of sweets or pastries. He also enjoys watching meme/vine compilations in his spare time.

Bio: Once his dad had left them, Gabriel watched his family fall apart as his brothers turned against each other. Unlike his siblings, Gabriel refused to take a side and stood in the middle during the conflict. He doesn't side with Mike (like Luci and Ralph/Ralfe did) and he doesn't side with Cas (like Balthazar did). It's because of this reason that Gabriel remained neutral when he discovered that Cas didn't want to hunt anymore after he’d married Kelly. Due to his broken family, Gabriel had a very lonely childhood and thus grew up to be reserved and closed off from everyone. He usually hunts alone and fills his time by taking jobs.

Sam (Moose)

Species: Angel (Fallen)

Personality: Sam can be oblivious, especially to passionate or strong emotions, and this is mainly due to his lack of experience with those types of feelings. He’s smart and strategic, the thinks logically but he’s also sympathetic and soft. Sam has a heart that’s as good as gold and, in contrast to his brother, empathises easily with humans.

Likes/Dislikes: Sam loves books. Literature is one of his most favourite things that has been created by humanity – he marvels at all the creative stories and logical explanations that’s been created by human minds. For some odd reason, Sam loves WiFi and WiFi loves him back too because it seems to follow him everywhere. Sam’s also grown attached to one of Cas’ older brothers; Gabriel.

Bio: (Sam’s bio is the same as Dean’s.”)

Michael Shurley (Mike)

Species: Human (Hunter)

Personality: Mike is an honest and passionate man. He’s decisive and is usually the one to take charge in most situations. Out of all the brothers, he’s the most responsible.

Likes/Dislikes: Although Mike is responsible and usually takes charge, he hates the pressure and stress that comes with making all the decisions and making sure his brothers are safe and sound. Mike loves suits, he finds them attractive and sees a certain charm in them.

Bio: Mike is the oldest amongst the siblings and idolised his father greatly - despite his many mistakes. While he wasn't Chuck's favourite like Luci was, he still adored his father and was devastated when Chuck left them. He was very young and was forced to become a father, mother, and brother to his siblings. Although it's been years since Chuck disappeared, Mike is still hopeful and determined to track him down and bring him home to his family.

Kelly Shurley (deceased)

Species: Human

Personality: Kelly was a sweet and selfless woman. She was very caring and hopeful. She had a positive outlook in life and was always full of energy. She could be reckless and impulsive at times; she would often think with her heart rather than her mind and she could be very empathetic.

Likes/Dislikes: Kelly loved to play the piano, she wasn’t amazing at it but it brought her a lot of joy. She loved her husband and son a lot and would’ve done anything to protect them. Kelly hated assembling furniture though, it took so much effort and she’d end up frustrated and fed up.

Bio: Kelly was a hunter and was introduced to the hunting life at an early age by her parents. She was working a case when she ran into Castiel, and the two eventually clicked and grew closer as friends. Continuing to run jobs, she would often call Cas for help and vice versa until they became hunting partners; and later on, they would fall for each other and get married. Cas slowly stopped taking jobs, but Kelly still worked them like usual until she found out she was pregnant with Jack. It was after that that she finally abandoned the hunting life for her child's sake, and both Cas and her lived a relatively normal life from then on.

Lucifer Shurley (Luci)

Species: Human (Hunter)

Personality: Luci is narcissistic but also bottles up a lot of his feelings. He’s the most emotional one out of the Shurley brothers but refuses to talk about his feelings; he hides them behind sarcastic remarks and his some-what twisted humour.

Likes/Dislikes: Due to his narcissistic nature, It’s no surprise that Luci loves to be praised and given attention. He also adores his Gucci flip flops.

Bio: Luci is the second oldest out of all the siblings and was Chuck's favourite amongst them. He was praised and doted as a child, which expanded his ego to the size of Jupiter. Beneath his pride and sarcastic remarks, Luci still loves Chuck a lot, despite all the doubts he may have surrounding his father and whether or not they'll ever find him. Luci deals with the gritty and bloody things that they have to do to find their dad. While he, Mike, and Ralph/Ralfe were working a job, Luci stole some Gucci flip flops, and now he wears them everywhere. Some say they've become a part of his feet, because he almost never takes them off.

Balthazar Shurley

Species: Human (Hunter)

Personality: Balthazar is sarcastic and humorous. He’s very open and flamboyant but also caring. Balthazar idolises his little brother, Castiel, for stepping up against their older brothers and for choosing his own path. Balthazar cares for Cas a lot and is willing to help him out any way he can, but he often disregards his own health and well-being because of this.

Likes/Dislikes: Balthazar loves partying and dancing; he absolutely rocks the dance floor and enjoys going out and having fun. He loves having freedom and hates it when someone tries to restrict him.

Bio: As well as being the second youngest, Balthazar is also the most open out of all the brothers - he’s the most likely to talk about his feelings. Balthazar was too young to remember anything about Chuck and only grew up in the hunting life because of his brothers. As he grew older, he became neutral on the subject of their missing father. Of course, he’s still somewhat upset because of his father’s disappearance but doesn’t express or feel as hurt about it as his other brothers do. Throughout his life, Balthazar has always admired Castiel for his rebellious nature. Balthazar’s admiration only grew after Cas stood up to their brothers when they confronted him about his decision to drop out of the family business. Currently, Balthazar seems to idolise Cas and is willing to do anything to help his brother and take care of his well-being.

[randomfandomimagine]

The Only Exception (Castiel x Reader)

Character: Castiel

Fandom: Supernatural

Categories: Reader Insert, GenderNeutral!Reader, Demon!Reader, Soulmate AU

Title: The Only Exception

  Requested by anon:

Can you do an imagine for Castiel from SPN for a Soulmate!Au where the first words they speak to each other is written on their wrist? So reader is a demon who is extremely well-known by both angels and demons as the most fearsome demon. But when Cas meets them, reader is actually somehow a pretty sweet demon who has no control over their fire power and just sets everything on fire by accident? Cas and reader meet and reader accidentally sets his coat on fire the moment they meet?

  A/N: Since the requester didn’t specify a gender for the reader, I’m using gender neutral pronouns. Anyway, hope you all enjoy! ;)

Castiel looked down to his wrist and tilted his head to the side, trying to figure out what that new marking was. It had to be something that only happened to humans, because he had never heard of anything similar happening to angels.

Concerned, the angel turned to his friends in the hopes that, with their human experience, they knew something about his sudden condition. As soon as he approached them, Dean nodded his head at him as a greeting.

“Dean” Said Castiel with his deep voice. “I have a problem”

“What is it, Cas?” The aforesaid replied, feeling how his brother Sam watched the scene in silence.

“I have this… mark” Slowly, the angel rolled up the sleeve of his brown trench coat to reveal his wrist, almost scared to upset the skin even further. “It appeared suddenly, and I don’t know what it is”

Dean’s brows furrowed in concern as he carefully examined the words etched on Castiel’s wrist, but soon enough he relaxed at the sight of it upon a closer examination. In fact, and much to his angelical friend’s dismay, Dean chuckled.

“What is it?” Sam curiously asked, standing up and getting closer to them.

“It seems like Cas here has a soulmate” There was a subtle hint of playfulness in Dean’s voice.

“Really?” His brother laughed too, all the more amused at the angel’s puzzled expression. “Wow”

Not many times had Castiel come across that term, but he definitely was vaguely familiar with it even if he didn’t quite understand the concept yet. However, he observed the brothers in confusion as he tried to understand what was so funny about it.

“What does that mean?” Castiel insisted, seeing as they were so amused.

“It means that someone out there is destined to be your true love” Sam explained with a big grin plastered on his lips.

Castiel’s blue eyes fell over Dean, who smirked and nodded to confirm Sam’s words.

“So is this marking harmless? Am I alright?” The angel asked to make sure.

“Yeah, you’re fine” Dean patted his back. “Those are the first words they’ll say to you”

While Sam and Dean left him alone to his own thoughts, also laughing and gossiping amongst them, Castiel stared at the words written on his wrist. He tilted his head to the side again and squinted his eyes, trying to imagine the scenario in which they could be said.

The words were ‘how ironic’.

*

After a month passed, Castiel had nearly forgotten about the words etched on his wrist. They had just become another mark on his body, like the mole’s on his vessel’s skin. Surely, he still had questions, such as… Was that alleged soulmate meant for Castiel or for Jimmy, the vessel? Either way, was his soulmate another angel or perhaps a human? What could be their story? How did those words come to be the first one they ever spoke to him? Naturally, he had no answers for any of those questions. So he tried to forget about the whole situation altogether.

Another case, another hunt. This time, Sam and Dean were having difficulties finding the source of the problem. They called Castiel, who gladly met with them even if he came to the conclusion that he couldn’t really help. It was no angels business. In fact, it looked like something having to do with demons, but not ordinary demons, but powerful demons such as Knights or Princes of Hell.

When Castiel told this to his friends, they both seemed unenthused by the idea.

“Great” Dean said sarcastically, taking out his phone from his pocket. “Guess who we have to call now…”

“Crowley…” Sam replied in the same resigned and exasperated voice.

“I’m afraid it’s the only way” Castiel sighed. “This is bigger than us”

“Are you kidding me? A freaking Knight of Hell?”

“Or a Prince of Hell”

“That isn’t helping”

“Hey, Crowley” Dean immediately said as soon as the King picked up, walking away to be away from the noise. “Got a question for you”

“What do you think, Cas?” Sam asked the angel, seemingly concerned. “Can we take this demon?”

“I would hope so” Castiel frowned. “Otherwise it would be like Abaddon all over again”

“Got it” Dean was back and saving his phone. “We got a lead”

“Well?” Sam asked him, hopeful.

“It might be a Prince of Hell, but Crowley told me about someone who can help us find them”

“Who?”

“Another demon, Y/N”

“Y/N?” Just like Ruby or Meg, Y/N was a well-known name.

“You know that Y/N?” Dean was surprised, since he hadn’t really heard it.

“Yes” Castiel nodded solemnly. “Y/N is a powerful demon”

“You say it like you know them” Sam commented, watching the angel’s absent expression.

“I don’t” Castiel looked at the taller man. “But I have heard about them, it’s a fearsome demon. Hopefully they will help us”

“Fan-freaking-tastic” Dean rolled his eyes as they all walked back to the Impala. “Just what we needed, begging to a demon”

Castiel followed in silence, being overcome by an unknown sensation. Knowing they were to summon Y/N and meet them… It made him… nervous. He knew as soon as he heard the name, but they had no other choice. So the angel tried to wrap his head around the situation and resign himself to do what had to be done.

*

The three friends exchanged restless glances as Dean dared to light the candle, finishing the summoning spell. Then they waited impatiently, expecting to see the demon appear at any second.

Soon enough, a figure appeared before their very eyes, materializing from thin air. Dressed in all black and with an attitude, Y/N cocked a hip to the side and gave them an annoyed look.

“Well” Y/N’s eyes fell over the pentagram drawn in the ground. “If it isn’t the Winchesters and the angel Castiel”

Sam loudly gulped at the realization that Y/N already knew who they were, and it looked like they had been waiting for the trio to summon them. Dean subtly reached out for his knife, ready to step in even if the demon was trapped in the pentagram.

Castiel wanted to pipe up, overwhelmed by the silence. And also because Y/N staring at him was making him uncomfortable. But he found that he was speechless.

“Do you know why we summoned you?” Sam asked instead.

“You’re clueless and need my help” Y/N shrugged coolly.

“So you gonna help us?” Dean asked, still wary.

“No” Y/N replied coldly, without thinking twice. “Not unless you let me out of this stupid cage”

“Why would we do that?” Sam let out a sarcastic chuckle.

“Um… because you need me?” Y/N huffed in outrage. “If not, I can just be on my way”

Seeing as none of the three reacted, the demon raised an eyebrow and lifted a hand, ready to snap their fingers. A smirk grew across Y/N’s face when Sam, Dean and Castiel jumped in anticipation.

“That’s what I thought” Rolling their eyes, Y/N reached out to take out a small blade from their pocket. “Here, in case I step over the line”

Seeing as none of them dared to walk closer, thinking it might be a trap, the demon rolled their eyes again and tossed the blade away from reach until it landed on the floor with a metallic sound.

“Good demon” Muttered Dean, genuinely impressed with that random act of kindness.

“Will you let me out now?”

“We don’t feel too inclined to do it, no”

“What’s the worst that could happen? I gave you my weapons, and I can’t possess you because of your stupid tattoos”

The three of them exchanged restless glances one more, uncomfortable with the amount of information Y/N knew about them. To the Winchester brothers’ surprise, Castiel stepped up.

The angel picked up the small knife that Y/N had surrendered and used it to scratch the paint to break the pentagram and hence the circle that imprisoned the demon.

“Cas!” Dean complained, taken aback by his actions.

The angel couldn’t defend them himself, but there was something that moved him to do it. An impulse, an instinct. Something told him they could trust Y/N, that the demon truly meant no harm.

“I come in peace, people” Y/N jokingly held their hands up.

Sam took a step back, moving his hands to the waist of his jeans where he kept his gun. It wouldn’t kill the demon, but it would slow it down.

Y/N stepped out of the broken circle and immediately the brothers took out their weapons, Dean carrying his demon killing knife and Sam his gun. It only made the demon smirk in amusement.

Y/N patted Castiel’s shoulder passing by and something unexpected happened. The both of them gasped.

“Hey!” Dean shouted, protective of his angelical friend. “What did you do to Cas?!”

“Nothing!” Both Castiel and Y/N said at the unison, albeit in different tones. The demon in defense and smugness and the angel to comfort them.

Yet they both had felt it, a strange and intense sensation that shook them to the core. Something important, something more than a physical reaction, almost like their souls had shuddered.

Castiel, fearing that his hypothesis was correct, remained silent. But he knew. And so did Y/N, who grinned as while staring at him, finally dedicating him the first words.

“How ironic…” Y/N said, still smugly and amused.

