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drabble roundup: supernatural
Every Night My Heart Unfolding • Dean/Castiel
So we carry every sadness with us
Every hour our hearts were broken
Castiel likes to read Dean’s soul, the way that other people like to read books.
He likes to open up his heart and spread all his secrets out like pages, each one a thin slip of color and emotion and too many things to name. Sometimes he looks at the whole of it, at the moving, breathing, synergy of a human being drawing all these disparate parts into a beautiful whole; sometimes, he picks one, a filament of soul stuff, and reads it closely like a page of dense, fine print. He studies every inch of it, where the connections are, what they mean, how it fits into the big picture, what it stands for on its own.
Tonight, he opens up ‘home’.
This has been a long time coming. In the fabric of Dean’s soul, the word home is a bright knot with strands reaching out to all corners of the tapestry. It has its darker moments-it’s braided in with every doubt and sorrow, wound gently around memories warm with pain-but the knot itself is shining, beautiful. It’s a complicated word, but, Castiel thinks, a good one. Like Dean. Complicated, but good.
He lifts it out and turns it over, pushing apart the strands that connect to things like Sam and Dad and hunting and motel rooms. They’re a part of it but not the whole, and Castiel wants to see what’s inside, what this page of the Book of Dean has to say.
There are memories, curled up against each other. One bright with fireworks, another, warm with fire, warm with the heat from a stovetop, warm with the feeling in a heart when someone hugs you without being asked. (Castiel knows how that feels, twice now, and now he knows how to respond. He’ll do it right next time.) There’s a growing wire-frame hope, shiny and brittle, shaped like the bunker but too new to take root just yet. But Dean is hoping, which is news to Castiel, and it makes a smile cross his vessel’s face before he’s even had a chance to realize why. Dean has hope. He can’t put into words how that makes him feel.
There’s a small cadre of non-memories, of what-ifs, of things that Dean has collected that embody what home is supposed to be like. The smell of warm apple pie, a pair of happy parents, high school, college, watching movies on weekends and knowing just how to sneak out of the house without waking anybody up. These things aren’t real, so they seem garish, overly bright, but to see them brings Castiel happiness, because their presence here means the light has always conquered the dark. Home still means these saturated, unrealistic clichés, even after all he’s been through, all that’s been taken away from him. He still wants ‘home’ to be synonymous with ‘safety’ and ‘innocence’.
And beneath that, with threads wrapping around the what-ifs and catching at the corners of the wireframe and bumping up against the old memories, Castiel finds something he did not expect. Here, at the heart of this glowing word, he finds an image of himself. His trenchcoat (Jimmy’s, but it’s clear that Dean has not made that distinction in a long time), his crooked tie, the soft beat of wings that meant he’d just appeared (and that, too, has the fragile shimmer of hope, the memory of every time he’d heard that sound). The grit in his stubble in Purgatory. The sharp, bright blue of his eyes. The feel of the scar he’d left upon Dean’s shoulder, the shape of it, the memory of how Dean would hold it when he’d thought Cas dead to ground himself. The touch of his fingertips to his forehead. The rough burr of his voice, so different from Jimmy’s (a distinction he still makes, surprisingly enough, and one that Castiel had not been aware of). The lines at the corner of his eyes when he smiled in another world, another future, when he was still with Dean no matter what. The systematic collection of every time that Castiel came back for him. A feeling, unlike any other that he’d ever seen in Dean’s soul-a feeling of surety, of belonging.
He’s opened Dean’s home and found that his most important anchor was the angel who, despite betraying him, despite dying, despite all odds and all circumstances, would never leave him.
And Castiel knows, as he lets Dean’s soul drop back into place and stares through the ceiling up into the unfathomable cosmos, that this is the purpose for which he chooses to exist. It no longer matters why he was made, what he is, what he was destined to be. He chooses the human with the patchwork soul. He chooses the man who could give all he has and still have more. He chooses love, and friendship, he chooses the Winchesters, he chooses Dean. He has had the world, the universe, eternity; but Castiel chooses home.
