Supernatural fanfic: "Hope Is a Waking Dream"
I've nearly forgotten how to do this, it's been so long since I posted anything . . . Well. Here goes:
Title: “Hope Is a Waking Dream”
Pairing: Mention of/implication of Sam/Ruby and of past Dean/Anna. Can most easily be read as preslash Dean/Castiel.
Rating: Uhm, probably a borderline PG-13-ish, maybe (?)
Disclaimer: I do not own any of the characters from Supernatural, more’s the pity (seeing as how they belong to Kripke and to the show’s writers)! What I do have is an extremely contrary muse that refuses to shut up and leave me alone . . .
Summary: As though Dean Winchester’s life weren’t stressful, insane, and just downright weird enough (seeing as how, by being a Righteous Man who’s shed blood in Hell, he’s inadvertently kick-started a process by which enough of the Seals keeping Lucifer locked inside Hell might be broken to free the Devil, permitting the fallen angel to start the Apocalypse), the angelic Hosts of Heaven have proven to be so morally deficient that they apparently have no problem whatsoever with threatening to either throw him back into Hell or else harm his brother, Sam, so they can gain Dean’s cooperation with their plans. Having outwitted both angels and demons by the skin of his teeth, in defense of a girl named Anna Milton (who turned out to be an angel who’d deliberately stripped herself of her Grace in order to experience free will and life as a human, and is now an angel again, having successfully regained her Grace), he’s not exactly in the mood to deal with any of the angelic dicks. Unfortunately, Castiel, the angel who hauled him up out of Hell, didn’t get that particular memo, and seems determined to have a heart-to-heart . . .
Warning: Around this time last year, I wrote a series of linked stories, (mostly) in response to the first handful of episodes of season five. Roughly two-thirds of this story was written out (longhand) at the same time as the last story I completed in that series and was meant to function as a kind of prequel to those Supernatural stories, “What Dreams May Come,” “Unless First We Dream,” “Dreams Are Free,” “Dreams Shall Never Die,” “My Dreams Under Your Feet,” and “A Dream Is a Wish . . . ” Initially, I’d thought that I was going to end up writing a series that would shadow the entire season five of the show, but then my grandma had to be hospitalized for a little while (because apparently having really bad rheumatoid arthritis can cause renal amyloidosis that can damage your kidneys enough that you end up having to have dialysis for the rest of your life) and a mod for two of the communities on the LJ I’d been posting the series to who apparently is incapable of keeping the rules of the two separate communities straight was such an unmitigated bitch to me that I just let the whole damn thing drop, because honestly? It just wasn’t worth the stress to try to reason with someone determined to be so damn hostile.
I always meant to come back to the series at some point and to just write for myself and to hell with certain unreasonable individuals active in the fandom. However, since then, we discovered that my dad has a kind of cancer of the plasma cells known as multiple myeloma, and I basically stopped writing altogether because I know myself well enough by now to know what nothing but darkness and ugliness would come out of me if I attempted to write when I was so emotionally distraught. It’s been a couple of months since the diagnosis and we’ve gotten through radiation and started his drug therapy and things seem to be going well, so, since my idea beta has been encouraging me to write something fluffy and silly and romantic and enjoyable for NaNo this year, as a form of distraction, I thought maybe I ought to try to remind myself how to write and actually finish something before November can get here. So. I decided this would be a good test vehicle, since the story itself as written down is largely complete and I’ve always known how I meant for the darn thing to end, even if I didn’t get around to filing in a lot of the stuff around the dialogue or writing anything much past Castiel going down on his knees to formally petition for Dean’s forgiveness for what happened with Anna and etc. If the story seems a bit rough around the edges and it strikes people as odd that I’m writing about something set in season four, well, just please keep in mind the circumstances surrounding the writing of and eventual typing up of the story, okay?
Author’s Notes: 1). As with the other six stories in this series, I have no idea where this story came from. Part of it actually came to me prior to viewing episode six of season five and the writing of the sixth story in the series, with the rest pretty much coming to me at the same time I was trying to get that sixth story written, and the remainder filling itself in as I’ve typed the rest up. Since the story is an in between the scenes sort of thing, it’s canon-compliant (as far as I can tell) up through to and including the tenth episode of season four (and could be considered at least semi-spoilerish for the show up through that episode, “Heaven and Hell”) and I suppose could be read as (kind of) gen, though frankly the vibe that I’ve always gotten from Castiel when writing in this particular ’verse feels anything but gen and by the end of “What Dreams May Come” Sam’s pretty damned sure that an angel of the Lord is not only in love with but adores and reveres his brother and that his brother’s in the first stages of learning how to have enough faith to return the sentiment.