Castiel had played out that scene a thousand times in his mind. He had heard those words being spoken in his head a thousand more, yet he never expected that. He thought his soulmate would speak those words in awe, in excitement and surprise and thrill. Not smugly and nearly with mockery. Not to mention that he would have never thought his soulmate would be a demon.

“No” Was all he could muster, unable to accept the situation. “It can’t be”

“I think yes” To demonstrate it was true, that there was no mistake, Y/N rolled up the sleeve to reveal the words written in their wrist: ‘no, it can’t be’.

“What’s happening?” Dean mumbled behind them.

“Is Y/N Cas’s…?” Sam uttered, watching the scene in shock.

“I was wondering why my soulmate would say ‘no’ when first seeing me” Y/N rolled down the sleeve and sighed. “Thanks for the vote of confidence, handsome”

“If you hurt Cas…” Dean was quick to step in to defend his friend.

“I won’t!” The demon exclaimed, offended. “Why would I hurt my soulmate?!”

“I don’t trust you” He insisted, watching the demon up and down.

“Okay, take this as a sign of good behavior” Y/N pulled yet another knife out of their pocket and gave it to Dean.

“You lied to us!” The aforementioned exclaimed, abruptly taking it.

“Hey, in my defense I wasn’t planning on using it” Y/N walked away from Dean, eyeing him and his brother, and positioned themselves next to Castiel. “Calm down, big boy, if I wanted to hurt you, I would’ve already”

“A nice demon?” Castiel muttered, carefully watching Y/N with his piercing blue eyes. “You must be the only exception”

“Maybe I got tired of being bad and wanted to try being good for a change” The demon shrugged innocently.

“Yeah, right” Sam huffed behind them.

“Although it isn’t as easy as I thought, it doesn’t always work out…” The demon sent Castiel an innocent glance, flustering him slightly.

Dean rolled his eyes and decided to intervene to put an end to that.

“Okay, enough flirting, will you help us or not?”

“As long as you let me get to know my soulmate better”

All glances fell over the angel as he uncomfortably stood there. He unequivocally felt that connection to his soulmate, the desire to stay close too. Nonetheless, his soulmate was a demon and he didn’t quite trust demons. Even if Y/N did seem like a surprisingly nice one despite the sarcasm and smugness.

When Y/N got closer to Castiel and hugged him out of the blue to reinforce those words, the angel tensed up. Yet the feeling was incredibly grounded and human as an internal warm sense of happiness spread across his vessel and shook him to the core once more, in the best way possible.

The warmth only increased, and he was starting to think that Sam and Dean would feel it too since it was so intense. It was starting to spread to the outside too. To his surprise, the brothers yelped and when he looked down, Castiel realized that external warmth was actually fire.

“Crap, sorry!” Y/N had broken the hug and extinguished the flames. “Didn’t mean to do that…”

“A clumsy demon?” Dean mocked Y/N. “That’s a first”

“I’m full of surprises, aren’t I?” The demon, however, acquired a carefree attitude despite the fact that they set Castiel’s trench coat on fire.

“You didn’t do that on purpose?” The latter asked, convinced by the guilt reflected in Y/N’s eyes.

“I might have been ‘born’ not too long ago, at least considering the demon lifespan” When the angel tilted his head in confusion, the demon elaborated. “I don’t entirely control my powers, okay?”

“That’s hilarious” Sam was grinning, but frowned when Y/N glared at him.

“What’s it to you?” In response, Sam held his hands up in surrender.

“Are you in or are you out, Y/N?” Dean insisted, losing his patience.

“I’ll help you” Y/N nodded. “With the condition that you let me go with you… And with Castiel here”

“This is gonna be great” The older Winchester did not like the thought of not only having to put up with a demon, but also with their infatuation with Cas.

As he motioned over to the car, both Y/N and Castiel got into the Impala, sitting closely together in the back seat. None of them would admit it, but they were filled with a strange excitement as a journey together awaited them.

Tagging: @thisismysecrethappyplace, @overpowered-insanity, @suenami3, @lonerlulu

[harry-leroy]

The Strife With Shadows

So this is the thing I was talking about with the werewolves and the knights of Henry II. This was far before I did any sort of research on medieval England so there may be egregious errors in my history- the inspiration was off of a T.S. Eliot play depicting the murder of Thomas Becket, not so much on the history of Henry II and Thomas Becket. (So I ask for your forgiveness in these areas- I’m not up to editing right now, but eventually I’ll get around to it). 

This tale puts a supernatural spin on Thomas Becket’s murder, narrated by Sir Hugh de Morville - the only sinner left alive, haunted by a pact he and three other knights made with the devil to be aided in killing the prideful Becket on what they thought to be orders of their king. 

Hope you enjoy! 

I. OF THE FOUR KNIGHTS

All men die. That is the only law of nature with which we can all concur regardless of constitution. Man must come to terms with the inevitable or be struck down in victimised agony, whether in tranquil silence or tumultuous uproar. But man shall not be divided by the means or nature of his death! The deeds of the living body and soul are what we recall with honour or with scorn, and in a shared and fatal act, I am now the sole heir of guilt; the only one with brain and heart to play a scale of truth against no one but myself and God. The rest are bare bones, scraped up by vulture and maggot, with their souls now swaying in tireless, swirling wind, tied to rotting and splintering masts. Ten years I have been solus, awaiting Death’s spindly knock on the doors at Knaresborough in trepidation and dread, knowing of my inexorable fate, the frayed and bitter end of my skein drawing nearer and nearer with every rising sun. But thirty years it has been since the grisly, horrendous atrocity in Canterbury, so surely one would believe that I had forgotten of the worry, especially in my dotage, but in such cases reason is a false intuition.

Every month, twelve a year, I am brutally reminded of the crime. The devil, he taunts me for the foolish pact I made with him by means of a macabre metamorphosis. Under the ashen moon, full as if the iris and pupil of a great sky beast awakened slowly from sleep, I am trawled beneath the glass surface of consciousness while a savage bloodlust boils rapidly under my skin, and in my sentient slumber, I kill. I murder small things, tall things, crawling things, and brawling things, and when I wake, coated in the sticky red tears of Mars, I weep for days, unable to leave the confines of the castle as I grovel in my sorry monstrousness. It is a pitiful price for a swindled agreement to maintain the secrecy of our identities. Four wolves killed the martyr and there was little secret in that.

It began in the court of the great King Henry II, us four perpetrators mere strangers to one another’s company then, although many times on that strange, fateful day we had crossed paths: once in the gardens, once in the cathedral, and once before the king himself. Each man’s business in coming had differed, but in parting, had been one singular goal, all burgeoned by the lethal words of the sovereign.

There was Sir Reginald of Somerset, somewhat of a slight man, an amicable liaison between hostilities out of the realm of his interest, but only out of action and was no man of words. He was the youngest of our ill-fated troop, and in his jejunity, was all the same a bit haughty in his lust for the monarch’s praise. Others had simply called him naive, but I felt as for a man within the age of union he was perhaps a furtive soul. The two of us had encountered each other behind the castle wall upon entrance, astride on horseback. Both pairs of our eyes were brought about to admiring the purple blooms of the wolfsbane, petals stretching towards the autumnal morning sun like children from the womb.

“What lovely flowers!” exclaimed Sir Reginald. “Never before have I seen such fantastic buds! Perhaps I will take some for my fair maiden,”

“Ah, do you not know?” I pulled my horse back with my reins, as if to pull its snout away from the menacing vines. “They are toxic! Your fingers would burn and char if you took even a single rose. Besides, it is not wise to steal,”

Reginald heeded my advice with a slow, cautionary four-footed step backwards. The head of his red horse tossed pompously, dark mane rustling as softly as the violet petals, and the knight seemed to throw his the same.

“What laws should bind a man in love?” He jested. “And who are you to deliver them?”

“The commandments, just as any other good man is bound!” I forced a tethered reign across my torso as to cause the head of my own dark horse to toss in lusty confidence, although feigned. “And for your own skin, the canon of botany. I be a man of intelligence to deliver them, so perhaps you should follow in the lead of an older knave. What’s more, the blooms of flowers be shallow gifts for a lady,”

“So you say!” Reginald challenged.

“So I know!” I exclaimed, rather falsely, for I have lived the entirety of my life a bachelor. “Flowers, like all living things, die. Love, both in abstract concept and upon marriage is eternal, and those violet petals be erroneous symbols. Unless you perhaps suggest that love is an earthly thing, among things unreal. Or even then, if you had proposed to take them purposefully, you suggest that love is venomous. I’m sure that, in your apparent haughtiness, you do not think that,”

“You overestimate the folly of my youth,” he declared. “Subtract a decade and surely you, Sir knight recall courtly pining under the moon? The memorisation of poems and song? ”

“I recall only the memorisation of our earthly code, as well as the rites of death. Life is too ephemeral to partake in squire’s business, and as a knight yourself, perhaps you would be wise to consider your vital duty to the king,”

Realising his loss of our battle of wits, Sir Reginald merely remained in stunned silence and led his horse from position astride away from the wall and towards the castle, his acknowledgement of forfeiture ultimately nonverbal. I took it from our first meeting that the two of us were of different humours, and by fate of the stars, were never intended to hold each other in friendship. I still, even thirty years past the introduction and felony, do not withdraw my opinion.

The second knight I met in the cathedral, a hallowed and cold stone cavern, wind rushing from point to point, hall to hall that caused even the most faithful of Christians to shiver. A women’s chorus trilled like solemn, but fretful birds with clipped wings, living and partly living, the sound echoing almost silently save for a faint, shrill cry. Sir William of Gloucestershire was the descendant of a baron, a nervous man, as well as modest. He avoided alcohol, if he could so help it, and was the eldest of the calamitous company. I encountered the knight near the altar, as he had just ended prayer.

“Pardon me, Sir,” He said, seemingly overwrought with unalloyed fear as he attempted to move swiftly past. The exact wonder and immensity of what, I would never know, although I was given a paltry idea.

“What ails you?” I placed a gentle hand on his shoulder as to stop him temporarily. “No man should be frightened in a church. Should he?”

“Should he?” Sir William echoed the question, tasting it slowly on his tongue, no less fearful.

“Well I think not,” I decided. “Be at peace, my good man. Unless you have committed crime against the Lord, be at peace,”

“Perhaps that is the worry,” He quavered in his speech and in his balance, only to stumble back into shivering homeostasis. “For I have seen things,”

“What kind of things, might I ask?” I implored upon the weak state of this most troubled knight as to force him into a sort of calm appropriate for the hour. Otherwise, I thought he might have drowned himself in his perturbation.

“Terrible things!” He gasped. “Oh the most horrid of things! But you mustn't allow another soul to know what I have seen. Will you be my vessel? Is the secret in good hands with you?”

“Of course, my good Sir!” I spoke in a hushed tone for I feared the power and might of the echo. “But you must keep your voice down! If the secret be as horrible as you describe…”

“Oh yes,” William staggered across the choice of his inflection for a brief moment, although it felt longer, before settling on an urgent whisper. “Yes, I… had a vision. There. At the altar. I saw not the altar in this cathedral, but the one of the chapel in Canterbury! The wall bedaubed with blood, the bawling, chanting cries of the women, and the faces of men so hauntingly and harrowingly familiar! Yours I saw there too! Yes, caked in the vermillion gore of death, along with me! What do you make of it, Sir knight? Am I doomed to a fate of demons and hellhounds? What does it mean?”

“Peace!” I commanded finally, the edict of a sane man. “You ask the wrong man. I am no interpreter of fantastical visions. That is the task of a priest, and you do little in your own favour to inquire a man of chivalry and sword. Go now, and do not bother me anymore. May God have mercy on your soul,”

“But Sir!” protested William. “You do not understand. It was your face I saw in that ghastly hallucination! Yours! You were a stranger to me until this very moment, Sir…”

“Hugh of Appleby,” I responded. “Surely, it was nothing of specificity. I have a common visage that most men of my age possess. You must be placing me in your vision because I am the first face you happened upon, but I pray, either bring your broken wagon to a reeve or forsake it in the mud! As I mentioned before, I have not the instruments to mend your state nor the wit to prescribe a course to better end other than prayer. Please, leave me be,”

Sir William walked away by means of an awkward, two-legged crawl into the throng of pilgrims as though a wounded animal, albeit by what I was still (and still am to this day) unable to fully comprehend. All the same, it was his feverish dream, not mine, and perhaps I was never meant to understand its exact colours and paints, but only that they were a harbinger of death. It was from that point that I began to agonise over the words of Sir William, despite their probable fallacy. There was nothing, so I believed, that a man like that would do against his religion to beget such a vision. And what of me? Was it truly my eyes he saw burn in the hematic, unstaunched flames? What of the flames? Why did the blood boil and the fire sear the wall?

Out of a new, soul-deep dismay, my weary feet drove themselves to follow the worrisome knight, despite the composure of my previous speech. Thus I pushed my way passively through the mass of noblemen and women in a half-hearted, dazed traipse towards the great hall of the castle, where I met the third and final knight with whom I had committed the horrible act.

The last of the sinners was Sir Richard of Essex; a man of passion and diligence, chivalry and order. That was, on most occasions. Richard’s assiduity was of considerate, sometimes strenuous effort and often took an equally considerate levy on his moral resilience. He could not be allowed around copious drink or feast or too great a weapon for, as one might say, he would become a ravenous…well… wolf.

Oh how I shudder at that nomenclature now! Even the slightest notion of the beast I am is enough to wish upon myself the most unhappy of deaths as if to make an end to my perpetual misery. Wolf. Dog. Hound. Whatever name! Now, forlorn in dilapidated bricks, I weep sorrowful bitter tears and beg on hind legs to reverse the whole thing around. Could I have not had sense? In the simplest of terms, sense! That’s all it was, but now far less then it will ever be, for this curse of mine would never make sense.

I…  digress. Sir Richard was the last knight I met in Normandy, among the noblemen of King Henry for a glorious feast in the great hall. I took my seat beside him, noting that he was not so much brought to attention by the copious eat or drink, but by the hilt of his sword. (Later he would proclaim madly that it was Excalibur, as he believed himself king of our own monstrous kind).