The Reverb in Those Holy Halls • Sam/Gabriel
I want trees instead of gravestones and nothing to confess
I got a soft spot for your ancient books of horror stories
Sam Winchester dreams about death.
He doesn’t have nightmares anymore, not the way he used to. He knows now that when an angel takes you, it leaves a piece of its Grace behind, and he figures that must have been what made him hallucinate, what Castiel took back into himself to fix him. Before Purgatory, before the trials. Before Sam stared Death in the eye and thought, I’m ready.
He had been so ready to die.
It’s become something of an obsession, now. What happens, really? He’s been to Heaven but it’s hazy and hard to remember, and now he’s not sure if it’s even real. How can it be, when death is supposed to be this great unknown?
So he dreams about death, and they aren’t nightmares.
One night, he dreams of a forest full of trees, big strong oaks with lush foliage and the sun dappling the warm, soft grass. He knows, in the way that you do in dreams, that this was once a graveyard, long ago. He knows there is nothing left of the stones; they’ve long been broken down by questing roots, that the bodies of the dead were fed to the soil and the bones make anchors for the tall, tall trees. He knows that there is no one left to remember these people that came to rest here, and it doesn’t make him sad-no, far from it. He cries at how free it must feel, to know that no one is mourning, no one is sad. Anger, pain, loss, love-all these things and more are irrelevant. They no longer matter. Graves of people he’s saved and people he’s killed could lie side by side and no one would ever know.
One night, he dreams of a library.
It’s old in that he knows (in the way that you do, in dreams) that this library has stood for centuries, but it’s new in that time doesn’t seem to have touched it. There is no cracked and crumbling leather here, no pages that time has blurred, languages changed, maps smeared with the wear of constant use. He wanders the shelves and takes books at random and he can read them, he can understand, he’s at once a little boy falling into a story for the first time and a hunter, finding exactly the right answer even if he hadn’t asked the right questions. It doesn’t feel like trespassing, this is a library and the books want to be read. He knows this. He hears the gentle rustle of wingbeats and knows he’s not alone.
He wakes up to his face plastered to an old angelology text. Presumably he’d been looking for information on Gadreel, for he’s certainly in the G’s, but the angel welcoming his cheek in sleep had been a different one. One that, even now, years later, Sam realizes he’s still trying to understand.
He touches the face of the icon of the archangel Gabriel, and wonders if there is such a thing as an afterlife for angels, too.
Make Myself Believe • Dean/Castiel
Pull me from the darkness, lift me back into the light
Fill this empty vessel, fill this hole I have inside
You don’t think you deserve to be saved, he’d said.
Even now, those words lodge in Dean’s chest like splinters. You don’t think you deserve to be saved. And the way he’d said them, so surprised, like it should have been obvious. Like the purity of Dean’s soul wasn’t something up for debate, like he couldn’t fathom why he would judge himself so harshly.
At the time, Dean had hated it. First he’d thought it was said with malice, with manipulation-you don’t think you deserve to be saved, how can you think that, anyone would want to be saved, anyone would want to live, you should be grateful for all that we’ve given you-but he knows better now. He knows that Castiel l.. l... that he cared about him from the start, that it was never about Heaven’s plan. He had proven that soon enough. Still, it had grated on him, feeling the weight of someone’s regard and thinking, how can I live up to that? How can I be anything close to what he sees in me? Of course he didn’t deserve to be saved, his whole life had been nothing but a series of bad choices with worse consequences. He didn’t understand.
But now, he thinks, now, he just might get it. He sits on the floor at the foot of his motel bed and can’t sleep, thinking of the look on Cas’s face when they left him in that nursing home, watching over Fred. The look on his face when he’d told Dean that he let go, that he’d stayed in Purgatory. The look that Dean recognized more than any other, because he saw it in the mirror every day.
