#yes hello everyone have a 20k nightmare!

[tragidean]

ocean front property [20.5k] (ao3)

A familiar mop of red hair stands on the porch, arms folded over her burgundy dress. She looks less than pleased, even at a distance, her scowl more recognizable than her face. “Darling,” Rowena calls from halfway across the clearing. She doesn’t make an attempt to move, and Dean doesn’t blame her. “I was in the middle of my mid-afternoon bath, and you—Oh, Tweety.”

Rowena runs—or, walks briskly, really—to meet Dean. He can’t stop walking, not now—not until he gets Castiel inside. “Walk, walk,” Dean says, automatic, and Rowena follows.

“I don’t know why, but I feel like apologies are in order,” she says, but Dean shakes his head. It’s not her fault. She tried to help with location spells and her own brand of magic, but nothing came of it. “How did you find him?”

Dean doesn’t answer. Doesn’t know if he can, actually. Rowena walks ahead, mud decorating the soles of her heels, and holds the door open, allowing Dean through. He could put Castiel on the dining table, but the couch is closer, and probably more comfortable. The minute Dean sets Castiel down—the minute he loses contact—he collapses to his knees, held upright only by Rowena’s steady hands.

“Easy, easy,” she soothes, helping him sit. The room spins. An inhuman sob rips its way free from his lungs. “It’s alright, handsome. You brought him back.”

“I cut off his wings,” Dean croaks. Tears scorch his face; all he wants to do is drown in them. “I cut him down, and he fell, and—”

Rowena shushes him with a soft breath. Kneeling, she pulls him against her, his head pressing into the front of her dress. She’s warm, so unlike Castiel, so unlike his heart, now shattered like the wings he left behind. “You did what you had to,” she says, petting through his hair. “I’d do the same, if it were someone I loved.”

Love. Love. What Dean feels isn’t love. It goes beyond that, deeper, richer. Castiel is tattooed on his body and soul, and now he’s dying, and Dean can’t live without him.

Reluctantly, Dean pulls away from Rowena’s embrace and looks at Castiel’s body, at the near-invisible rise and fall of his chest. Gently—more tender than Dean has ever seen her—Rowena takes one of Castiel’s hands and turns his palm. Her brow furrows, lips pursed in thought. “How did you find him again, dear?”

Dean rests his forehead against the couch cushion, closing his eyes. Light hurts—breathing, even worse. “I’ve been having… visions,” he admits, for the first time in months. Not even Sam knows, and the last time he met up with Rowena, he had wanted to say something. “I’ve just felt… cold, ever since he left, and I keep seeing shit, things I can’t even describe, like… One minute, I’ll be standing somewhere, and the next, I’m in a void, and there’s screaming, and wings, and… And last week, I got a call. Someone said they found him, but when I got here, ‘found’ turned into ‘holding him captive,’ and I got… Two demons tried to kill me.” A breath. “They said they had him, and I believed them.”

Low, Rowena hums, then tsks. “I trust you killed them?”

“Course,” Dean mutters. “Not before they tried to rip out my kidney.”

“That saves me from having to interrogate them myself,” Rowena chirps. “My methods are a bit more unorthodox, as you’ve seen.”

Of course Dean has seen—Rowena sicced Castiel on him over a year ago, and nearly killed him in the process. “You know what they mean? The…” He waves at Castiel’s hand.

“It’s a binding spell,” Rowena confirms, although slightly unsure. “It’s old magic, though. Older than my time, I’m afraid.” She pauses and holds both of Castiel’s hands, observing the marks side by side. Her face sours, just what Dean wants to see. “Oh, this is a cruel one.”

Great—just great. All at once, the breath leaves his lungs, and the worst settles into his brain. This is it—Castiel really is dying, and there’s no way he can bring him back, not this time. God and Amara are hands off, and no amount of prayer will convince them to resurrect an angel just because Dean wants them to. “Rowena, don’t make me beg.”

“I hate to rip the Band-aid off, dearie, but there’s no cure.”