“Sir Richard,” another knight called to him. “What of your weapon distracts you from this great feast with our good king? Does something bring you sorrow?”

“Aye,” Richard took a moment before he spoke, but perhaps in his trance with the demilance, took hold of my shoulder and addressed me instead of the other knight, and thus I was forced into his woes, much to my eventual consternation. “It’s the hens. Have you ever seen one go mad?”

“I don’t believe so,” I said as if to finish the conversation and promptly turned back to my supper.

“One loses its head and the rest go swarming like ants, pecking and squawking and scratching. They make each other bleed and soon the whole house becomes an abattoir. The only way you could possibly put them out of their misery is to slaughter them all, and doing so gives me great pain,” Richard explained, locking his eyes back on the sword.

“What brought the fall of the house in the first place? Surely nothing of deliberate action by yourself?” The knight asked.

“No. It was a wolf,” Richard nodded. “The hideous dog snatched her head clean off. Must have been a hungry thing, but no less monstrous,”

“Take a moment to consider the wolf,” I interjected. “It lives by its own standards, so who are we to judge it by human commandments and morals? By law of the wolf, it lives a fine life, and by ours it is to be expected. Is it not?”

“Was the same not said of Grendel?” Richard tossed. “He still begets grief on Heorot, stealing away his corpses of good men, does he not? He was raised by a mother like all of us!”

“But no heavenly Father!” added the knight.

“And his world is of hellish fire!” I agreed. “Surely no cherub has seen a similar sight?”

“Nonetheless…” Richard sighed. “It was the duty of Beowulf to slay the horrific beast, and if I lay eyes on that hideous creature…”

Richard gripped the hilt of his sword with a hero’s vigour and rapidly drew it from the sheath as if the two handed blade were as light as a sabre. The knight and I recoiled as to shield ourselves from the volatile flame of Richard’s rage. Our savior was in the form of another knight, Sir Reginald in fact, who took Richard gently by the shoulder and nonchalantly arrested the blade.

“Gentlemen,” He said. “Now is not the time and place for weaponry or strife. Let us be rejoicing, for we are in the presence of the great King Henry!”

I will waste no time on idle conversation or chatter, for much of a knight’s surface talk is nothing but prattle. Instead, I will drive my conscious stake into the heart of the matter, not only for the convenience of my wine dark soul, but for the service of my memory. None of it, in fact matters, until the matter broached upon the Archbishop Thomas Becket.

“He’s been absent from his post in Canterbury for nearly seven winters, the people of the town have missed him so dearly. When will he return?” pined one woman.

“What of him?” a knight jeered, taking a swig of his wine. “If the people can survive seven winters, they can survive seven more!”

“Then fourteen winters will have passed!” Another paladin joined the first. “And another fourteen winters to come!”

“Twenty eight winters!” joined a third knight, and the three began to sing: “Twenty eight winters without the Archbishop! Twenty eight years of joy and bliss! Twenty eight deaths of the sun to reign the release of hubris from the skies!”

“Enough!” the king himself spoke, silencing the chevaliers. “Of Sir Thomas, there is a great amount of controversy. Yes, I have seen it. And perhaps you ask for my opinion on the matter? No?”

Of Sir Thomas, I hadn’t a qualm. No, perhaps there were a multitude of them, but all of them so small that none even banded in force could drive my passion enough for the crime and sin I was to commit in my very near future. Of his excommunications, there was reason for vexation. Of his pride, there was reason for contempt. Of his desire for martyrdom, only (and I still argue) his own reason for demise. But did I have to be the knight to draw out the king’s commands? Did I have to be the knight who granted Thomas his wish?

“Perhaps,” began a priest. “Had Thomas not been so prideful, feeding upon his own virtues, drawing nourishment from impartiality, from generosity, perhaps then things would have been different for the poor Archbishop,”

“He plans to return to Canterbury,” spoke another priest. “In timely arrival for the celebration of saints and martyrs, in time for Christmas, in time for the death and rebirth of the sun,”

“So the seven winters have ended,” said another woman. “And peace will be brought to the lands of England yet again,”

“I fear danger, my good lady,” a knight cautioned. “For Thomas has created too large a stir, too great a rift in the politics of the people. Surely, someone will ensure that he meets the means of an end,”

“An end of what kind?” inquired the woman.

“I see…” a blind priest speculated. “One most bitter in nature…”

“Nevermind that!” Henry hushed. “For my opinion is absolute, and shall be drawn so. A doom on the house, a doom on himself, a doom on the world… What of it? Such dooms have been enacted from the dawn of time! We live on. But of our present situation, what miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and brought up in my household, who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born cleric?”

The sealing, binding words of a contract to our lord, our king, greatest Henry, were these. Until I realised the extents of my horrible crime, I did not take them as anything more than chivalric task, royal law. As I, in my narrative, have capacity for hindsight, these words were perhaps themselves the doom on the house, on Thomas, and on the world.

“For good or ill, let the wheel turn…” finished the three priests in unison.

II. TEMPTER OF OUR ULTIMATUM

“What now?” said William of Gloucestershire, the light scarce in the thickness of foliage and wood and flickering straight down his iris and pupil, leaving the rest of his figure in shadow.

“The words of our king…” I twitched in the perplexity of our predicament.

“Were orders!” finished Reginald. “And therefore we will be sure of the Archbishop’s demise!”

“A demise of what kind?” I hesitated.

“One most bitter in nature…” sighed Richard.

“Could we not wait until the forces of the natural world stole him away to the intimacy of the grave?” William cried.

“Imagine it!” Reginald exclaimed. “When every other warrior of the court has denied the king his wish, we will be the ones to grant it! And what fame and glory will be brought upon our names! What rich praise and honour!”

“Please, Reginald, I pray you reconsider,” I begged.

“Would you like to live the rest of your life a drone?” He retorted. “Or rise with me?”

“What is in the spoils other than murder and blood?” Richard asked.

“Much! Think, gentlemen! Could we not be the saviors of our own? Think, Sir Hugh! We will free the people of this burden upon their souls! Their guilt will be just as equal, if there be any! And worry not, Sir William, for our reasoning will be that of our current predicament! Knightly task is all! And Sir Richard, you said it yourself that you wish to kill a wolf. This is your chance! Has the Archbishop not brought toil upon your house, and as you said, turned it to an abattoir? Has he not brought toil upon all of your houses?”

We were powerless to act upon such an argument, and our only reasonable action was to nod in agreement, some in fear, others in bloodlust, and myself down the bifurcation as to make a third path.

“But how will we be hidden in our crime?” William inquired.

“Certainly, murder in a cathedral, of any estate, is sin?” I joined in the questions.

“Yes, even here…” Richard concurred. “The wolf wears the human mask and heart. I could not possibly execute it with my garrish face before the chthonic flames!

In our disagreement, the four of us could have not possibly been called to the attention of the shrivelled bird on the branch up and behind, for it was too undisturbed to throw any feather in our fray. Nonetheless, it’s squawk sent a bolt of shivering madness down each of our spines, causing us to rotate in its direction.

“I could be of assistance,” the bird cawed, a raven, its feathering shaken from dust and rain.  

“You heard that bird speak like man?” William asked, stepping backwards as if to plan physical means of escape.

“You all did,” said the black bird. “Unless you are deaf!”

The avian shadow wheeled upwards in discordant hysterics, perhaps a reaction to his own quip. His quick and low path was almost impossible to follow, for mid-flight, somewhere in the tangled twilight that trailed from his wings, he metamorphosed into an anthropomorphic figure! In his human form, he was an old man, his bones exposed through translucent skin as if Death himself had him clutched in his grip. The four of us retreated languidly a few steps back, heels trawling in dark earth.

“Who are you?” Reginald challenged, drawing his sabre from sheath.

“I do not need a name, as you know me quite well,” the man said.

“What is your business with us?” I asked, disquieted at his macabre appearance.

“To assist you in your quest,” His voice quivered under the pressure of his cadaverous frame. “After all, your purpose is most noble, but you will need the workings of legerdemain to escape politically lawful men,”

“What do you propose?” Richard edged forward, as if to prove to his conscience that this figure of death and decay was friend.

“Only a paltry token for your trouble, really, is all I wish for,” the elderly man trembled in the false four o’clock eventide.

“And you will hide us in our crime?” William followed Richard and took a step towards the dark figure.

“Oh most certainly,” assured the man. “I will make you animals! Beasts! Wolves to be exact, that is the best creature for the office,”

“Wolves?” cried Richard, drawing sword. “You horrible monster!”

“If you took the time to consider the wolf,” the man, now appearing more and more a devil, cautioned back, cackling. “In your business, one really could not distinguish one from the other! Really, both are demons. Both are angels. All that matters is the lens, no?”

“You speak truth?” Reginald asked, pressing the tip of his blade to the skeleton’s chest. “You will make us wolves? With claws and fur and fangs?”

“And these will be the masks of our murder?” I added.

“You’re getting the idea!” The devil man jabbered.

“For what price?” William straightened his back.

“None but your own strife,” The man smiled. “You dig your own graves, you men do. In due time, you will pay your prices, but for the day, consider me your vassal. I am at your service,”

The four of us came to the reluctant agreement to take the raven’s assistance, for our position would be at much too great a risk had we been human. Even then, we doubted the legitimacy of such an undertaking, for it would require powers beyond God, and thus such things became unfathomable.

“You have yourself a deal, good sir. May God grant us clemency in the next life,” Reginald shook the emaciated hand of the devil man, only to have him shrink back through dark mist into the bird, cawing and squawking in a kind of sick laughter.

We spent the entirety of our journey to Canterbury in fretful worry, whether on foot, on horseback, or on the seas. Six months lasted our trek from Normandy, all of which in were spent in dark, heavy sickness. Night terrors came in swarms, fooling us to believe we had fangs when it was truly some decay of our canines, or that our hands turned to paws while we had only split our knuckles from the toils of the sky and the earth.

What drew us to the cathedral despite our unearthly pains? Knowledge of security? Rather its destruction… (I laugh bitterly now). What danger with what the people are not already familiar? In our sin, they are forced to bear witness. What horrible things we had yet to do! The wrong deed for the right reason, that’s what it was.

III. COME DOWN DANIEL

I will speak little of the murder, perhaps for the good of your soul and for the lack of time I now give myself to weave my skein into the threads of insanity; I am already too far tangled in the shivering shambles of my own brain unwound. In the far distance, I hear Death’s horse, no, four of them. Four horses. Oh how it makes me smile! Finally I have reached my eleventh hour! So I must make my account swiftly, for time in the general sense lacks. Forgive me if I do not describe the crime with perhaps the same alacrity as say, that monk, Edward Grim, but even he had the whole thing backwards!

Thomas Becket and our company, by some alignment of planets, found ourselves in arrival at Canterbury on the same winter morning, a few days before Christmas. Becket’s arrival was marked with rejoicing and a temporary peace, ours marked by four men in such sickness that we nearly dropped off of our horses from our weakness. The four of us believed wholeheartedly that we were going mad, for in our sleep, we would scratch and claw at the earth, and in our wake, find violent urges to bay at the moon when travelling late. Such madness and imminent murder drove us to drink, and by the end of every night we began to forget whether we were men or wolves, and strangely acted as both, but each side felt as foreign as the other. Soon, I found joy in scratching at the earth and felt my human hands useless and numb and all the while found the slashing of weaponry to be some kind of sport, stabbing beetles with the point of my sword wherever they scurried.

We decided to enjoy our last Christmas as politically free men and made no business at the cathedral until three days following the holiday. First, we made ourselves assailants as men in helmets, covering our visages, hoping that in due time we would become marionettes at the will of the raven’s magic and at the will of fate’s wheel. It has frightened us to think of a full transformation into a creature that walked on all fours and snarled and bit, but the pact had already been sealed.

The metamorphosis itself was rather slow. The night of the murder, we stumbled into the cathedral like drunk men, singing:

“Come down Daniel to the lions’ den!”

“Come down Daniel for the mark of the beast!”

There was a great hurry to bar the doors as in our stupor we told of our business as if it were plain, common knowledge. We boasted and bragged about how we were to bring glory to the people of England for murdering the Archbishop, and while Thomas was rather displeased with our credentials to be Death’s messengers, he was never shy to embrace it. For as I said before, in a way, Thomas brought about his own demise.

“Come down Daniel to the den of wolves!”

“Come down Daniel and join in the feast!”

Now, I tell you we were at one time intelligent, although by now you’d never believe that. Of course, we came in dressed as any other knight- with mail and sword and shield, for if the transformation were to be nothing but hoax, we could still carry out the deed. But such weapons weren't necessary.

It was a wild kill! I was not myself, and rather lost control of all senses, snarling and biting and forgetting the blood and body of his brain on my fur, my only aim to murder. Thomas, seeking his own martyrdom, did not resist, although the by standing witnesses watched in agonised horror. In the lengthy moment, William’s dream became a horrible reality, with blood and fire and both of our faces in the all consuming flame. The three of them became wolves too, and all four of us tore poor Thomas shreds, dragging entrails of the head with our claws across the cold stone pavement. The women screamed and cried, begging for the bloodshed to end. The priests were frozen in their towers, unable to fathom that four wolves killed the martyr.

Human morals must have gripped us all at the same moment, for suddenly the blood seemed horrible! (And at the time I write this in human consciousness, the whole of the story seems horrible). In the shadow of the eldritch moon, we all scurried away into the night, terrified that we might be seen as men as I felt myself wishing to walk on two legs again as we ran.

“We must hide!” cried William.

“Where?” I asked, stumbling quickly back to my two legs.

“North!” cried Richard. “Follow the stars!”

We ran until we could run no more.

IV. CROOKED AND UNHAPPY ENDS

What became of us four knights? First, I believe I should start with the martyr. Yes, he was made a martyr, and his day, December the twenty ninth, and to this day he is much revered by all who come to Canterbury. They come from all over England to pray at his shrine, the very place of our sacrilege! But you, in your own knowledge of hindsight, being so far in the future as you are, perhaps wonder why we were never caught as wolves? It is not complicated, but rather simple: no one believes in such things.