He thinks of Cas in Purgatory. He thinks of the nights they spent with his head pillowed on the angel’s lap, Benny keeping watch, because the human needed to sleep. He thinks about the hands in his hair, the soft voice murmuring Enochian like a lullaby. He thinks about how Cas was willing to sacrifice his sanity to try and fix what he’d done, though it was unfixable. He thinks about Cas.
The truth is, Dean had already forgiven him. He’d forgiven him long before he’d deserted him in Purgatory; he’d forgiven him before the madness, before Emmanuel, before the leviathans trying to claw their way out of him and Cas tried to apologize. It hadn’t changed how he felt, but he’d forgiven him already, then. He could tell himself it was because he understood why he did it, that Cas was just trying to do what he thought was best, but the truth is, he’s always going to forgive him, no matter what. That’s what you do, when you. When there’s someone. Someone you-someone. When there’s someone.
He understands, now, how Cas could see his soul in the depths of Hell, soaked in blood and laughing, thrilling at the pain, the anger, the feel of skin parting under his fingertips, and believe that he deserves to be saved.
He understands, because it’s his turn, now. His angel who’s done horrible things, unspeakable things, things you can’t come back from, that no amount of apologies will make right. His angel who believes, truly believes, that he is not worthy of redemption.
Dean isn’t an angel, or a priest, or a god. He’s barely even a human being, if decency and morals are a prerequisite. He’s broken, and he isn’t in any sort of place to pass judgment, but that doesn’t mean his opinions count for nothing. Dean isn’t the one that Cas has to apologize to and he wasn’t the one who saved him, but he can still say, you deserve to be saved.
And Dean, he’s got a lot of black marks on his tab, a lot of shit he can’t undo, but he gets it now. It isn’t about that. Not with them. Not when you...
You deserve to be saved as much as I do, he thinks, no, prays, and hopes that Cas can still hear him. For the same reasons you saved me, and for all the nights since then.
He doesn’t let himself think the word, but his heart speaks louder.
You are loved, it whispers in the dark. You will never not be beautiful to me.
So we carry every sadness with us
Every hour our hearts were broken
Castiel likes to read Dean’s soul, the way that other people like to read books.
He likes to open up his heart and spread all his secrets out like pages, each one a thin slip of color and emotion and too many things to name. Sometimes he looks at the whole of it, at the moving, breathing, synergy of a human being drawing all these disparate parts into a beautiful whole; sometimes, he picks one, a filament of soul stuff, and reads it closely like a page of dense, fine print. He studies every inch of it, where the connections are, what they mean, how it fits into the big picture, what it stands for on its own.
Tonight, he opens up ‘home’.
This has been a long time coming. In the fabric of Dean’s soul, the word home is a bright knot with strands reaching out to all corners of the tapestry. It has its darker moments-it’s braided in with every doubt and sorrow, wound gently around memories warm with pain-but the knot itself is shining, beautiful. It’s a complicated word, but, Castiel thinks, a good one. Like Dean. Complicated, but good.
He lifts it out and turns it over, pushing apart the strands that connect to things like Sam and Dad and hunting and motel rooms. They’re a part of it but not the whole, and Castiel wants to see what’s inside, what this page of the Book of Dean has to say.
There are memories, curled up against each other. One bright with fireworks, another, warm with fire, warm with the heat from a stovetop, warm with the feeling in a heart when someone hugs you without being asked. (Castiel knows how that feels, twice now, and now he knows how to respond. He’ll do it right next time.) There’s a growing wire-frame hope, shiny and brittle, shaped like the bunker but too new to take root just yet. But Dean is hoping, which is news to Castiel, and it makes a smile cross his vessel’s face before he’s even had a chance to realize why. Dean has hope. He can’t put into words how that makes him feel.