Just like that—in those few words, Dean’s life might as well be over. All of the words left unsaid slip through his fingers, out of his grasp. The last words he ever heard Castiel speak were in a graveyard—and Dean might as well have buried him months ago, and he never said goodbye. “There’s gotta be something,” he croaks, burying his face in the cushions. He can’t look at her. If he tries, he might scream, or fight her, or break, like he’s always feared. “Some way to reverse it. Hell, call Crowley, he’d probably—”

“He knows nothing of this,” Rowena snaps, then corrects herself. “Fergus was never an angel. Neither was I, but I can read the tomes. I understand things ordinary witches could never even dream, and these runes, they’re meant to rot his body. They’ve contained his Grace so that by the time he freed himself, he wouldn't have a body to go back to.” She lowers her hand, petting through Dean’s hair. “The most I can do is break the runes. It might help if you let him touch you, just so he knows you’re there.”

“There’s nothing you can do?” Dean asks, brittle. He looks up, but not much higher than Castiel’s chest. Rowena must pity him, or else she wouldn't be here. There’s nothing for her to gain out of this, other than watching an angel die. He can’t die, Dean thinks. His tears might as well be flames, burning trails down his face. “You can’t just—You can’t just sit there and let him die, he didn’t—”

“I don’t want him to die any more than you.” Kneeling, Rowena taps her nails to his cheeks. “But you have to face the fact that he might not survive. If you have any amends to make, I’d say them now while he can hear you.”

Rowena doesn’t waste time. Part of Dean is grateful, while the other half wishes she never answered him. Dean offers her his knife and watches her draw a sigil into each hand and foot, counteracting the marks engraved into his skin. The lines spark and close, leaving behind unblemished skin. Still, Castiel sleeps, never once making a sound, even after Rowena offers her condolences and leaves.

Hunger grips Dean’s stomach. Yet, he can’t fathom ever eating again, or doing anything other than holding Castiel’s hand in his own. Dean kisses his fingertips, his breath little more than a shudder. “You gotta come back to me,” he whispers, his words shattered. “You can’t leave me like this. I was—I was gonna come back to you. Me and Amara, we worked it out, and I was coming home. I was gonna tell you, and Sam said you were just… You disappeared. And I tried so hard to find you, I did everything I could.

“You've gotta believe me, man.” Dean shudders. An idea crosses his mind. Quickly, he jerks up his shirt sleeve and grabs Castiel’s wrist, pressing Castiel’s palm to the silvered mark branded into his shoulder. But nothing happens—that, more than anything, breaks Dean’s heart that last final inch. “Don’t do this to me. We had time, we had…”

Don’t make me lose you, his soul cries. Castiel doesn’t answer, and Dean bows his head, slumped into the couch. I love you too much to watch you die.

continue reading on ao3

[cntrspll]

this is a love letter to my own fic

hi hello hey, this is an essay about my own fic and the feelings i have about it. fic can be found here.

i am going to try so hard to keep this organized but i don’t know how well that will work soooo let’s go!

on the fic overall:

i just... like magnus. i think he is a fan fave for a reason, but i think there’s a lot of missing discussion of his post-canon situation and the development thereafter. when i finished listening to balance for the first time (in february-ish this year, i think?), i remember being super frustrated with where parts of the fandom had landed their focus. this isn’t an uncommon fandom thing, and i totally get where it comes from. some characters are just super relatable and a lot of fun to write about and have like absolute piles of stuff to unpack, so it’s totally fair that some characters get more focus than others, but where i felt that some of my faves got a lot of fandom focus, others... didn’t.

so this fic was in part an attempt to rectify that, because i wasn’t finding the unpacking of magnus and his emotional / mental state that i wanted. that being said, there are a couple fics that i did draw a little bit of inspiration from, the biggest probably being patterns of migration by goodnicepeople. the depiction of magnus as this big strong dude who also has these quiet vulnerabilities that he doesn’t like admitting to people is like, in part just really accurate to canon, but also something that i really wanted to see explored more, and i didn’t find a whole lot of other fics that fit that, so in part i just wanted to set out to put a little more into that.

also, like, i work in food service, and we are in a pandemic, and i moved in the middle of this year and i started hrt this year and have been dealing with the fallout of coming out and just kind of everything, and this fic was a really good way of just like, distracting myself from everything and sitting down for a little every day and thinking about something else and not so much about everything that was happening around me. so there is a good part of this fic that is just like, me coping with everything and trying to reorient myself a little. and it worked pretty well for that!

on process:

ok first things first, this was never meant to be 133k long. when i first sat down to write this, it was going to be a handful of snapshots set across [undetermined amount of time here] of magnus dealing with isolation and insomnia, and it was only meant to be like, maybe a 20k oneshot? that obviously did not happen. i think my original estimate once i accepted that this was gonna be multichaptered was like 60-70k, but then the chapters started getting longer with each one i finished, and then i wanted to add in an interlude, and then i decided i needed an epilogue, and here we are.

