DVD Meme Part 2

[misachan]

Spent a nice afternoon catching up on Royal Pains. It's right behind White Collar as far as USA shows (although much lower stress, so lots of time I enjoy it more! There's yet to be any Nazi loot storylines!) even though it next to no fannish attention and no one writes my ship. :p I am pleased with the amount of Boris this season!

More DVD MEME!

For sirenshaper:

Torn

That they'd broken his faith was worse than what they'd done to his body.

Dean may think God is a raging dick but he deep down he never really wanted Cas to agree with him; angels are made of faith, even if Castiel's had his severely tested. That Cas could be hurt badly enough accept that God will never answer him isn't something Dean can just stitch up.

Dean thought back over the past two weeks, thought over his dreams. Of course he'd dreamed of Hell, of knives and pain and blood, he always did, but had any of those dreams been out of the ordinary? More vivid than normal? How many of those dreams had been Cas reaching for him and Dean not understanding?

Help me.

Dean's already dealing with the guilt of looking back over everything he did the past week knowing that every time he stopped late night for pie or sang along with the radio or brought a girl home somewhere Cas was being held down and sliced open. The last thing his mental state needs is to know that Cas was praying Dean would save him.

This is not the smartest thing Josiah could have said, is what I'm saying.

Dean supposed in the end it didn't matter. In a way, the prayers had worked; Cas was safe now, and Dean was going to make sure he stayed that way --- starting with Threat #1 right in front of him.

This is obviously Dean rationalizing. There's a certain amount of logic in taking Josiah out – if he was able to jump Cas once, he could do it again – but that's not why Dean's here. He could kill him a lot more cleanly than what actually happens.

"You still curious about why you got summoned?" Dean crouched back down. "You and me are gonna send a message to all of your asshole brothers and sisters. They need to know how this war's gonna go from here on out."

Josiah blinked in confusion. "The war is over," he said, as if Dean had just told him the sky was orange.

Josiah is not the brains of the operation. (Melchoir was the tortur expert who ran the show and Samael set everything up. Josiah was basically the brute squad member of the team.) He honestly doesn't have any idea of the trouble he's in right now and really, really thinks he's helped end the war – as a Raphael loyalist, he genuinely thinks he did the right thing.

"You wanted the war over, you shouldn't have left Cas breathing. And you shouldn't have given me extra incentive to see you bastards bleed." He showed off his blade, letting it catch the light. "Bought this knife at a yard sale a couple of years ago. Told Sam I just thought it looked cool, but the truth is I used to have one just like it. Somehow I knew it would come in handy."

Dean's been waiting for this moment, in his heart. A part of him misses those ten years and now he has his chance.

He looked at the angel, who was looking distinctly more nervous than a few minutes before. "You might not have noticed yet, but your mojo's disrupted while you're in there," he said, gesturing at the sigils lining the outside of the circle. Sam had walked up, a cruel smile of anticipation on his face. "Now I know one of you bastards is a bit of a fan --- and really, with this face who wouldn't be ---

I like writing Dean as a little vain, especially since he was mocking Josiah's looks earlier.

but I think some of you up there have forgotten why Michael was so hot to jump my bones in the first place."

Josiah's eyes darted between Dean and Sam. "You're the Righteous Man."

Dean rolled his eyes. "Yeah, yeah, but what made me the Righteous Man, huh? You remember?" He let out a patient sigh. "The reason I was supposed to say yes to Michael was that I'd already said yes to someone else."

Being Michael's vessel is a bloodline thing, but none of this kicks off without Dean saying yes to Alastair.

Understanding dawned in the angel's eyes. "You don't dare. Such an act would blacken your soul...."

Angels. Holding and torturing your brother as a prisoner of war, A-OK. You getting tortured by a human? Absolutely beyond the pale.

Like I said, Josiah's not the brains of the outfit.

"Yeah, before you finish that I've already killed one of you bastards, or didn't you notice Zachariah's been a no show at the Heaven office parties. And my brother's soul can't come to the phone right now, so there's not much blackening that can happen there."

Dean's rationalizing that involving Sam is okay because that's not really Sam, despite that once Sam gets his soul back he will not be okay with Dean having used him to kill and torture. Dean's so angry he can't even see the line he's dancing over.

Dean smiled, grim and feral. "You shouldn't have put your hands on him." He stepped into the ring.

And we finally have the real, honest reason why this is happening.

Josiah screamed more than once. Much more than once.

It's not enough to hurt him the way they'd hurt Cas – he has to suffer more.

It turned out the hardest part was getting the wings to show. He was surprised at how deceptively delicate they were. Almost fragile.

Dean remembered being a happy little boy, chasing down butterflies.