There’s a small cadre of non-memories, of what-ifs, of things that Dean has collected that embody what home is supposed to be like. The smell of warm apple pie, a pair of happy parents, high school, college, watching movies on weekends and knowing just how to sneak out of the house without waking anybody up. These things aren’t real, so they seem garish, overly bright, but to see them brings Castiel happiness, because their presence here means the light has always conquered the dark. Home still means these saturated, unrealistic clichés, even after all he’s been through, all that’s been taken away from him. He still wants ‘home’ to be synonymous with ‘safety’ and ‘innocence’.
And beneath that, with threads wrapping around the what-ifs and catching at the corners of the wireframe and bumping up against the old memories, Castiel finds something he did not expect. Here, at the heart of this glowing word, he finds an image of himself. His trenchcoat (Jimmy’s, but it’s clear that Dean has not made that distinction in a long time), his crooked tie, the soft beat of wings that meant he’d just appeared (and that, too, has the fragile shimmer of hope, the memory of every time he’d heard that sound). The grit in his stubble in Purgatory. The sharp, bright blue of his eyes. The feel of the scar he’d left upon Dean’s shoulder, the shape of it, the memory of how Dean would hold it when he’d thought Cas dead to ground himself. The touch of his fingertips to his forehead. The rough burr of his voice, so different from Jimmy’s (a distinction he still makes, surprisingly enough, and one that Castiel had not been aware of). The lines at the corner of his eyes when he smiled in another world, another future, when he was still with Dean no matter what. The systematic collection of every time that Castiel came back for him. A feeling, unlike any other that he’d ever seen in Dean’s soul-a feeling of surety, of belonging.
He’s opened Dean’s home and found that his most important anchor was the angel who, despite betraying him, despite dying, despite all odds and all circumstances, would never leave him.
And Castiel knows, as he lets Dean’s soul drop back into place and stares through the ceiling up into the unfathomable cosmos, that this is the purpose for which he chooses to exist. It no longer matters why he was made, what he is, what he was destined to be. He chooses the human with the patchwork soul. He chooses the man who could give all he has and still have more. He chooses love, and friendship, he chooses the Winchesters, he chooses Dean. He has had the world, the universe, eternity; but Castiel chooses home.
The Reverb in Those Holy Halls • Sam/Gabriel
I want trees instead of gravestones and nothing to confess
I got a soft spot for your ancient books of horror stories
Sam Winchester dreams about death.
He doesn’t have nightmares anymore, not the way he used to. He knows now that when an angel takes you, it leaves a piece of its Grace behind, and he figures that must have been what made him hallucinate, what Castiel took back into himself to fix him. Before Purgatory, before the trials. Before Sam stared Death in the eye and thought, I’m ready.
He had been so ready to die.
It’s become something of an obsession, now. What happens, really? He’s been to Heaven but it’s hazy and hard to remember, and now he’s not sure if it’s even real. How can it be, when death is supposed to be this great unknown?
So he dreams about death, and they aren’t nightmares.
One night, he dreams of a forest full of trees, big strong oaks with lush foliage and the sun dappling the warm, soft grass. He knows, in the way that you do in dreams, that this was once a graveyard, long ago. He knows there is nothing left of the stones; they’ve long been broken down by questing roots, that the bodies of the dead were fed to the soil and the bones make anchors for the tall, tall trees. He knows that there is no one left to remember these people that came to rest here, and it doesn’t make him sad-no, far from it. He cries at how free it must feel, to know that no one is mourning, no one is sad. Anger, pain, loss, love-all these things and more are irrelevant. They no longer matter. Graves of people he’s saved and people he’s killed could lie side by side and no one would ever know.
One night, he dreams of a library.
It’s old in that he knows (in the way that you do, in dreams) that this library has stood for centuries, but it’s new in that time doesn’t seem to have touched it. There is no cracked and crumbling leather here, no pages that time has blurred, languages changed, maps smeared with the wear of constant use. He wanders the shelves and takes books at random and he can read them, he can understand, he’s at once a little boy falling into a story for the first time and a hunter, finding exactly the right answer even if he hadn’t asked the right questions. It doesn’t feel like trespassing, this is a library and the books want to be read. He knows this. He hears the gentle rustle of wingbeats and knows he’s not alone.