i’ll talk about this in other sections too, but as i wrote, i just kept finding more and more things that i wanted to talk about. i was also in the process of relistening to balance i was writing, and i kept running into little things that happened over the course of the show that i was like... oh shit! and that would inspire another scene or an interaction i wanted to write or something i wanted to focus more on, and the whole thing just kept getting more and more and bigger and bigger.

i’ve said it like 50 thousand times now, but i have never written anything this long before. i tried really hard to be regimented about the way i did it, because from the beginning i knew this was going to be an emotional journey for me to write, but i knew that if i let it slide for a week or so then i would never finish it. so to get through it, i wrote almost every day for a minimum of an hour. the process that i’ve found works best for me when i’m writing is using word sprints, putting on some music, and then forcing myself to tune out of social media and everything else for 25 minutes. i try to do between 750-1k words in that time period, then the site gives you a five minute break, during which i usually check twitter or fact check if i need to, and then i go back in and do another sprint. this works really well for me because i wasn’t trying to hit a specific word goal in any given day, just like... trying to sit down and write. i also tried not to guilt myself too much if i missed a day, or if i only did one sprint instead of two, or anything like that, and that’s kind of what helped me get through the whole monster without instantly dropping it as soon as i had another idea.

on mental health and recovery:

so one of my big personal pet peeves in fiction is the idea that trauma recovery is like, a one time single event deal. like, someone has this big horrible thing happen to them or they have some pressing mental health issue and then someone else walks in and they have one conversation and bam, everything is fine. i was exposed to a lot of [fan]fiction when i was younger that kind of supported this kind of narrative, and i get that there is a certain sort of wish fulfillment thing to that, but it also sucks, being an adult and having Problems(TM) and knowing that it absolutely does not work like that.

so when i set out to write a fic about trauma and mental illness and recovery, i felt kind of a responsibility to not fall into that trap and write it like, okay and then magnus and taako talk about it and taako’s like hey dude you’re depressed but it’s okay and then magnus doesn’t have nightmares anymore. also, because this is taz and the canon of like, historical accuracy is complete bullshit, i can put therapists and psychiatry and psychiatric medications in my fic and no one can tell me i’m wrong and it doesn’t exist. elevators exist, so i can make ssris and anti anxiety pills exist.

but also, magnus as a character is not going to jump into that right away. it is canon fact that he doesn’t like accepting or asking for help with stuff like this, and yes there are a couple big moments where he does, but like i bring up a couple times in the fic, mental health struggles are a big jump from like, a physical fight using swords and axes and shit. and this i think is really accurate to a lot of people’s struggles with mental illness, just taking that first step and admitting that you don’t feel okay, and that you need someone’s help to deal with it. that’s super super scary even to admit to like, your closest friends.

so that’s why magnus kind of shies away a number of times from some of the conversations that people try to start with him about mental health. taako and carey and lucretia and pretty much everyone else approach him at some point about opening up about this stuff, but he pulls away because admitting that kind of vulnerability to someone else is super scary, even if you’ve maybe admitted it to yourself already.

i also wanted to make sure that at the end of the fic, he wasn’t magically better. this is something else that i think people kind of forget, like... trauma and the problems that it causes don’t go away just because of therapy and medication. those things help, they help you reform the ways you think about yourself and about the world, but they don’t change the struggles you’ve been through or the sometimes biological problems that are causing whatever issue you’re having. and i remember reading a lot of fic when i was a kid where someone would be depressed, and then they’d fall in love and get magic dick or something and then they’d never be sad again, which... isn’t great.

but at the same time, i didn’t want it to end on this note like, oh everything is still bad even though he worked so hard to open up and get help, because that sucks, too. so it was really important to me that the fic end on a hopeful note, like, magnus isn’t cured. he still has bad days and bad weeks and sometimes he is just as low as he was before, but he also has like, normal days, which is something that i think you kind of forget can even exist when you’re depressed, or when you’re dealing with any mental illness. but like, i really wanted it to be obvious that things did get better and even if he’s still coping with it and it’s not going away, he’s okay. he’s gonna be all right.