I wanted to leave all of the actual violence off screen. Nothing I could ever write could match what someone's imagining Dean doing right now.

This was one of the rare fics where I knew the last line before I started writing. I almost passed up this prompt that inspired this because the way the original was written made it seem that prompter wanted a story where Dean was torturing Cas, which is so not my thing, but I liked the butterfly part of the prompt and kept thinking it over and eventually got that last line, the scene with Mary and everything else fell into place.

I think this is the best ending to anything I've written. Sometimes I get tempted to write a follow-up to this, but at the same time I feel like knowing what happens later takes away some of the punch.


For grasshopr_molly:

Gone Too Long

I can never, ever get enough of Past!Dean/Future!Cas. Love it. This was comment fic written for a first kisses in the rain meme, because apparently there's no fluff prompt I can't turn angsty.

"You should see the look on your face. I forgot what it was like when you gave a shit."

It's been headcanon for me that drug use and promiscuity started as a combination of self-medicating and attention seeking – especially as Dean started to pull away, when even negative attention was better than nothing. Which of course just made Dean pull away further, since he didn't know what to do or how to fix it, and Dean's standard response to things he can't fix is to focus on what he can.

He looked back up at the sky, rain plastering his hair back and flowing down his face in rivulets. "How long do you have here before Zachariah decides you've learned your lesson?"

"Three days. Well, three then, more like one and a half now."

Cas took a long pull from the vodka bottle beside him. "Do me a favor then?"

Dean blinked. "Sure. Shoot."

"When you meet back up with the other me, I need you to give him a message." Dean nodded, ready to remember whatever prophecy or wisdom Cas wanted him to take back to the past.
Dean really never sees it coming.

So Dean was entirely unprepared for Cas to lunge forward and kiss him. When on pure instinct he opened his mouth to the kiss Cas shuddered and pressed closer, his hands cold and trembling to the point that Dean pressed his own over them. Cas finally pulled back like someone had a gun to his head, breaking the kiss with a desperate little whimper that gave Dean the horrible impression that Cas was about to cry. "Just..." he started, his voice cracking before he cleared his throat and got back under control. "Tell him not to wait so damn long to do that this time around."

I didn't intend it to be at the time (this was comment fic I wrote in a hurry) but I like the ambiguity of that line. I've gotten comments from people who took it to mean Cas wanting his other self not to wait until the world's gone to hell to make a move and from people to interpreted it as this was the first time Cas screwed up the courage to kiss Dean, right when he's about to lose him again.

Dean would have sworn on everything he'd ever loved that he'd had no idea it would have even occurred to Castiel to want to do this. And then in an instant it seemed ludicrous that he couldn't have known; so many things fell into place that Dean felt like an idiot for not realizing it before. "Cas...."

A big part of writing Dean/Cas is figuring out exactly how to apply the clue bat to Dean.:)

"I wanted you to kiss me that night before we faced Raphael," Cas said, his voice shaking and fragile. "Do you remember, Dean?" Dean flashed back to laughing his ass off outside that brothel, clapping one arm around Cas' shoulders. He remembered Cas had smiled at him and Dean didn't understand why he hadn't grabbed Cas by that stupid coat of his and kissed him then and there. "Why didn't you kiss me then?"

There's a reason that having Dean and Cas' first time be that night before the fight with Uriel is such a fandom cliché.

Dean shushed him gently, brushing his sodden hair out of his eyes. "I'm sorry, man," Dean whispered, pressing a light kiss to his lips. "I didn't know, Cas, swear to God I didn't." Cas shivered and Dean pulled him closer, running his hands over Cas' bare arms to try to warm him up. "I didn't know," he repeated before before kissing him again, long and slow and deep this time.
If Dean's going to take so long to figure this out, he's going to kiss the hell out of Cas to make up for it.
Cas opened to the kiss like a drowning man finding a breath of air, his hands in Dean's hair and trying to get under his clothes; Dean tasted rain and booze and the bitter tang of pills.

"I missed you," Cas whispered between breaths. "I missed this and I missed you. I wish you were still you."

Cas was just barely holding it together as it was; now he has past Dean, the one he fell in love with and turned against Heaven for walking around showing him just how bad things have gotten.

Dean made soothing sounds as Cas shook against him; he slid one hand past Cas' waistband and over his too-sharp hipbone, wondering if Cas had always been this thin under all those clothes.

Dean's wondering how much there is about Cas he's never noticed; he's guilty that he can't even whether Cas is naturally this thin or this is him wrecking himself with the drugs, although when he gets back home he intends to find out. Although that's not what he's focusing on now.:)

Again, anyone who wants commentary on a fic, ask here, the original post, all's good.:)