[for reem and her anon!]
After Castiel falls from heaven, he figures he has two options. He can find Dean Winchester, or he can get spectacularly drunk.
He opts for the latter.
“Could you, uh… could you find someone?”
Dean barely sounds like himself. His voice is a low rasp over the phone. He didn’t introduce himself in any way, didn’t say hello, didn’t call her “your highness.” But Charlie knows it’s him all the same. She can picture him standing in the bunker, holding the phone to his ear, rubbing his other hand across his forehead.
She hadn’t been waiting for the call, but it’s not exactly a surprise to hear from Dean. She saw that “meteor shower,” the one NOAA hadn’t predicted, same as anybody else. She’d looked into it but hadn’t found much—a spike in the birth rate, but that seemed more coincidental than anything else. Then again, when is anything ever a coincidence?
She senses that now is not the time to joke with Dean, so all she says is, “Yeah, probably.”
“He might be—he might be going by Jimmy Novak. Or Emmanuel. He—,”
“Cas? You want me to find Cas?”
Dean is quiet for a moment. Maybe he forgot that she read all Carver Edlund’s books, even the unpublished ones. Charlie hears him swallow before he speaks again. “Yeah.”
“You alright?”
“No. Not really.”
Clearly no more explanation is forthcoming. Back to business. “You got any pictures of him?”
Dean doesn’t say anything, but a moment later her phone buzzes. It’s a scan of a small photo, a face shot, probably left over from one of the Winchesters’ many fraudulent collage projects. The man in it is dark-haired, blue-eyed, tired. He doesn’t look like an angel. One of the photo’s corners is very slightly creased, as if it had been folded and then flattened out again, restored. Charlie wonders if Dean had kept this photo aside, tucked into his wallet, a secret icon.
“Good,” she says. “This will help.”
Dean is quiet again.
“Do you… need something else?” Like someone to talk to?
“Just find him,” he says, and hangs up.
The Five Stages Of Grief
When Castiel dies for the first time, Sam watches Dean grit his teeth and mutter “dumb son of a bitch.” He watches his brother take out his anger in tense, vicious barbs against Zachariah, and then growl out “learned that from my friend Cas” like he’s dedicating Zachariah’s pain to the downed angel.
It’s the first time Cas dies, and the first time Sam wonders just when Dean started to care so much about that angel.
In Dean’s opinion, the bunker is the perfect place for Cas to learn how to be human. It’s away from prying eyes that would narrow, confused, if Cas tried any to learn human stuff in the real world. It’s away from danger; not only monsters, but the kind of human monster Dean knows all too well, that would take advantage of Cas’ fresh new humanhood and— well, Dean’s just glad they’re not on the road anymore.
When Dean expresses this to Sam, Sam scowls and says, “Don’t baby him, Dean.”
“Me? Baby who?”
“Just don’t smother him, okay?”
Dean stares after Sam’s retreating back. “What does that even mean? Are you saying I smother you? Get back here!”
Despite Sam’s assertions otherwise, Cas does need a lot of supervision in the early days. He’s watched humans for millennia, and the little time he had on earth has given him knowledge of some skills, but applying that knowledge has been the difficult part. Dean can’t count the number of times he’s walked into the kitchen to find Cas giving him sad-eyes over burnt eggs or ruined coffee, so he’s pretty much made it his mission to make sure Cas knows how to do all this stuff.
Anonymous prompted: Blaine goes over to Kurt’s house and Kurt is still sleeping. and Kurt sleeps naked. (A/N: I meant to just write a smutty drabble but then I had feelings. So many feelings.)
At 7:07 he texts Kurt to let him know his connecting flight is delayed. At 7:08 he orders a triple shot soy latte and considers a somewhat rubbery looking egg sandwich in the display case. At 7:09 there’s an announcement for a flight going to Newark instead of LaGuardia. Blaine decides he isn’t all that hungry anyway, and rushes to the counter to make the flight.
He takes a cab in, doesn’t feel up to sorting out public transportation from New Jersey to Bushwick this early in the morning. He doesn’t text Kurt again either. His track record with surprises is spotty, but Blaine just figures that means there’s plenty of room for improvement.
Santana opens the door, gives a brief, unimpressed once-over then steps aside. “He’s in his…area,” she says with a flick of her hand, and goes back to her breakfast.
“Oh, is he busy?”
“Probably,” she says around a mouthful of cereal. “You know, flitting through wild flowers, perching on toadstools, spreading fairy dust everywhere. The usual.”
“My dear, find what you love and let it kill you.
Let it drain from you your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness.
Let it kill you, and let it devour your remains.
For all things will kill you, both slowly and fastly, but it’s much better to be killed by a lover.━ Falsely yours, Charles Bukowski”
“How do you do it?” Cas asks Sam one day, his eyes red-raw from lack of sleep, jaw dusted in two-day old stubble. “How do you live? How do you stand it?”
Sam’s face is partially obscured by yesterday’s newspaper, but he peers around the edge and quirks one eyebrow at Cas. “I dunno,” he says, and shrugs. “You have to figure out what kind of person you are first, I guess.”
“And how might one go about that?”
Sam looks at him then, really looks. He folds the paper into a square and sets it on the tabletop. “You good, Cas?” he inquires, concern budding in the corners of his eyes.
Cas nods abortively, wrings his hand together. “Yes, I–“ he pauses, sighs. “No, actually.”
Sam shuffles forward in his chair, curls his mouth into a gentle smile. “What’s on your mind?”
Ficlet: In Limine
Amidst the giddy chaos after Mr. Schue and Miss Pillsbury’s wedding ceremony, Kurt felt someone take his hand. He thought it was Blaine at first, but immediately realized that it felt wrong—the fingers too slender and delicate, the palm cooler than the heat Blaine always radiated.