on an unreliable narrator:

this kind of plays into some of the mental health stuff, but one thing that i love about taz that i really wanted to play into with this fic is the idea of limited perspective. griffin does some really cool fucking things with this, specifically in relation to the ipre and the big reveal in the last lunar interlude, with the idea of like... a character can only know the things that they know. like, magnus knows that there is a picture of him depicted as a red robe, and barry knows that they’re all red robes, and taako knows that they found the umbra staff next to a red robed skeleton and that the umbrella spelled out lup at one point, but none of them necessarily know all the things that the other person knew, and none of them know all the things that lucretia knows or that fisher knows or junior knows, etc etc.

unfortunately, just because the pace of the story picks up so much in that last lunar interlude, there isn’t a whole lot of space to explore that like, disconnect between all these facts that they each have as individuals. and given the perspective of mental health and the way that plays into your perceptions of yourself and your perceptions of other people’s perceptions, i really wanted to delve into like… magnus’s misunderstandings.

this is not a strictly straightforward unreliable narrator situation, but i did bring in some elements of that. i really wanted to explore the disconnect between how magnus sees and how everyone else sees him and his issues. there are also a couple moments where he flat out completely misinterprets their intentions, which unfortunately i didn’t delve into as much as i wanted to so they ended up mostly being fun easter eggs for, uh… me? i guess?

one of those moments is the scene in ch 4 where barry and magnus are sitting in the kitchen and barry starts to ask magnus something. magnus assumes it’s going to be about his mental health, and that this is barry stepping up as representative for everyone else to talk to him about it, but it’s really meant to be a precursor to their conversation in ch 6 where they talk about barry and lup and marriage and proposals.

magnus gets a little perspective on this later, i think in ch 7(?) where he’s thinking about how maybe their lives don’t completely revolve around him and he’s missing some of their perspective. but like, they all have their own shit going on, and they all love him and they’re worried about him, but also, barry is thinking about lup. lup is thinking about taako. taako is thinking about lucretia. lucretia is thinking about davenport, and davenport is thinking about his own issues, and so on and so on and they’re not all just like… waiting to pounce on magnus the second he shows weakness.

a lot of that plays into the hypervigilance of ptsd, too. magnus is very aware of any perceived threat, and he sometimes treats the people around him as threats, when all they’re doing in reality is thinking like, man i wish he didn’t live out here by himself all the time.

on a more meta note, i also have a tendency to make every character i write just like, a super good judge of character. i don’t think magnus is that, and i really wanted to lean into that. magnus does not read intention super well, even when that intention is genuinely good.

on the ipre and their relationships:

so i… really don’t write gen fic a lot. even when i do, it is almost always tinged with a little bit of background shipping, and there is some of that in this, but whereas in most fandoms i end up being a multishipper, for some reason with taz i’ve ended up pretty much only caring about the canon ships (sorry…). that being said, the platonic relationships in taz (and especially in balance) are some of the most compelling and important fictional relationships that i’ve ever encountered. like, they are just really well fucking done.

this being the magnus love letter that it is, i really wanted to focus on magnus’s distinct relationships with every member of the ipre crew. i don’t know how obvious this is in the actual narrative, but with the exception of the interlude and the epilogue, the story is broken down into one chapter for each member of the starblaster crew (in order, magnus, taako, merle, davenport, barry, lucretia, lup). i did this specifically because it was really important to me that i dive into all of them and their particular issues. i didn’t quite get the deep dive with merle or davenport that i would’ve liked to, but hopefully in the future i’ll get more time to explore that.

anyway, in case it isn’t obvious, lup is probably my favorite fictional character literally ever in any media created by anyone in the history of time. i say this only because a lot of this fic was set up to build to the conversation between her and magnus in ch 8 out on the mountain where he finally opens up for the first time. there are some really incredible unexplored parallels and relationships in taz (unexplored mainly because like, where would it even fit in canon), and while some of them are super self indulgent (ie, lup and mags, barry and mags), i really really really wanted to dig into those a little more. things like the conversation where taako is talking about everyone brushing over his trauma to rush to forgive lucretia, or lucretia talking about trying to learn to love writing again and recognize happy moments, davenport almost admitting that he’s not completely sure about stepping back into the family in his former role… i could write an entire fic on any of these, really.

but ultimately, this being a magnus fic, i tried to filter those conversations through a perspective of two things: first, how does this affect magnus and his mental health journey, and second, what can magnus do to help this. those scenes where magnus is trying to help someone with something and they’re like, backhandedly helping him are some of my favorite interactions in the fic.