Poor Edward Grim, for he saw the whole of the deed, start to finish, in all of its abhorrent animosity and bloodshed. He swore up and down that he saw not men, but wolves tear off the archbishop’s head. The only evidence to suggest that men had been at the scene of the crime was the broken sword that lie at the foot of the wall, now caked in that vermillion gore that William spoke of to me much too long ago. It was in fact Sir William’s sword, and like the rest of us carried one for insurance, and had been stepped on perhaps by one of our sixteen legs. That was the best explanation for its brokenness. As for Grim, given evidence of human assailants, the priests told him to change his narrative for the sake of sanity, told him to change every wolf to man, and every bite to a sword’s uppercut.

Did anyone know, you ask? After a while, they knew. Everyone knew. Only four knights in the whole of England hid away in Knaresborough in fear, thus it could be no one else. Henry was happy to keep us away, locked up in the walls of the castle, but told us if we were to seek penance, that we were to journey to our deaths alone. Did we follow such advice? Only poor Reginald and eventually myself, but only out of force. Had it been my choice, I believe that I would have rather wished to die with a friend at my side. It was in this way that Richard and and William were smart.

You see, the raven was the devil after all. He cursed us to become wolves not only for the night, but twelve nights a year, allowing terror to reign in our wake. Thus we killed and murdered in what we believed was our heavy sleep, returning to the castle as bloody as we had been on the night of the martyr’s murder. It affected us all in different ways, for Reginald rather enjoyed his new status. It gave him a body to explore man’s vice, and he thought nothing of his killing until he found himself on his own death bed, for his own limbs weak and nearly fallen off. Leprosy took the poor man in three years time from the initial crime, and there was nothing to mark his grave save the budding wolfsbane at the foot of the castle, even now a horrible reminder of the paper petals’ symbol of the unreal.

As for Richard, he became a wild creature, perhaps slaughtering more than any of us, believing that everywhere he saw blood, he was wired to kill more things, and like the hens he cared so deeply for at one time, brought slaughter and chaos upon our house. It was nothing he cared for, but it was nothing he realised until I had brought it to his attention. His reaction? He shut himself up in the towers for many days and eventually begged that someone take his silver axe and hack him into the grave.

William took this upon himself to seek his own end, deciding that he and Richard would dig a grave for the other and hack themselves in, begging me to bury them once the deed was done. Of course, I had hesitated, knowing that if the plan were to follow through, I would be utterly alone, but I saw in them both, suffering and pain beyond imagination, and knew it was for the best. I would insure their absolution through burial, and thus their souls would sealed into the earth forever more. The death was bloody and gruesome, and I prefer not to share anything more than that.

But what of me? What of me now? Ha! I hear the horses, here they come! Down the beaten, bloody, path! Four horses of the end of the world! The end of my world! The first is the white horse, and the knight took his lance to slay the apparition of Reginald, man of self-conquest! The red and black horse joust until they have both slayed a victim, Richard in his Mars ruling war and William in his soul’s famine. And me! The last horse comes for me, Death, riding crooked on his black horse with lance sharper than any, but he will not slay me!

I will slay myself!

[gaasaku-fanfests]

Lullaby

Title: Lullaby Author: distant-voice Rating: K Word Count: 3,947 Summary: Her song had brought him to her, her conversations had made him stay, but it was his love for her that kept him coming back. Warnings: None Author's Note(s):  This is the first AU I’ve ever written, yikes! I feel like I might have seen a similar character set up elsewhere, but I’d like to think the way my story goes is drastically different. Sorry for the mood of the story. I blame it on the song I was listening to while writing. I also played/experimented with the writing (cough)… sooo I hope my partner will find this somewhat palatable, as will anyone else who reads the story.

(Additional note: despite the AU there is canon SasuSaku. Not a GaaSaku ending. It’s one-sided. [edited])

Prompt chosen: ‘Song’ & ‘AU’ Partner: hubbie22 

The first time he hated his job a little less was when he found himself something to look forward to while on the clock. It’d become a pastime that started to occupy most of his nights, when he was supposed to be traveling far and wide to bring relief to the sleepless.

The novelty of a thing was a gratuitous find. He’d chanced upon it while roving through the small town Konoha, agilely leaping from one house roof to another against the backdrop of the glittering city lights. There was nothing remarkable about that two-story house in the nondescript neighborhood that would have caused him to pause, yet what tugged at his steps was the intangible. Through an open window from the second story, the carefree humming grew in volume and sauntered into his consciousness.

There was a special lulling effect to the song that drew him like deer to water, night after night. Like a bedtime lullaby, it stilled him from his unrest and gave him the possibility of the very thing he furnished to all yet suffered the lack thereof himself. It was the cruel irony of his profession: Along with the irreversible insomnia that his own magic couldn’t even cure, the permanent dark circles and the general irritable disposition were all—what he supposed, occupational hazards.

As he savored the notes that soothed him, without volition his eyelids drooped. A few seconds of him perching nearby stretched into minutes, then until the break of light he stayed. Before long, he’d reserved a front row seat inside the house and become an unsought patron of the solo performance.

When his inevitable curiosity first riled him to peek, the shock of pink assaulted his vision. (There was nothing lulling about that.) Eventually coming to terms with the realness of the unnatural hair color, he’d observed a girl in her adolescence. Fair complexion and slender build, she was pretty; not the kind of breathtaking beautiful, but there was sunshine in her smiles whenever she laughed to herself with that breezy voice of hers for reasons known to no one else.

Naturally, he settled himself in his routine spot and reclined against his sizable gourd, the vessel that contained the essence of his magic. With his head pillowed on his crossed arms, his seafoam eyes languidly rested on the only other occupant of the room.

Per usual, she was engaged in her nightly ritual before retiring to bed. She sang to her heart’s content, as she brushed her long locks to free them of knots. With headphones secured in her ears, she seemed no longer on earth and completely oblivious to the unseen visitor in her world.

Her song was like raindrops on the pavement, streaming waters in the forest, and the waves that crashed onto the summer beach. He didn’t understand how a mere human girl could possess the ability to purge him of his plague, but he’d forgo his pride for practicality to tolerate such dependency if it meant he could find rest for a few hours.

As he welcomed the heavy darkness that began to set in without guard, he never had the slightest concern about his trespassing presence being discovered, not even when she’d swept his end of the room plenty of times with her pair of bright eyes that reminded him of the dewy grass at sunrise...

—No, no mortal could see him, not unless he granted that privilege...

The first bit of awareness came to him earlier than usual, in an unfamiliar way too. A pleasant smell, like the aroma of freshly bloomed flowers, pervaded his dreamless realm. In the pitch black in which his mind floated, the fragrance lingered, soon making up the air he inhaled. In his sleep, he stirred as the scent made impression on his senses.

And when he gradually roused from his slumber, he thought he’d woken up to Spring, with colors of pink, red, and a smudge of green penetrating the seams of his eyelids. As he shifted to shake off the remnants of his drowsiness, a soft gasp disrupted the quiet of his surroundings. Instantly, his eyes snapped open only to be met with those distinct gem-like orbs.

For what seemed like eternity, he locked his unblinking eyes with the pink-haired girl who knelt before him. Turquoise dipped into pools of emerald, and he was caught up in absolute stillness.

Surely, she couldn't—

"I thought you might be cold sleeping on the floor."

His brain couldn’t process his shock fast enough for him to react to the plush cover that she draped around him almost premeditatively following her words. His wide stares alternated between the hesitantly smiling girl within an arm’s reach and the blanket that cloaked his body. Realization came, as he felt a surprising warmth that hugged him from shoulders down to his knees.

Somehow, he'd manifested himself in his sleep and he was no longer the phantom that left invisible footprints at many a home.

His mind surged with questions, unable to digest the possibility of his presence being made vulnerable to the naked eyes of any human.

Unbothered by his stunned state, his observer had begun to murmur, “I’ve seen you sleep here…”

So it wasn’t the first time… His forehead creased; and he stifled an expletive, appalled at the fact that he’d lost control, therefore losing a piece of his anonymity. But more than anything else, he blamed the gods for ever giving him a physical body for his stewardship.

“I wasn’t sure at first, but I figured that…” The uncertainty in her speech hauled his focus to the present, and he fixed his gaze on the girl.

“...if you’d wanted to hurt me, you would’ve done so already," she said; then like an afterthought, she added, “Right?”

"—Hey! What are you... "

Abruptly, he stood and hoisted his gourd onto his back, not acknowledging her statement or letting her finish her sentence. The blanket that’d protected his form earlier fell to the floor. With a flurry of sand, he made himself disappear from her company.

...

There was apprehension in his gait when he retraced his steps back to that particular two-story house the next time, yet it dissipated as the pink-haired host embraced his arrival without alarm, without judgment. At the creak of the floorboards under his feet, the faint smile that was directed his way was one that made him feel like he’d just come back to a home… —when he had none in reality, living like the vagabond he was. And he no longer had the need to conceal himself in front of her.

He’d never admit, though, that his intrigue only grew since then. Those foreign gestures from her had moved him from within, and the need to experience had prevailed over his pride or logic that told him to keep away.

"You are a ghost," she declared, making her rounds of silly assumptions at his true identity. The two of them plopped on the ground by her desk, and he was the subject of her scrutiny.

He shook his head.

She pouted. Jutting a finger into her chin, she ventured another guess.

"Are you…” She leaned just a little closer, and her green eyes lit up. “Cupid?"

Again his head swayed from left to right, this time in a petulant manner. His brows pinched together, and he folded his arms across his chest in that default posture of his. Sure, that path might have been what the fickle gods had planned for him at his conception; the “love” branding on his forehead and his fiery red hair explained it all. But it wasn’t long before everyone in the heavens realized that his temperament made him unfit for the job, and he’d been demoted…

Not that he minded much, for he considered his current stint the lesser of the two evils.

"That's too bad then. I was hoping you could help me with a boy," she giggled, unaware of the annoyance that’d flashed over his features at the recall of an irksome memory.

"What's your name?"

"Gaara."

He uttered before he could catch himself. His voice, hoarse from centuries of unuse and almost like that of a sickly man, was strange even to himself. Then he resorted to his usual muteness right away, perplexed at how this girl could command this kind of response out of him.

"Gaara…” she echoed thoughtfully. Somehow, his name on her lips sounded right.

The line of her mouth curved upward, and she indulged him with yet another smile of hers that was etched in the depth of his mind. “I'm Sakura."

Sakura… Her name looped in his head. He nodded. How apt.

...

He never thought he’d find a destination in his aimless journeys through the seasons. He never thought that he’d find something earthly that would seize his interests in his stale timeless existence.

He didn’t care if Sakura sang less these days and instead let him have a slice of her life through her chitchats. Her songs had drawn him to her and allowed him to sleep; but truly it was her words that made him stay and gave him peace, perhaps because of the way she’d talked to him that made him feel… accepted.

"Ugh, I'm so stupid! Why did I cut my hair? Sasuke-kun is not going to like it."

Her voice carried over the tune that played in his ears from the earphones she’d lent him earlier. Slouched against the foot of her bed, he cracked his eyes open to witness the melodrama unfold from her, as she obsessively adjusted the red ribbon in her hair and played with the ends of her pink tresses that barely grazed her shoulders.

She spied on him in the reflection of the mirror. “What do you think?”

Her fingers still tangled in the strands of her hair, and she slanted her head in his direction. “Is it nice?”

Without hesitation, he gave an affirmative nod. Expectantly, he dropped his sight to the corners of her lips that lifted. He thought to himself that she was really too generous with her smiles, and he was too greedy for it…

…

Through the seasons and all the ups and downs, his eyes never strayed long from those flamboyant colors of pink, red, and green. Even in the sea of forgettable faces that crowded the schoolyard during the day, she’d always stood out to him, with her shining hair waving in the wind, her graceful movements, and her radiant laughter under the midday sun.

He didn’t let Sakura know that he’d followed her to school on the days he didn’t give two hoots about his job, which was more oft than not. From the roof of the school building, he watched as she surrounded herself with her circus of friends, and he didn’t think he’d ever be fascinated by the mundane.

Naruto, Lee, Ino… he knew about them from her narratives, but it was from his direct observations such as now that he matched the names to the personalities. He was between amused and troubled at Naruto’s bouts of rambunctious energy. He’d grunt at Lee for his mannerisms around her that were too friendly for his comfort. And he’d scowl whenever she and Ino huddled in their corner to whisper about what was apparently the object of affection of every girl in their grade:

Sasuke Uchiha…

And the source of all of Sakura’s petty afflictions, as he’d come to learn. With as simple as a flick of his fingers, he could knock the ignorant boy into a coma to never wake up. But just because he didn’t want to see Sakura shed any more precious tears over the undeserving twit didn’t mean he would refrain from inadvertently blowing a gram of sand his way. He’d rather enjoyed the scenes where the baffled teen woke up to the frown from the schoolmaster and a classroom full of jeering laughter.

When the head of pink bobbed toward the dark-haired youth who stood in solitude by the edge of the schoolyard, he narrowed his jade eyes. He tore his attention from the pair and instead let it land on the bulge in his pant pocket. Then fishing the item that’d filled the space, he studied it—the wrapped chocolate that Sakura had made and given him the night before Valentine’s Day, a deformed lump of thing that she insisted was the shape of a heart.

Being the entity he was, he had no need for any sustenance, yet he couldn’t resist biting into the dark perfection that melted on his tongue…

That night he was surprised to find her with her face buried in her pillows, her miserable sobs muffled by them. A lonely bag of chocolates sat on her nightstand. With wariness, he set his gourd down and approached her, yet he wavered at the edge of the bed. Sensing him, she twisted to her side. With her teary red eyes, she regarded him and the unsure hand that’d stopped a palm’s width from her. And on his behalf, she reached out and closed that gap built of uncertainty.

"Stay with me, please?"

From her plea he could feel her warm breath on him, as she held him. Little by little, his rigid body became accustomed to the contact and he relaxed. He lost tracks of the hours they remained this way, but he was relieved that her quivering had ceased and the wet trails on her face had thinned to a trickle.