He turned and saw Brittany. She smiled and placed a finger to her lips, then pulled him gently toward the door. He walked with her out to the hallway, staying silent, wondering what she could possibly want.
To Give You Everything
4x15 reaction ficlet.
“Tequila shots. Go.”
Santana thumps a full bottle of Jose Cuervo down on the table and pushes a plate with lime wedges and two salt shakers right up against Kurt’s elbows. He rubs his hands over his face, wearily turns one shot glass over.
They don’t talk, not at first. Just taking shot after shot, Kurt giving a full-body shudder after each bitter, burning swallow, Santana pumping her fist in the air and chanting a litany of swears in Spanish.
“God, you are so fucked up for him,” she finally says, voice too loud and slurred at the edges of each word.
Kurt doesn’t haven’t to clarify which him she’s talking about. He knows. She knows. He knows she knows and she knows he knows and does Adam know? Should he know? The room spins a bit and Kurt presses his fists to his eyes to halt the line of very confusing thoughts swirling around him.
He wants to say that she’s wrong. Or at least that he’s working on not being completely fucked up for him. That he’s getting over him. But the alcohol is a warm thrum in his veins, spreading out from his center, pushing every should, every could, every last bit of defense he’s barely holding on to anymore.
“How do I stop?”
Santana hiccups, licks the patch of salt still left on the web of her thumb and pointer finger. “If you’re looking for advice on how to quit loving someone you’re asking the worst fucking person.”
(x)
It takes Castiel days to pinpoint his own location. That first night, the stars are no help, eclipsed by the angels. The remainder of the night—after that one painful moment of brilliance—is a dark spot in his memory. A new experience, and not a welcome one. He awakes in the woods, aching in ways he doesn’t understand, and then he walks.
He sleeps through the second night, too exhausted to wait for the stars to reveal themselves. The green and white road signs are in English—Castiel is relieved, for an instant, that reading has not been taken from him along with everything else—and the climate is temperate. He is most likely in the United States. It’s warm enough that he doesn’t freeze to death while sleeping a cow pasture, but not warm enough that sleeping a cow pasture is comfortable.
Being human is anything but comfortable. He remembers the first time, of course, that long slow descent before the Apocalypse that wasn’t, but this is different. The discomfort has to do with the cold and the heat and the itch of being human, but it also has to do with something deeper, something vulnerable and afraid and violated. Castiel doesn’t want to think about it, so when he wakes up with grass tickling his cheek on the third day, he simply gets up and keeps walking. His legs are sore.
He doesn’t have to wait for the stars that night. He follows the road until he discovers the city of East Lansing, Michigan. He pulls the last crumpled dollar bill out of his coat pocket and spends ninety-cents of it on coffee at Biggerson’s. He sits down at a table by the window and stares down into the cup, trying not to contemplate the rest of his life.
There’s a rest of his life now. A finite rest of his life.
Of all his new limitations, that is the only one that feels like solace.
“Talk about coincidences,” someone says.
Maybe the flower child is just in Castiel; maybe he just grew up a little sideways, a little ‘different’, and that’s why he does stuff like this; Dean doesn’t know.
He found Castiel outside the headquarters in jeans and one of his old shirts, hair a mess. Standing where he was, Dean could only see his back. He was sitting down, and perched on his shoulders, like knots in a line of thread, were six tiny birds.
fic: If I Needed Someone (Glee, Kurt/Blaine)
Title: If I Needed Someone
Fandom: Glee
Pairing: Kurt/Blaine
Rating: NC-17
Word count: ~17,500
Summary: BDSM AU. Kurt may be as queer as a two dollar bill, but in New York he doesn’t have to pretend to act like a proper sub on top of all of that. He can hold his head up high and make his own way through the big city without some dom holding his leash. He can be anything he wants.
Notes: Based on this kink meme prompt, though I do take a few liberties with it. I’ve also borrowed bits and pieces of worldbuilding from helenish’s Take Clothes Off As Directed and etothepii’s things you don’t tell me. So much love to zulu for the beta.
It’s not a date.
It is definitely not a date.
That’s why Mike and Mercedes are here too, saving them seats at a table for four in the middle of the cafe, not in the marginal privacy of the corner booths where they used to playfully nudge each other’s feet and smile at one another over the lids of their cups while they pretended their love was safe and untouchable from the harsh realities of the world around them.
It’s not a date.
But that doesn’t stop Blaine’s heart from hammering too hard behind his ribcage while he stands next to Kurt in line near the counter. They’ve both grown and changed since their frequent visits here before Kurt left for New York, before Blaine made a mistake, and before their untouchable love was shaken. Standing here, though, feels like they’ve taken a step back in time. If only for a moment, Blaine feels a flicker of young, hopeful love, and he reaches into his pocket to grab his wallet just to keep himself from grabbing Kurt’s hand instead and lacing their fingers together like he used to.
It’s not a date.
But Blaine’s still paying, since he was the one who offered up the idea of a Lima Bean visit in the first place. The young cashier with her hair perched in a bun on the top of her head calls out a friendly, “Next!” and Blaine takes a few steps forward, not even bothering to glance at the menu before he speaks.
“A medium drip and one grande non-fat mocha, please.”
He hands over the exact amount of cash without waiting for the total, and the cashier chirps out a polite word of thanks.
“You know my coffee order,” Kurt quietly says beside him. Blaine glances to his left to see Kurt smiling thoughtfully, his own lips pursed in a half-smirk while he valiantly tries to keep it from turning into a full-on beaming expression. They’re not together, and it’s not a date. Staring at Kurt like he’s the sun, moon, and stars might not be the best idea—but Kurt doesn’t seem to mind today.
“Of course I do.”