the other thing i really really really wanted to explore that i never see enough of in fic is magnus and carey’s relationship. carey is canonically magnus’s best friend, and yet in fic i feel like she gets pushed to the side a little in favor of the starblaster crew. which i get, they’ve got a hundred and ten years of shared trauma, but also, travis flat out states that carey is magnus’s best friend, so… i mean, there is also a little bit of self indulgence here, because i am also a man who is exclusively best friends with lesbians, but you know.

that being said, i really wanted to emphasize that relationship in particular, which is why carey doesn’t have her own dedicated chapter and instead kind of slides in and out of each one and slowly helps magnus along the way. her personality i also feel is like, the exact kind of thing that magnus needs to push him into accepting / asking for help and moving towards recovery.

on real life parallels:

ok, i swear to god i did not intend to make this a holiday fic posted during the holidays. i started writing this in june, and again, it was only meant to be like 20k and not necessarily entirely set during candlenights. that kind of happened, anyway? candlenights just seemed like the best vessel to get all these characters whose post-canon situations i wanted to explore into the same room, and i finished the first draft around mid october and i wanted to give myself plenty of time for editing, so it honestly just ended up coincidentally aligning with the holidays. go figure.

that being said, isolation ended up featuring pretty heavily in this fic. that i think is to be expected to a certain degree given the nature of mental health and recovery and blah blah blah, but i probably unintentionally ended up leaning into it a little more because like… this year. and the holidays tend to be a time that a lot of us feel really isolated, and this year especially, but one of the big things for me this year is that like, all of my friends live out of state. the closest one to me is still a good 2-3 hour plane ride, which i am absolutely not risking. i had like a hundred plans to go see people and do things this year, and those obviously got cancelled.

probably the biggest one of those things was seeing a friend who i have kind of started a new years tradition of seeing, but we ended up calling that off out of safety considerations, of course. and it sucks! it’s not fun! i also moved out this year and i have my own place and in june i was really hoping that things would be okay by now and i could have all my friends come in from out of town for new years and that didn’t happen. and i wasn’t intending for this fic to be a kind of wish fulfillment of like, here’s my new place post-[saving the universe / coming out and becoming a real person], let me show my found family around my hometown and let’s make new holiday traditions together now that we’re no longer [fighting the apocalypse / literal children] and everything will be fun and happy and good, but that is kind of what happened anyway. [insert joke here that goes like “do you project your real world problems and mental health issues onto fictional characters or are you normal?”]

but yeah, magnus’s mental health struggles did kind of accidentally become a little bit of a pandemic / quarantine life parallel. i did not mean for that to happen, but it did help me tease out a little bit of what it is that i feel like i’m missing and what i want in the future when things are better, and i hope it helped some other people figure that stuff out too, maybe?

and in conclusion:

i said this a little bit in the final notes in the fic, but i am so so so grateful and emotional over the comments i’ve gotten from some of you. i’ve said it already, but this was such an emotional rollercoaster for me to write. i put a decent amount of my own mental health issues into the stuff i wrote into magnus, and it was genuinely therapeutic and like… super helpful and important. it was also a big struggle, and there were some scenes i came out of feeling incredibly drained and like i needed to not write for a week.

so that being said, those of you who have commented things about how this fic helped you deal with your own emotional turmoil or helped put something in perspective for you, i am genuinely so happy to hear that i’ve impacted you in that way like, at all. that is so incredible to me, and not necessarily what i set out to do, but it means so much to hear someone say that and also to know that someone felt comfortable sharing that with a stranger on the internet. thank you so so so much.

again, this fic means so much to me. the fact that it’s impacted even a handful of people in that way is absolutely amazing. some of the things you guys have said have had me seriously choked up. i am so glad that anyone even took the time to read all 133k of this, let alone that it affected people like that.

i don’t know if i’ll be writing more about magnus in this universe. i would love to! but i’m also super happy with where i’ve left his story. i have plans to explore the calen thing in the future, but only kind of tangentially in a side mention and not fully, so who knows? there is more though, a lot with taako and kravitz and lup and barry and hopefully one day i will find the motivation somewhere in me to flesh out everyone else’s situations a little more, too. who knows!

anyway, i just want to say thanks again to everyone for reading, and even more so if you are reading this dumb essay. you’re super cool.