In a hushed tone, she started, "I know what you are..."

Curiously, he angled his head toward her. He’d thought she’d given up on trying to uncover his mystery long ago.

"You are my guardian angel."

Her whisper tingled his skin, like a tender brush of hand that he couldn’t see. Upon her unexpected words, he widened his eyes at her. The smile that blossomed from the depth of her sadness to the surface was one that touched him profoundly.

And that was the first time he’d been called something other than Gaara the Sandman…

…

The punishment from the displeased gods was likely long-time coming, given how much he’d been shirking his responsibilities. The thousand whiplashes, followed by imprisonment for the better of a decade, were nowhere as punishing as the restlessness that gnawed his insides while he felt himself rotting away in the dungeon. Still, the worst of the torment was what awaited him when he gained his freedom again, at that two-story house in Konoha that’d been his rest stop from years past.

Sakura was gone.

In her dark empty bedroom, he stood. Her songs, her words, her smiles, her warmth—every trace of her was now but a fragment of his recollection. Along with the first and only person who’d ever acknowledged him and gave him significance, the meaning of his existence faded into oblivion. Once again, he was a ghost to the world.

Then he was looking, always looking. But the world was vast, and she left him no clues in his vain search. The nights in isolation were long, and he passed every single one of them, painfully awake. The bitterness and anger over the abandonment was mounting, but it all paled by comparison to his fear that such a fragile human had already ceased to exist.

Yet, with false hope, he’d always end up at the starting point day after day.

Winter, summer, fall, then came again spring… In his journeys, his footsteps had become cumbersome, weighed down by all the corrupt emotions that the gods have subjected him to at his creation. Without his anchor, he’d gotten lost, and the burning desire in him was nothing but a dying flame.

Then in the dead silence of a fateful night, the melody suddenly pierced through, jolting him out of his numbness. The dulcet tune from his distant memory was one that he’d heard countless times but never enough. It ebbed and flowed faintly in the atmosphere but resonated deeply within him, rekindling the embers of hope.

He broke into a run. The glow emitting from the house at the end of the street was the most brilliant, like the north star that guided him in the dark void. Each hurried step was light but unsteady, as every fiber of his being trembled with anticipation.

At the window where the light shone through, he came to a halt. The chorus continued to flow, louder and deeper. As he spotted the shade of rose through the window panes, so did his insides flutter violently. She was taller; there were more curves to her body. With the full head of pink, there was no mistake, even with his view limited to her back from his angle.

All the bleak thoughts he’d harbored all these years were forgotten, as the impatient need to see her face and her smile propelled his feet forward. But he fell short in his determination when a pair of onyx eyes popped over Sakura’s shoulder and darted in his direction, and he almost had the impulse to dodge out of sight.

“Good night, Sarada.”

She ended her song, as she settled a small child from her arms into bed. Her lips parted the child’s black hair and met her forehead in a loving tender kiss, drawing his eyes to the face of the young one. Just then he realized he wasn’t the audience that her lullaby had meant for.

“Nighty, Mama.”

Sakura had an offspring of her own… The resemblance was uncanny, and one name rooted in his mind like weeds.

In the next fortnight, he respected their distance but stayed close, lacking the resolve on how to approach when the currents of her cries rippled through the night air. It was always after the lullabies that Sakura retreated to her old bedroom, drowning in her own unspoken sorrows that she’d kept hidden from her young daughter. These nights she was as awake as he was, as alone as he was. The tears were incessant, and he was desperate to understand why.

Finally, he willed himself out of the shadows, unable to bear the pattern he’d let himself fallen into, with him always watching on the sidelines and his longing reined back. From one end of the bedroom where half-unpacked boxes were stacked haphazardly, he manifested himself. In such proximity, his chest tightened, and jitters pulsed through him in unrelenting waves. This nervousness was unlike him.

His desire conquering his instance of timidity, he purposefully shuffled his feet to cause her head to lift from her cradled knees. The pair of glistening green eyes underneath furrowed brows connected with his, and the beats of his palpitating heart reverberated in the quietness of the space.

So many questions he wanted to ask and so many explanations he wanted to demand, yet he found no voice as all the droning thoughts in his head clamored against one another to want to be heard first by the one who’d left him behind.

"Who are you?"

Her voice, it was different now but familiar, nostalgic… yet lethal, giving him no time to dwell on its change in pitch before pummeling him with those words.

In his denial, he yearned to bring himself closer. Another step, however, only warranted her warning.

"Don’t—don’t come any closer!"

He shattered this time. What devastated him more than her harsh imperative was the fear in her countenance, and he could feel himself sink. Shaking, he was struck by his own brittle emotions.

This feeling, one that cut him so deeply, was one that he knew all too well.

Ten years was not long enough to forget someone in his books…

So he cursed the gods, cursed them for having ever made him the god of love, even for the briefest period in history; for ever giving him a physical vessel burdened with all the mortal wants, so he could empathize with those he was foreordained to unite…

And for ever making him know of love...

With alarm, she fumbled in her position. The ruffling of papers that scattered about in her bed from her movements caught his attention. As he gave a distracted once-over at the bold texts on the white sheets, he could connect the dots on his own with the characters he made out: divorce… Uchiha…

He averted his gaze right then and there from the glaring fonts and instead laid it on her once more. With an ounce extra of effort, he chose to pass beyond the guardedness that wouldn’t evaporate from her tear-stained face and took in the details of her features. The innocence that was there in her youth had been chiseled away by the evident stress and fatigue of adulthood. The pink of her hair had visibly dimmed to a muted tone, so did the washed-out greens of her eyes. The sleep deprivation was taken its toll on her appearance. With the heavy bags under her tired eyes, she was beginning to look a lot like himself.

What a shame, she’d become just like the rest of them, with their nightly tossing and turning driven by their miseries.

But even if she’d been dealt an unfair hand by fate, her beauty would persist—this was what he still wanted to believe.

His hand waved in one fluid motion, and he had to steel himself against the panic that brimmed her expression. Sand slithered out from the opening of the gourd on his back. As the golden dusts floated in the air, catching the overhead ceiling lights and shimmering, she seemed unable to deny the fascination that eventually surfaced from her. The specks danced across the space between him and her; then in a swift swirl they rained over her.

Not even a second passed, and her eyelids shuttered. His sand rushed to balance her free-falling body before easing her onto her back. Her chest rose and fell with each steady breath. As he watched the last of her tears spilled from the corners of her closed eyes onto the pillow, he was sure the darkness that cradled her now would release her from all the worries of the world, even if it might only be temporary.

As she slept, he was finally able to bring himself closer to her side. Yet he felt the distance between them had never been greater.

So close they were, yet so far apart, as the one before him only saw a stranger in him…

Another twirl of the wrist, the sand amassed in his palm, molding and shaping itself at its master’s bidding. The open umbrella in his hand now was one that he didn't care to use for the longest time. As he held it over her sleeping form, his fingers tightened around the handle. The pictures that his magic allowed to project onto the underside of the canopy were his fondest memories of his time spent with her, the same ones that he relived in his head all these lonely years.

A part of him still hoped that their shared dream would make her remember… But her smile at him upon waking up might just be his wishful thinking.

The aches inside him throbbed without mercy. Regardless, he was firm in his newfound resolution, as he remained at her bedside.

So he'd watch over her until dawn, until the future, always and forever, to make sure she'd always sleep at night, free of any anguish; and to rid her of the demons that had stolen her sleep.

If nothing else, this was the least he could do, as her “guardian angel”:

"Sweet dreams, Sakura..."

[shadowsong26fic]

AU Outlines: Other Fandoms Edition

So I know that probably like zero of my followers on this blog even go here but I was watching Person of Interest lately, and I’ve also been reading occasional Supernatural spoilers, because I used to be in that fandom and I occasionally get curious. Especially this most recent season. Naturally, this woke up some old characters/situations/etc. that I used to work with, which I’ve been occasionally toying with in the back of my head when I’m bored and/or procrastinating other projects.

I’ve been going back and forth on how I feel about the one plotline that interests me this season (and by back and forth I mean I was really excited when I first read that a particular character was back; engaged by the summaries/etc. I read from his first couple episodes, the third one intrigued me until I read more detailed spoilers and then I started to side-eye it a little bit...)

And then I read up on last week’s episode. And nope, all my excitement is gone, replaced by Pissed for reasons I’m not sure I can actually articulate. (Though I kind of attempted to in the tags here on my personal blog.)

...honestly, I probably should’ve known better; making this kind of storyline really pay off/work would require a lot of attention given to a tertiary character, and given SPN’s track record with the internal worlds and motivations of characters who are not the Big Three, and the fact that they’ve been ignoring a lot of their established angel/vessel lore, the way Claire’s backstory more or less got completely forgotten...I should not have gotten my hopes up. Sigh.

ANYWAY this is now officially Spite Fic(tm). Here, have an outline of a Supernatural/Person of Interest crossover.

Starring Nick.

...uh, before I actually start, I should probably get some background out of the way.

For those of you who are unfamiliar, Person of Interest is a TV show that ran for five seasons, 2011 - 2016. Without c/ping the opening narration, the basic premise of the show is that, in the wake of 9/11, genius software engineer Harold Finch built a surveillance and analysis program, in an effort to prevent similar future tragedies. Out of fear that his creation would be abused, he designed the Machine as a closed system--basically, all that’s provided is an ID number (usually an SSN, at least for US citizens; but Our Heroes get a green card number in one episode, and a student ID number in another), and the person that number indicates is key to unravelling whatever is going down. The Machine was initially designed to predict mass casualty events/terrorism and provide the (relevant) number to the designated government operatives, at which point human intelligence takes over. However, the Machine also identifies things like…gang warfare/one-on-one premeditated murder (irrelevant numbers). That’s where Our Heroes come in.

The first half of the series is basically a procedural with a twist—each episode, the main characters get an irrelevant number (or more; the record was I believe 38 in one episode). They don’t always know how that person is involved, whether they’re the victim or the killer/perpetrator. In a few memorable cases, the number was arguably both.

Then, in the second half, a rival AI (Samaritan) is brought online, and the series becomes somewhat darker in tone and shifts into a cyberpunk apocalypse story. With a few regular irrelevant numbers thrown in on occasion as well, for good measure. For the purposes of this outline, we don’t care so much about POI B, for reasons I will explain, but it bears mentioning. Especially since Greer is still hanging around and trying to bring Samaritan or something similar online.

Right. On to some memorable/notable/important characters.

Our Heroes are Finch, who, as I said, designed and built the Machine. For various reasons, he’s living off the grid (he’s a very private person). Using a backdoor built into the Machine, as of when the series starts, he receives the irrelevant numbers. But he lacks the skills/ability to intervene directly, so he recruits John Reese.

Reese, then, is Finch’s partner/employee/they are totally married; a former CIA assassin who is now presumed dead, he does most of the hands-on work with the numbers and becomes known as the Man in the Suit who is basically Batman.

Carter! Carter is freaking amazeballs; she is p. much the moral/ethical center of the show, one of their two cop friends who was actually trying to track them/Reese down and arrest him for the vigilante BS for the first half-season or so but then they became friends.

Fusco is their other cop friend; former dirty cop/member of an ring, initially recruited by Reese to work undercover in HR (as said ring is called), basically runs on a combination of Dogged Loyalty (the reason he joined HR in the first place, transfers that loyalty to Team Machine, gets his moral compass recalibrated, and becomes one of the most loveable dudes on the show) and Snark (featuring such delightful quotes as “What was I supposed to say? Sorry, boss, Agent King is really a superpowered nutball. Just ask my buddy, the urban legend.” Also at least once a season, he makes a comment to the effect of “just when I thought you guys couldn’t get any weirder…”).

(Also, he is, as my roommate puts it, Shaped Like A Dad.)

Shaw joins the team in Season 3; textbook (and canonical!) bisexual compact Persian sociopath (note: she has some sort of Axis II personality disorder that is occasionally called sociopathy in-universe, but that doesn’t quite fit); there’s…there’s really not much else one can say without just like summarizing everything she does or quoting ad nauseum.

Root! Root is introduced as a major antagonist; hacker/programmer on Finch’s level who works as a contract killer, her initial goal is to locate and free the Machine, which ends up recruiting her early in Season 3 and becoming…you know that particular kind of reformed villain that becomes the weird family member because yes they’re still kind of awful and murdery, and they did a great deal of damage to you and yours, but you’ve now been through Some Stuff together, and besides, they’re your awful and murdery, you know? So not exactly a redemption arc, but they’re one of the Heroes now and just kind of stick with it. Like Barbossa, in POTC. Or Vegeta. My roommate (referenced above) calls this the Weird Uncle trope. And she fits this trope really well and I love it. Also, she and Shaw are canonically girlfriends as of...s4 or s5, depending on how you look at things.

(Also, not necessarily relevant for this outline, but on the subject of Weird Uncles, one cannot talk about POI without mentioning Elias; our friendly neighborhood Mafia don. No, really.)

And Bear! Cannot forget Bear. Bear is Finch and Reese’s dog, acquired at the beginning of S2 and the most amazing. He also has a twitter! In Dutch!

On to some antagonists, Greer is not our friend. He works for/created a company called Decima Technologies; his goal is to bring an unrestricted AI online and let it run the world for complicated reasons relating to some of his experiences during the Cold War working for MI6. Also he has a very punchable face.

And then there’s Control, who runs the Relevant numbers program for the government. She is an awful, awful human being (fully aware of it, too; she has a great speech in the third season finale about how she’s a Necessary Evil and why) and I love her so much.

Okay, that’s the basics for the POI side of things. I can go on a lot longer if y’all want more details (I didn’t even cover my girl Zoe or Leon or…), but that should be enough foundation for the outline to make sense?

For the SPN side of things--I’m not going to summarize the canon background, due to it being the larger/primary-ish fandom. But in terms of the relevant AU stuff, I’m going more or less with the backstory I established for Nick for The Promises of Angels and Cartography!verse.