He wakes up to his face plastered to an old angelology text. Presumably he’d been looking for information on Gadreel, for he’s certainly in the G’s, but the angel welcoming his cheek in sleep had been a different one. One that, even now, years later, Sam realizes he’s still trying to understand.
He touches the face of the icon of the archangel Gabriel, and wonders if there is such a thing as an afterlife for angels, too.
Make Myself Believe • Dean/Castiel
Pull me from the darkness, lift me back into the light
Fill this empty vessel, fill this hole I have inside
You don’t think you deserve to be saved, he’d said.
Even now, those words lodge in Dean’s chest like splinters. You don’t think you deserve to be saved. And the way he’d said them, so surprised, like it should have been obvious. Like the purity of Dean’s soul wasn’t something up for debate, like he couldn’t fathom why he would judge himself so harshly.
At the time, Dean had hated it. First he’d thought it was said with malice, with manipulation-you don’t think you deserve to be saved, how can you think that, anyone would want to be saved, anyone would want to live, you should be grateful for all that we’ve given you-but he knows better now. He knows that Castiel l.. l... that he cared about him from the start, that it was never about Heaven’s plan. He had proven that soon enough. Still, it had grated on him, feeling the weight of someone’s regard and thinking, how can I live up to that? How can I be anything close to what he sees in me? Of course he didn’t deserve to be saved, his whole life had been nothing but a series of bad choices with worse consequences. He didn’t understand.
But now, he thinks, now, he just might get it. He sits on the floor at the foot of his motel bed and can’t sleep, thinking of the look on Cas’s face when they left him in that nursing home, watching over Fred. The look on his face when he’d told Dean that he let go, that he’d stayed in Purgatory. The look that Dean recognized more than any other, because he saw it in the mirror every day.
He thinks of Cas in Purgatory. He thinks of the nights they spent with his head pillowed on the angel’s lap, Benny keeping watch, because the human needed to sleep. He thinks about the hands in his hair, the soft voice murmuring Enochian like a lullaby. He thinks about how Cas was willing to sacrifice his sanity to try and fix what he’d done, though it was unfixable. He thinks about Cas.
The truth is, Dean had already forgiven him. He’d forgiven him long before he’d deserted him in Purgatory; he’d forgiven him before the madness, before Emmanuel, before the leviathans trying to claw their way out of him and Cas tried to apologize. It hadn’t changed how he felt, but he’d forgiven him already, then. He could tell himself it was because he understood why he did it, that Cas was just trying to do what he thought was best, but the truth is, he’s always going to forgive him, no matter what. That’s what you do, when you. When there’s someone. Someone you-someone. When there’s someone.
He understands, now, how Cas could see his soul in the depths of Hell, soaked in blood and laughing, thrilling at the pain, the anger, the feel of skin parting under his fingertips, and believe that he deserves to be saved.
He understands, because it’s his turn, now. His angel who’s done horrible things, unspeakable things, things you can’t come back from, that no amount of apologies will make right. His angel who believes, truly believes, that he is not worthy of redemption.
Dean isn’t an angel, or a priest, or a god. He’s barely even a human being, if decency and morals are a prerequisite. He’s broken, and he isn’t in any sort of place to pass judgment, but that doesn’t mean his opinions count for nothing. Dean isn’t the one that Cas has to apologize to and he wasn’t the one who saved him, but he can still say, you deserve to be saved.
And Dean, he’s got a lot of black marks on his tab, a lot of shit he can’t undo, but he gets it now. It isn’t about that. Not with them. Not when you...
You deserve to be saved as much as I do, he thinks, no, prays, and hopes that Cas can still hear him. For the same reasons you saved me, and for all the nights since then.
He doesn’t let himself think the word, but his heart speaks louder.
You are loved, it whispers in the dark. You will never not be beautiful to me.