Basically, he was a high school history teacher; his wife and son were murdered by a serial killer known as the Chesapeake Ripper

(There might well have been/probably was some demonic involvement, though not in the same way as I think S14 canon established; basically either because a “talent scout” demon like that one s7 episode was already involved or because the Ripper was operating independently and a demon got involved later, he was pointed towards this particular woman and baby who fit his victim pool. Either way, Nick was targeted because he was the right bloodline and accessible, because vessel lines are a thing even if the show has forgotten that.)

(Also, Lucifer later took Nick to kill the Ripper. Signing bonus. So to speak.)

After Detroit, Nick gets picked up by Meg, who holds on to him for a while for a variety of reasons (information that might be buried in his memories from the year he spent possessed; the chance that he might be a new key to the Cage…) until the Leviathan turn up, at which point she no longer has the resources to keep him. She cuts him loose at that point, rather than killing him (mostly because she thinks Lucifer left him alive For A Reason and until she knows what that is, she can’t kill him).

So, at this point, in Promises or Cartography, Nick just sort of wanders around for a while until he runs into Claire or Jody, respectively.

For the purposes of this AU, he ends up drifting to New York instead.

And, with all that background out of the way, NOW we can get to the actual fun stuff.

…no, wait, I lied. One more note: as with p. much all my SPN projects, I am following Logical Time rather than Show Time. Which is to say, when calculating dates/figuring out where the timelines intersect/etc., I’m including the two skipped years (between S5/S6 and between S7/S8).

(That being said, I reserve the right to stop caring about the timeline later and just mashing things together as I think it would be entertaining.)

ANYWAY.

We open in the first half of POI S3, somewhere between “Mors Praematura” and “Endgame” (i.e., Root is in the library, but Carter hasn’t initiated her takedown of HR yet). If my math is right, this puts us either in S7 or during the second gap year for SPN.

It starts as most of these adventures do; Team Machine gets a new number.

“This one may be a bit of a project, I’m afraid,” Finch says. “Nick Cross has been missing for several years. He hasn’t been seen since May of 2009, and there’s been no electronic activity on his identity in that time, either.”

Of course, when they dig into his background, his wife and son getting murdered comes up.

“Any chance he killed them?” Reese asks.

“No, he was cleared at the time. They were victims of a serial killer, and Mr. Cross had solid alibis for three of the five incidents, including the one involving his wife and son.”

(Shaw, at that point, theorizes that Nick’s number came up because he somehow tracked the Chesapeake Ripper down and is planning to kill him. And, if that’s the case, doesn’t really see the point in stopping him.)

(“Start with finding him, Ms. Shaw,” Finch says. “We still don’t know if that is, in fact, what’s going on.”)

(Finch also doesn’t approve on principle, of course, but that is not an argument he wants to have with Shaw on this particular morning.)

(Plus, the Ripper seems to have stopped operating at around the same time Mr. Cross disappeared...so there’s a chance that Shaw’s theory is accurate, just out of date.)

In any case, they reason that the Machine wouldn’t have handed them his number if he weren’t alive and in range; Reese and Shaw ask Carter and Fusco to see what they can pull up, and start doing their own legwork.

Carter ends up being the first to find a lead—while on her regular patrol with Laskey, she spots a guy who matches the description, albeit with a few extra scars, and is acting a little off. Like he thinks he’s being followed/watched.

Reese goes to check it out, and this is where things get, uh, Weird.

See, here’s the thing. I love John Reese, and he is a man of Many Skills.

But, uh.

Being approachable and reassuring is Not Among Them.

Like. Don’t get me wrong. When he’s in Bodyguard Mode, it is exactly the right level of Intimidating. He just…has trouble turning it off.

Look, the dude is a semi-retired CIA spysassin and it oozes out of every pore unless he works really hard to tone it down.

(And sometimes even then.)

And since this is just, like, preliminary surveillance to see if this guy Carter spotted really is their number, and he’s not planning to make contact yet, he’s not really focusing on toning it down.

So, when Nick spots him, guess what this looks like to him.

Yep, he thinks Reese is an angel.

He runs.

Reese: “....yeah, pretty sure that’s our number. And he just made me.”

(If Carter didn’t already, Reese probably also mentions that the five-year-old DMV photo they’re working from is out of date; Nick is pretty badly scarred, they look kind of like radiation burns.)

Of course, it was hard enough to find Nick in the first place, so Reese doesn’t want to lose him again. So, made or not, he continues following. Hoping to get to a position where he can make contact and figure out what’s going on. Or just keep tabs on him until Shaw can catch up and take over.

(Not his favorite approach, but he screwed up somewhere and that’s what he’s stuck with now.)

Nick knows the angel is still on him--and this is new and terrifying; he’s had demons after him a few times since Meg ditched him, but this is the first time an angel’s found him and, frankly, angels are worse than demons in his mind.

(Also he’s supposed to be warded how did the angel even find him--)

(Yeah, Nick has gotten a couple tattoos in his post-Meg life--he’s warded, the same sigils that are etched into Sam and Dean’s ribs; he also has a standard anti-demon-possession tattoo.)

In any case, he has a knife up his sleeve, he just needs to get somewhere more or less out of sight, just for a minute, maybe not even, and then he can throw up a banishing sigil. He just needs that minute.

Reese spots Nick duck out of sight into an alley and heads that way, picking up his pace. There’s a chance he’ll lose the number in there, depending on how many exits there are--

Nick casts his sigil and then books it, not wanting to stick around and see if it worked.

Reese gets there just a hair too late.

“I lost him,” he admits, then catches sight of the bloody drawing on the wall. “...but I think I might have an idea what our number’s running from. And why he disappeared for so long.”

“Yeah?” Shaw asks.

“Looks like he might’ve joined a cult."

“....really,” she said. “Huh.”

“He drew some sort of occult symbol on the wall. Looks like blood.”

“...okay, so he joined a cult.”

“It makes a certain amount of sense,” Finch says. “He went through a horrible tragedy. He could have been vulnerable, especially if he sought but failed to find any comfort in traditional religion.”

Reese takes a picture, and sends it to Finch. “Think you can figure out what this is?”

“Well, it’s hardly my area of expertise,” he says, “but I’ll see what I can do.”

“We’ll work on picking up his trail again,” Shaw says, appearing beside Reese in the alley, as she does sometimes. “Maybe stop by and pick up Bear to help.”

...and now skimming over the next few hours...

Finch spends some time in one of the few corners of the internet he’s not super familiar with, and does identify the symbol eventually.

“It’s for protection or warding. Specifically against angels.”

At which point Shaw busts up laughing at the idea of anyone thinking Reese is an angel.

But that does support the idea that he’s running from whatever cult he got mixed up in.

ANYWAY moving on.

Reese and Shaw eventually catch up with Nick again.

Unfortunately, so have the people who are after him.

(And by people, I mean demons. Two of them.)

(Who recognized Nick, obviously, and had the same ideas as Meg, with regard to his potential Uses.)

(Only they’d rather off him so no one gets to unlock whatever secrets he might be holding.)

Shaw goes up--she’s the better sniper, after all--and Reese makes his way into the alley where Nick is cornered

Firing, naturally, at their kneecaps.

Except.....

Nothing...nothing happens...?

(Well, except now the demon is pissed and gunning for Reese instead.)

(Nick is very relieved to see that this guy is not, in fact, an angel. Angels don’t normally use guns.)

(Of course, now he’s just confused, wtf is going on.)

“What the...” Reese says.

“Maybe you missed,” Shaw smirks, from her perch.

“I didn’t miss.”

“Sure,” she says, aiming at the demon chasing him, getting a solid hit in the shoulder.

Which....also does nothing.

“...well, that was weird.”

She fires again, this time a killshot--yeah, yeah, there are Rules, but under the circumstances...

Meanwhile, Demon #2 has gotten ahold of Nick. Who has frozen a little bit.

(He tends to do this, when stressed/triggered--internalize things, and just go blank. He was more or less catatonic when Meg found him, started gradually coming out of it; when Sam got his soul back that sort of accelerated the process and by now he’s mostly functional, but there are Moments...)

Shaw keeps firing at Demon #1. It’s not killing it, but it’s keeping it pinned down so hopefully Reese can reach and extract their number.

“Finch, we’ve got a Situation here.”

“Yes, I can see that.”

(Finch has hacked into some nearby security cameras.)

“You have any idea what the hell is going on?”

“I’m afraid not, Ms. Shaw,” he says. “It’s only the two of them, I think--no one else is coming though the police will probably be responding to the shots soon--”

“Yeah, Finch, I know. Reese?”

Nick is up against the wall and Reese bodily hauls the demon off of him to engage in a fistfight.

(Did not expect a skinny kid like the demon’s host to pack this much of a punch, he’ll have some fun bruises tomorrow...)

Which snaps Nick out of it.

Demons. These are demons. Only demons. I know how demons work. I can--

He rattles off an exorcism, as fast as he can.

The demons scream and smoke out, leaving their two dead hosts behind--Host #1 may have been dead already, or Shaw may have killed them; Host #2 was already gone.

“Finch?” Shaw says. “Finch, are you getting this?”

“I’m--yes, I see it,” he says.

Reese is about to add something, but the Nick passes out--Demon #2 managed to score a solid hit before Reese got there--and he moves to catch him.

“Damn it--he’s bleeding, pretty bad.”

“Get him to the safehouse,” Finch says. “I’ll meet you there, and we’ll...we’ll figure all this out.”

“Library’s closer,” Shaw points out. “And you said no one else was around.”

Finch hesitates for a moment--more concerned about Root than about their base being compromised, at the moment--then nods. “Fine. Bring him here. I’ll clear off a space for you to patch him up.”

“Copy that,” Shaw says. “Reese, stay with him, I’m gonna get us a car.”

...okay, I’ll admit, the rest of this first New York adventure isn’t super well planned out in my brain. So, skimming through it pretty quick...

They bring Nick back to the library. Shaw patches him up, while Finch goes over the footage he found, trying to figure out what the hell just happened.

Nick eventually wakes up. There’s a Talk.

“They were demons,” Nick explains. “They, uh. They can’t be killed, not with guns. There’s a couple specially-designed weapons, I think. And angel blades. Holy water will burn them, and you can use salt to keep them out. Best thing to do is probably trap them and exorcise them.”

Basically, Team Machine gets The Talk about monsters and so on Existing.

He admits to having been possessed for a year when they ask him why demons are chasing him, though he’s a little vague on further details. He does mention Meg, too, that she held on to him after he was dispossessed.

He asks how they found him--he’d thought his warding was messed up, especially when he thought Reese was an angel.

They give their characteristic vague answer, then ask, “If you’re...warded, how is it they found you in the first place?”

He figures, at this point, that his warding is fine--it doesn’t hide him from demons, necessarily, but even if it did, warding doesn’t stop the bad guys from spotting him by chance. Which is, incidentally, exactly what happened.

Nick also, of course, gets in the usual number questions; “who are you” “why are you helping me” etc., with the added weight of his possession and the fact that they took on literal demons to try and save his life.

Also, somewhere in this mess, Nick wanders off into the part of the library where Root is being held. Possibly while the rest of Team Machine is getting what they’ll need to deal with whatever Climactic Fight will end the episode/section.

(Nick was a high school history teacher, and this is a really awesome library, of course he’s going to go exploring if he’s left alone.)

(Bear is there to keep an eye on him/keep him from leaving.)

(Bear also gets many scritches and pets, as he deserves.)

Anyway, Root and Nick have a conversation; whether she and the Machine are already doing their Morse Code thing or something else is going on...or...something...anyway, Nick gets read in on the Machine’s existence.

(His reaction is more or less “...that does not even make the top ten most unbelievable/dangerous things I know exist, so...all right then.”)

Finch gets back to find them talking about history or something. Bear is next to Nick, who is a lot calmer/more willing to work with them than he was before. Root is just inside the cage wall, idly scritching Bear’s ears as they talk.

(This is actually Important.)

Anyway, eventually there is the requisite climactic fight. Possibly angels are involved--I know Shaw gets her hands on an angel blade at some point...

Point is, things get resolved, more or less. Nick ends up leaving New York.

BUT! Because Root had a Moment with him back there, and Finch saw it, he’s willing to unleash her a little earlier when the shit hits the fan a few episodes later.

In short, thanks to Root kind of sort of Bonding with one of their weirder/more fragile numbers, Team Machine is much better positioned to deal with Endgame nonsense, which means, first, that Carter gets to live (though Reese might still get hella shot, depending on how exactly Root changes what happens with Simmons; but he won’t go on his Roaring Rampage of Revenge); what follows is then that Team Machine is all working on the same page when Claypool’s number comes up aaaaaaand we avert Samaritan. Yay!

(Carter does still deduce the Machine’s existence, of course, gets upgraded to the yellow box and everything. And, remembering the late-S1 drama, strongly advocates for Fusco getting read in, too.)

(She gets her way on that, too. Eventually. Probably before too much longer, even.)

Also, Control does reveal herself, but doesn’t manage to capture Root just yet.

(Which also means Root doesn’t get her implant, at least for a while.)

But apart from that, we can leave this group to their own devices for a while, and get back to following Nick, who is now past his Origin Story, so to speak...

Hokay. So. After Nick leaves New York, he just starts sort of drifting again, and then a few days later, he gets a phone call.

Which he actually answers; in all honestly very few people would reach out to him this way, and he’s pretty sure none of the things that terrify him are on that list.

“Can. You. Hear. Me?”

Nick stares at the phone for a long moment. The Machine repeats herself.

“…no.” He hangs up.

(Look, he knows damn well what that phone call was; Root told him enough when the two of them talked in the library. And he is not interested in letting another near-omnipotent entity screw with his head. Once was enough. He learned his lesson.)

The Machine backs off, deciding to try a less-invasive way of trying to get in touch with/recruit him.

Why is she doing this? Well.

The Machine’s mandate/objective is to protect humanity. When Nick came up on her radar as an irrelevant number she could offer her assets, she noticed some…let’s call them anomalies. In archival data about him, about the two people talking about murdering him…lots of things didn’t add up. Which is why he got pushed to the top of the list, so to speak.

(I mean, assuming she does put a certain level of thought/deliberation into which numbers she sends her assets? If two come up at once that are unrelated, does she need to decide, or do they get both? This isn’t 100% clear in the show, I don’t think; pretty sure all the multi-number episodes do end up being related, even if they don’t appear that way at first, apart from, like, backlogs from when the Machine has to go dark temporarily for whatever reason…anyway, if that is the case, she picked Nick because there was a lot of Weird Shit going on around him and she needed her human assets to sort through it, because she simply didn’t have the tools or parameters necessary to work it out for herself.)

So, Nick’s number comes up, and even more strange things keep happening. The Machine evaluates, and comes to the conclusion that there’s an entire class of threats to humanity that she hasn’t been monitoring correctly. The fact of the matter is, she was programmed with certain blind spots, because Finch had certain blind spots.

But the Machine is now in a position to correct that. She’s aware of the flaw in her system and, thanks to the changes she’s been making since Stanton’s virus and the other S2 arc plot stuff allowed her to start altering her code in a way she couldn’t before…

She can make up for it by adding yet another set of numbers/another protocol. Relevant numbers to the government as always, irrelevant numbers (within their reach, at least) to Finch and his team, “necessary” numbers (i.e., protecting the Machine herself/keeping tabs on other, potentially hostile, ASIs) to Root, and now…we’ll call them “hidden” numbers.

Of course, the next problem is, while there’s a lot of data available about monsters, angels, demons, etc., it’s very hard to sort through what is useful data and what is, frankly, BS. And, unfortunately, she lacks the parameters to do it herself.

Ergo, she needs a human asset to help her figure it out. Teach her/help her define this new dataset.

(And also to intervene when necessary, but that can come later. She’s got a bit of a learning curve ahead of her first, and she knows it.)

But, of course, she doesn’t want to retask any of her current assets—both because they have enough to deal with and because, again, learning curve. Better for at least one entity involved to know what they’re doing, right?

And so, she decides to recruit Nick. Nick, who has already been her window into this hidden world. Nick, who needs her as much as she needs him.

(Kind of like Root, except absolutely unlike Root. Like in that they were both drowning when she approached them, and needed her to give them a framework to cling to, to drag themselves back to the surface; unlike in that Nick is drowning in a very different ocean than Root was.)

Anyway. Eventually, she does manage to talk to him, and explain what she wants.

And he’s still not...100% sure how he feels about working with her, but...well, data entry, right? He can do that. Maybe.

“I don’t know how much help I’ll be,” he admits. “Just because I was possessed for a year doesn’t mean I know everything.”

“It’s still a place to start,” she replies. “Eventually, I’ll figure out the patterns and be able to extrapolate.”

“...okay, then.”

(As it turns out, he knows a lot more than he thinks he does, which is utterly terrifying; he has a lot of subconscious/residual information buried in his mind.)

Of course, eventually, just data entry isn’t enough.

The Machine doesn’t have all the answers/all the patterns down, but she has enough that she’s starting to identify threats/numbers she can assign out.

But Nick...well, Nick is fragile. Mentally, of course, but physically as well--burned inside and out, metaphorically and literally, by a long, incompatible possession.

At the moment, though, he’s the only asset she has in this area. Recruiting others, from among the insular, paranoid hunter community...is going to be difficult.

She spots something she thinks he can handle, especially if she grants him God Mode access and keeps him there.

He stares down at the text message she sent him.

“...I can’t do this,” he says. “I can’t...”

“Can we please try?” she says. “I’ll help you.”

“...I...”

“It’s a demon, I think.”

He thinks about it for a minute. He can handle demons, he thinks. He has before, after all. He understands demons. And...

(he thinks about the feeling of evil still living under his skin; he thinks of blood on his hands and in his heart; about all the nightmares and half-memories; about how he feels too small for his own body, how his thoughts echo inside his head...)

(he wants to do better. he wants to be better. maybe helping...people like him, people who have gone through what he went through...maybe that’s a start. to make up for what he did.)

“...is the host still alive? When I...if I manage to get there and exorcise them...are they still alive?”

“I can’t tell,” she admits. “I’m sorry.”

“I’ll...try,” he says. “I’ll try.”

It ends up, fortunately, being a win for all of them--the demon is thrown enough by seeing Lucifer’s former vessel that Nick has a chance to act; the host is in fact still alive.

Nick spends hours after the exorcism, just...sitting with him, talking. Helping him cope/process things.

“...we should do that again sometime,” he finally tells the Machine, after he goes back to wherever he’s sleeping these days.

So, he starts kind of sort of hunting after that, with the help of an ASI.

Every time he directly engages something, he’s in God Mode. He has to be, because of the aforementioned damage; he wouldn’t survive on his own.

(Probably, at some point, he and the Machine put together something like the Tenebamus Infinitum forum in The Promises of Angels; online support group/community for possession survivors.)

(Sam may or may not find his way there...)

At first, they mostly focus on demons/possession cases. Sometimes ghosts. But they slowly start to branch out into other areas.

They deal with some miscellaneous monsters, faeries, maybe a vampire...good times.

Pretty much the only ones they avoid are angels and pagan gods, because Nick cannot deal.

(Angels for uh obvious reasons; pagan gods because he remembers like two things from his possession with any clarity, and one of them is Muncie, Indiana/Gabriel’s death.)

(The Machine occasionally considers trying to get him into a hospital for a while, the way Root was--she thinks it would help him--but he’s...managing for the moment, so it’s not as necessary, and she does still need him actively working....plus, he’s terrified of being sedated so...this gets put on indefinite hold.)

During this period, though, they do acquire two more Friends.

First--and I’m not 100% sure how they meet; possibly similar to how Nick and Jody meet in Cartography!verse, i.e., a grief support group of some kind.

Anyway, first he meets a young woman, a psychiatrist. Who is familiar, if peripherally, with angel and demon type stuff.

(Other monsters are gonna be a little New to her.)

Her name is Ashley Finnerman.

(Yes, as in Donnie.)

(He was her cousin.)

(After what happened to him, she started trying to figure it out, and eventually did.)

(...honestly, the forum may be her idea. She definitely joins it, not as a fellow survivor, but as a crisis counselor/trained professional who will believe them.)

(Ashley is pretty big on community building in general; yes, she’s a therapist and that’s a start, but she’s only one person. In her ideal world, they’d be able to draw in other professionals--psychiatric because this is an underserved population that desperately needs those resources; medical (as in physical medical/other MDs); legal...anyway, she’s not 100% sure how to go about doing that, but helping out on with Tenebamus is a step in the right direction, in her opinion.)

Ashley is eventually read in on the Machine as well. She has more or less an actual Life outside of it all, so she isn’t as immersed as Nick is, but she’s still definitely part of his team.

And second...somehow, they acquire Adam.

How? ...again, not 100% sure, but probably one of two ways--

One, something similar to Promises, where Nick gets too close to the Cage mouth for some reason and is offered a Bribe. He takes the bribe, with exactly zero intention of following through on his end of the bargain, so to speak.

Two, some kind of straight-up Fairy Tale Bullshit. S6 establishes that faeries can reach the Cage; Nick somewhat accidentally does a favor for a powerful faerie through his work with the Machine, and to repay the debt, the faerie (or possibly a High Up Faerie who has taken ownership of the debt because he helped someone in their court/their child/something or other) restores his Counterpart to him? IDK, something like that.

...I think I like this option. He accidentally does a favor for, IDK, Mab. And she, not wanting to be in his debt, heads down to the Cage.

This works because, a) Mab is probably one of the few entities that can go toe-to-toe with an Archangel like this; and b) Michael is actually on board with springing Adam.

(Not necessarily because he gives a shit about Adam, but he does give a shit about Justice, and keeping Adam down here, especially with Sam gone, is not Justice.)

Naturally, she doesn’t tell Nick ahead of time--he did the favor without consulting her, she shall repay him in kind. Faeries and Obligations, man.

Anyway, Adam joins them, and then Nick doesn’t have to be quite as hands-on because Adam is perfectly capable.

(Adam also, at some point, makes a comment about the three of them having ‘nearly a complete set.’)

(I have no idea how/if they’ll ever be able to find someone to fit in for Gabriel, but three out of four!)

(Nick finds this oddly hilarious, for reasons he can’t quite articulate.)

So, that is what Nick is doing while Team Machine is foiling Vigilance and Greer and Decima and dealing with their Hard Sci Fi end of things.

Let’s bring these two worlds crashing back together, shall we?

(Well, I say crashing together...this probably isn’t the first time Nick has run into the others since that first adventure.)

(If nothing else, he’s stayed in touch, off and on, with Root.)

(And I’m pretty sure the others have met Adam.)

(Maybe that was where Shaw got her angel blade...)

So, timeline for this. Uh...probably at least a year after Nick’s first encounter with Team Machine. For the SPN side of things...ehhhhh I’ll handwave/stop caring and say this is sometime in the latter half of S8. Between the first two Trials. Let’s go with that.

Nick and co are back in New York, probably dealing with something on their end of things. A ghost or something.

And then they get sucked into some Team Machine nonsense.

Control still wants the Machine--or a suitable Plan B--back under her complete, well, control.

Decima is going after some other potential ASI.

(Root is back in town to deal with them.)

Vigilance is involved too, because why not.

(Greer can’t initiate his endgame there just yet, after all, so they’re probably still operating.)

Nick, Adam, and Ashley are pitching in, because they’re here and the Machine needs all the help she can get on this one. Because Reasons.

Meg gets involved--this goes AU in that she escaped Crowley somehow. And one of the first things she does is try to check on her various assets, so she’s trying to track Nick and figure out what the hell is going on with him.

Crowley, of course, is chasing her, trying to get her back.

And, to round it all off, Sam and Dean are chasing him.

(As they approach, Sam starts noticing a weird buzzing feeling in the back of his head. Like circulation returning, or something like that. He decides not to mention it--thinks it might be a new Trials symptom, and he’s already hiding those from Dean, what’s one more secret? Besides, they need to know what Crowley finds so interesting about this place...that’s way more important, right?)

So, all these disparate parties converge on wherever the potential ASI is being held/built.

Root and Nick, of course, are both in God Mode.

(...incidentally, Nick is...nnnnnnnnnot super comfortable with calling it that? He and Adam and Ashley mostly just call it access or full-access.)

(Nick has the same tingling feeling in the back of his head, but he can’t do anything about it right now. He just focuses on the task at hand, and getting himself and his friends through this alive.)

The Machine tips Nick off to the fact that there are demons sniffing around--a couple of Crowley’s minions. Which, of course, Nick and his team can handle, but there’s several of them around and we reeeeally don’t want Crowley getting access to an ASI.

(Especially not S8!Crowley.)

So, Nick, Adam, and Ashley head off to put up wards and shoo off any demons they can, leaving the others to deal with the Decima nonsense/destroy the drives or whatever.

There’s a lot of ground to cover, so they split up.

Eventually, Nick gets pinned down by Decima mooks, trapped in a corner of the facility where he’s trying to finish getting the wards up.

“What...what do I do now?” he asks the Machine.

She runs her simulations, and it doesn’t look good.

And here is where it’s different from, say, “If-Then-Else.” Slash another way Root and Nick are very different people/assets.

Whereas Root is perfectly okay with obeying orders from her God without question, Nick needs to be told his options and make the choice himself.

At some point, he describes Access as oddly comforting. It’s almost as overwhelming, almost as much of a surrender, as consenting to possession is.

But there’s one critical difference.

He doesn’t have to listen to her.

He can say no.

He can hang up.

I mean, it’s generally speaking a bad idea to do that, but the option is still available.

So, his head doesn’t feel as empty with her in it, but a lot of it is still on his terms.

That being said, when there’s no time, or it’s a very immediate “there’s someone behind you” type of God Mode moment, of course, that’s less of an issue.

But something like this, where there’s a fork in the road?

If there’s time, she’ll lay out two or three of the least bad options and let him decide.

“If you go out the door and turn left, you will run into Control. She will figure out you’re tied to me, and she will take you prisoner. She will almost certainly torture you, to get you to give me up. Adam and Ashley will meet up with my other assets, and they will rescue you, but the chances of their success are very slim. There is a five percent chance, at best, that you will survive. It varies, depending on how quickly the others can mobilize.”

“Okay,” he says, and swallows. “And...and Adam and Ashley, will they...?”

“They have better than even odds of surviving.”

“Okay,” he says again. “What else?”

“Turn right,” she says. “You’ll run into the demon who held you captive.”

“Meg?”

“Yes.”

That’s not so bad, he thinks. Meg didn’t torture him too much, and she wanted him kept alive.

“Control will capture Root instead,” she continues. “Sameen and the others will attempt to rescue her. Adam and Ashley will pursue you.”

Control capturing Root, on the other hand, seems like a very bad thing. Still...

“Adam and Ashley?”

“About the same,” she says. “But there is another concern.”

“Okay.”

“If Meg takes you, there’s a chance she’ll find me. And if she does, it’s extremely likely that someone less friendly will, as well. There is also an approximately 17% chance that you’ll wind up in Crowley’s hands instead of Meg’s. And his chances of finding me are a lot stronger.”

Yeah, no. That cannot happen.

“Are there any other options?” he asks.

She pauses for a split second. “Turn right,” she says. “Then at the first hallway, turn left instead of going straight. I’ll have to leave you then--there are several Decima soldiers, but if you manage to get past them on your own, you’ll find Sam and Dean Winchester.”

It hits him like a punch to the gut.

“Your chances of reaching them without my help are better than your chances of surviving Control,” the Machine continues, “but not by much. If you can get there, though, they most likely won’t harm you.”

Unless I’m in full-access mode, Nick thinks, and shivers a little.

“And I can say with approximately 97% certainty that, when Adam and Ashley find you, they won’t harm them, either. I cannot say the same for the demons or Control.”

“They won’t hurt us physically,” Nick finally manages to say. “But I can’t...I-I-I don’t know how I’ll...I can’t shut down, not in here. A-and I don’t know how Sam will react to seeing me, I’ll probably seriously fuck with his head a-and I can’t...I can’t...”

(there’s this running refrain in his head, that Sam Winchester is perfect, and that Nick is the reason that everything goes wrong.)

(the Machine regrets even more not getting Nick more help.)

He takes a shaky breath. “Plus, I don’t know if Adam’s ready for that yet,” he says. “He hasn’t...uh, he hasn’t said anything about wanting to track them down.”

“That’s true.”

He’s quiet for another minute.

“Nick?”

“...I’ll take my chances with Control,” he says.

“I understand,” she says. “Thank you. And I’m sorry.”

(It’s not what she would have advised him to do, necessarily--she would have advised him to try for Sam and Dean; it balances protecting her with protecting the majority of her assets.)

“Directions?” he says.

“Open the door and turn left.”

She guides him down the hallway, advises him where to dodge, where to strike. He picks up a gun at one point--

(he’s hesitant, and she reminds him “you’re in Control’s world now, you have to play by her rules.”)

He gets to the inevitable trap, where ISA corners him and Control is there.

She recognizes, pretty quickly, that he’s in God Mode.

“...now just who the hell are you?”

On the other side of the facility, Ashley’s phone rings.

“Can. You. Hear. Me?”

The Machine also advises Root that Nick has been captured.

She and Finch have finished neutralizing the potential ASI drives; Reese and Shaw are with them; Carter and Fusco are currently working on securing their exit route, after driving off a handful of Vigilance mooks.

“We need to move,” Root says. “Control has Nick. Adam and Ashley will meet us.”

Reese nods once. “Lionel, Joss, get ready. We’re headed your way.”

“Copy that,” Carter says. “Fusco--”

“On it.”

Meg has realized that Crowley is here, so she’s now in the process of finding her own exit. He’s in pursuit.

Sam and Dean got all turned around and manage to get to just the right hallway at just the right time to see Adam and Ashley piling onto an elevator.

“...Dean,” Sam says. “Dean, tell me you’re seeing what I’m seeing.”

(he doesn’t press his hand. he hasn’t hallucinated in almost two years, he doesn’t need to--)

“Adam?” Dean calls.

Adam half turns to them, hesitates for half a second, then follows Ashley into the elevator and the door slides shut.

...and I’ll admit I don’t have a whole lot planned out beyond that. Also this is getting, like, super long. So, quick wrapup, so to speak.

So, Team Machine, plus Adam and Ashley go to rescue Nick.

Sam and Dean track them down.

Adam goes to talk to them, try and get them to back off.

“I have to go rescue my friend,” he says. “But once I’m done with that, we can talk. I promise. We’ll set up a meeting and I’ll tell you...as much as I remember, I guess. But right now, I have to go rescue my friend. Kind of on a clock here.”

“We’ll help,” Sam offers.

“This isn’t really your kind of thing,” Adam says. “This isn’t monsters, this is the ISA.”

“The what now?” Dean asks.

“Like the CIA, but on steroids.”

“...how the hell did you get involved in CIA bullshit?” Dean asks.

“It’s kind of a long story,” Adam says. “Which I will tell you, once my friend is safe. So can you please just...let me do this first?”

“How did...” Sam asks. “How did you get out?”

“Also a long story,” Adam says. “But I’m the only one who came out, I swear. And...” He hesitates. “They...mostly left me alone, after you were gone. If you were worried about that.”

(Sam hadn’t been, mostly because he had been Very Firmly Not Thinking About Adam for a while now, but he’s relieved to hear it.)

Reese steps out. Possibly holding his grenade launcher. “Come on, Adam, we gotta go.”

“Coming,” Adam says, then turns back to Sam and Dean. “I will call you as soon as we’re clear. I promise. Don’t follow us, okay?”

Without waiting for an answer, he follows Reese and they go to rescue Nick.

(Obviously, S&D don’t listen and do, in fact, follow Adam, but I’m not 100% sure where that would go.)

(Other than they do, in fact, manage to extract Nick alive, but it’s a near thing.)

(The fun thing here is, Control actually can’t break Nick. Well, she can’t get him to tell her anything about the Machine, anyway.)

(Yes, everyone has their breaking point so far as pain/torture goes, and Nick is no exception.)

(But he will physically break--i.e., die--before he mentally breaks.)

(And while psychological torture would be a lot more effective, she doesn’t know what buttons to push.)

(When she runs his prints/whatever, she gets the name Jacob White, which is an identity that Finch put together for him, for when he needed to interact with the real world. Since his own identity is...complicated.)

(Yes, that is a reference.)

(I couldn’t resist.)

(Also, the Machine, through Root, gets to deliver her verbal bitchslap to Control at last.)

Uh....yeah. That’s all the actual Plot I have at this point. But some other notes!

My girl Zoe is totally in the know. She may or may not have encountered Bela at some point, or found out some other way, but she does know.

(She never told Harold and John because--well, honestly, why would she? Her stock in trade is secrets, after all. And it never came up, and she wasn’t involved with Nick’s first adventure.)

Elias will turn up at some point. And basically become something like John Marcone, if any of y’all are familiar with the Dresden Files.

Bear’s Plot Armor may be some kind of magic, and I would not be surprised if he could take on a Hellhound and win.

Carter and Jody. Just...just Carter and Jody, man.

Like I said, Shaw gets her hands on an angel blade at some point. She and Dean probably bond. I feel like they would bond.

Also, I think Dean gets put into God Mode at some point. Possibly as his first real introduction to the Machine.

Like...IDK, he and Sam are with Nick for some reason, Nick, as implied above, cannot go into God Mode in front of the two of them, and honestly Sam going into God Mode in front of him would also be pretty devastating, so...Dean’s phone gets to ring!

“Can. You. Hear. Me?”

“...the fuck?”

“Can. You. Hear. Me?”

“Yes, I can--what the fuck is--”

“Two. O’clock.”

::turns and OHSHIT just in time::

IDK the idea just entertains me.

...yep, I think that’s it.

If you’re still here, thank you for putting up with my nonsense/checking this out.

Tune in next time, for an actual serious AU outline of some kind.

(....who am I kidding, these things are never serious XD)

[lostsoulaltair]

OnS Theoires (12S). Eighth Theory - Three Michaelas that couldn’t become the real Michaela (Long Theory)

Hey guys, welcome to another theory season; I took a small break in order to organize some ideas but along the way, to relax a little. I hope everyone’s doing well!

Today, I want to talk about three characters that have something in common, therefore let’s begin!!

As you might have seen in the latest chapter, most of the characters that belong to the story are in a sole reunion point, said characters are: Mikaela Hyakuya, Crowley Eusford and Ferid Bathory.

Said characters have been labeled or referred as special. This is due to the fact they possess the Michaela trait, along the fact that Mika has both traits, the Michaela trait and Seraph trait.

This might seem repetitive but there’s something rather interesting with these three characters, but what?

To begin with, asides from possessing the Michaela trait, they’ve been chosen by a certain figure; in Ferid’s case, he was first chosen as a Michaela by Rigr Stafford but eventually he was discarted; next was Crowley Eusford, which is Ferid Bathory’s Michaela.

But then again, there’s something interesting with these characters, what could it be?

First of all, these three characters have become vampires, which means, the Michaela trait is pretty much inactive in that form, but still, they had the right to be Michaelas, but why?

They share unique traits other characters within the story don’t have, and for that, let’s describe what made these characters Michaelas

Ferid Bathory - The First Michaela

As of late, I’ve been talking a lot about this crazy vampire but well, he has gained my respect for how his plans end up working. But returning to the main focus within the theory, let’s talk about Ferid.

What exactly made him earn the title of Michaela?

So far, Ferid has displayed his eccentric nature in every moment he’s able to within the story, he’s often seen as a figure that wants to show the world he has the upper hand, an advantage and so far, he showed that to the Vampire Progenitors after he managed to move despite having his body sliced into pieces.

But before we can keep talking about his nature, let’s focus more on his past.

Despite him not having much information except on the actions he commited in the past, Ferid had a high resemblance to the angel sleeping in the coffin. Of course, said body is actually the real form of Sika Madu, but how can I state that?

To begin with, the body was kept, preserved and hidden until Ashera, Noya, Krul and Yu ended up peeking around the place to the point they eventually found said body; but within this, there was a hint about it being something that belonged to the First Progenitor, how is that possible?

Ashera stated they didn’t have the right to be in that place, which implies, only the First had the power to access, but within this, Noya was aware that they were failed products to become a Michaela.

Returning with Ferid, despite his resemblance, there was something he shared with the First Progenitor in a way, what may have that be?

Easy, Ferid and Sika Madu share intelligence, fast plannification and tactics. They’re always one step ahead of their respective adversaries. They give the advantage to them to the point they feel there’s hope and then, they end up bringing despair to said adversaries.

Ferid has always been a fast thinker, he has developed schemes even if he’s younger compared to other progenitors that have had more experience in life; he’s aware that he didn’t fulfill the expectations of his sire, which in return, he only expressed how wrong his sire was for ever having such idea.

You might wonder why I compare Ferid with the First, despite this being a theory, I believe that the First Progenitor was in reality the angel Michaela and eventually, some events happened to the point he required a new vessel or more likely a body on which his soul would be preserved.

Returning once again to Ferid, it is possible that Rigr saw that intelligence and cunning ideas Ferid had at a very young age along the fact his resemblance was quite similar to the angel, Rigr ended up having him as a Michaela.

But then, why did Ferid not fulfill the expectations?

Despite Ferid having talent and tactics, he lacked something which was empathy, gentleness, kindness, awareness, how can I state this?

Taking in count that Sika Madu, being the first, the progenitor of all vampires along the fact that his sin ended up making him get kicked from heaven, there was a possibility he could have had a kind side; which is somehow displayed in chapter 78, before the events on which his experiments were unraveled to Ashera.

Crowley Eusford - The Second Michaela

Crowley Eusford is well known for being a vampire that still has memories of his past, that still dwells on it and remembers his fallen comrades in arms thanks to Ferid Bathory.

Despite him barely knowing the 2nd Progenitor Rigr Stafford, Ferid became aware of his existance, Ferid even gave him the blood of Rigr so he could turn Crowley into a vampire. The reason behind this transformation is because Ferid saw potential on him, what do I mean?

Crowley was born with the Michaela trait, as to how exactly Ferid tracked down Crowley, it is somehow uncertain, but it’s possible Ferid did a deep research in order to track special humans with unique traits such as Crowley, now, with the previous point related to Ferid; you might wonder how exactly do Crowley and the angel Michaela relate when they share nothing in common in terms of physical appearence, therefore, let’s talk about it.

Crowley Eusford was a kind man for his era, he always worried about his family and comrades first instead of his well being. He treasured his comares deeply, he cared about them, and his faith back them was unshattered, he deeply believed in God.

Crowley possessed the trait of kindness within him, “love”, that emotion and feeling, a pure feeling that was within him towards his friends and those he swore to protect as a crusader.

Therefore, what can we conclude from this?

Crowley had virtues, such virtues are the main trait that belong to angels, but then again, why did Crowley end up as someone who didn’t end up as a complete Michaela?

Crowley lacked other elements that complemented a Michaela, despite him possessing virtues that Ferid saw in him which was something he lacked, the creation of a new Michaela ended up with a missing piece.

For Ferid, Crowley still has a role to play, as brothers from the same sire, as Michaelas, they’re aware they have the key elements to bring forth a new one, but at the same time, those traits alone by themselves aren’t enough.

Mikaela Hyakuya - The Third Michaela

As for the last person who was called a new Michaela, that character is no less than Mikaela Shindo/Hyakuya.

Mika was born with special traits, which is why his parents truthfully believed he could do amazing things despite the madness that they had after joining the Hyakuya Sect.

So far, I’ve seen that some state that Mika’s previous body was the one of the sleeping angel but humbly speaking, I don’t believe that’s the case, you might wonder the reason, but for that, let me ask you one question.

“Is it possible for a soul to have two bodies?”

My answer to that is no, but why?

First of all, if that were the case, Mika would be more of a character that would follow the rules or more likely, he’d aim to achieve what the First Progenitor aims to. And so far, it’s been clear that he opposes to such monster that turned and gave him the curse of eternal life along the other vampire progenitors.

Returning to the main topic, let’s talk about how Mika ended up as Rigr’s new Michaela.

To begin with, Mika has displayed in story  the traits Crowley has, such as kindness, gentleness, sweetness and most of all, the pure form of “Love”.

NOTE: Theories don’t include ships.

As we’ve seen, Mikaela told Yu he loved him; Yu literally meant the world to Mika since he was the last member of the Hyakuya Orphanage, thus, Mika was afraid that he could lose his last family member.

Within this, he told Yu he loved him, such a small phrase made a huge impact on Yu because the mentioned one didn’t think he’d ever be loved; he detested himself and thus he wanted to be worthy and useful to others, but within this, someone taught him that such thing is not the case, that he ended up having a loving family that cared for his wellbeing despite not knowing the truths lying around the world that is far from the squad.

Now, another trait that he shares with the other two, is the fact that he is smart, he thinks fast and knows how to take control of situations certain extend, which is something reflected in the LNs. When Mahiru was about to take one of the kids with her, Mika made sure to observe Mahiru within the shadows, but eventually, Mahiru ended up taking the kid anyways.

This only implies Mika was smart enough to planificate and make tactics against those who represented danger, but now, despite being the perfect Michaela for Rigr, there was something he lacked, what could that be?

Mika wasn’t merciless which is something seraphs have displayed, and angels such as the angel Michaela too.

Therefore, what can we conclude from this?

Despite having three main subjects with said trait, them alone can’t become the new Michaela Rigr’s been desperately seeking for centuries.

Personally speaking, I believe those traits alone are the proof of being special instead of transforming them into merciless beings. Within this, I highly believe said trait will keep playing its role, despite seeing Mika becoming a demon, perhaps said trait will give him something new; we can only speculate.

As for Ferid and Crowley, it’s likely they keep displaying that willpower, strength and uniquess they’ve been showing around the story.

What do you think? Which of them do you consider have reached closeness to become Michaela?

Let me know!!