2). As I’ve said in the author’s notes for all of my other stories for Supernatural, this is kind of a strange fandom for me, in that, since the show’s largely refused to allow the main characters to have (or to keep) any romantic attachments or possible romantic attachments that aren’t either broken by death or else what some would consider blasphemous and/or unnatural in some way, I managed to be a fan for years without ever being tempted to seriously ship anyone on the show, before. The appearance of Castiel on the show and the dynamic of his evolving relationship with Dean, though, kind of threw me for a loop . . . and that rule of no shipping pretty much went straight out the window, as I found myself not only drawn more and more to the possibility of a Dean/Castiel pairing but actually having my mental arms twisted by one of my muses so that I’d write stories for this possible pairing.
I can’t even begin to guess what this darn muse thinks she’s doing - I spent most of season four actively avoiding embracing this possible ship, mainly due to the fact that (back then) it (mostly) seemed to be painfully one-sided (on top of which, frankly, it disturbs the ever living crap out of me to even approach the notion of a God who would deliberately send an angel to a human, all the while knowing that the essential nature of the two beings involved could only result in pain, Dean too scarred by his life/afterlife/second life to even be able to recognize love and faith when it is offered to him and Castiel having no choice - as a creature whose sole purpose is essentially to experience love and to glorify the divine and faithfully praise God by worshiping all of His creation - but to love) - but I’ve learned that it’s generally futile to try to resist a muse. (If I piss one of them off, she’ll just call in the calvary and they’ll all gang up on me and inundate me with stories until I’ll wish I’d just given in to the original story prompt being telegraphed my way in the first bloody place.)
Given that plus the fact that there just might be more going on underneath the surface of Dean and Castiel’s . . . relationship (for lack of a better word) than is immediately obvious and that Kripke et al might deliberately be using the connection between Dean and Castiel - the choice Castiel made, in Dean’s favor, and the reasons why, and the possibility that Dean might one day choose Castiel (and, by extension, his God) back, willingly, for reasons of his own - to enrich the show’s already hugely complex background and mythology, I’m finding myself having to seriously contemplate the possibility that Dean/Castiel (of some form or another) could end up being the penultimate ship of the show . . . and that this probability would likely end up having a direct and profound impact on the ultimate outcome of the show, especially since another way was found to defeat Lucifer and avert the destruction of humanity and the Earth that didn’t involve Dean being forced to give in to his so-called “destiny” as the Sword of Michael and it seems to have left both Heaven and Hell (and, thus, Earth) rather in chaotic disarray.
Because of this, the Dean/Castiel ship - or at least some version of it - is rapidly becoming a lot more important to me, as a fan of the show. I honestly don’t know yet if I’m seeing things that are really there or not or what the hell I’m really doing, floundering about in this fandom, grasping at possible ways to smooth a path between Castiel and Dean. (This ship makes me feel like I’m stumbling around in the dark with an armful of nitroglycerin, which is more than a little disturbing.)
The whole thing still kind of freaks me out - there are consent issues here that are just . . . freakin’ insane. Angel of the Lord, y’all. Inherent lack of free will plus the whole created to worship and glorify and adore thing. And Dean Winchester, poster boy for, well, using free will as a convenient excuse to stomp all over monsters, demons, corporate angel asshats, and assorted other company - and I’m seriously, seriously confounded by the fact that, while their connection so far largely seems to be more mental/spiritual or even emotional than physical (much less sexual), that handprint of Castiel’s is still blazoned on Dean’s arm like a mark of ownership, where he gripped him tight and raised him from perdition, not to mention worried as hell over the fact that, while Castiel appears to have spent season five becoming more human, Dean’s capacity for self-blame and self-loathing are still such that any alteration to the angel’s apparent nature is (upon reflection) entirely too likely to make Dean panic over the possibility that he’s somehow corrupted/lessened/damaged Castiel.
So, in short (not to repeat myself or anything, but), I really have no clue what I’m doing here or where this story came from or why I seem to think it’s a good idea to pursue this crazy idea of mine (courtesy of my muse) in what is apparently a nascent between-the-scenes series in the making, given that it’s meant to smooth the way for the previous stories my insane muse bullied me into writing for this fandom. I get the feeling that I’m going to end up regretting allowing myself to be bullied and pulling out handfuls of hair whilst trying to figure out what in the hell this thing really is and just what Dean and Castiel truly are to one another. In the meantime, though, since I’ve no intention of trying to puzzle this out any further right now, allow me to point out that, though this specific story is canon-compliant up through the ending of the tenth episode of season four (at least to a point, inasmuch as it follows the events of the show), the between-the-scenes nature of the story means that it can, technically, also be read as AU. And, in any case, the whole series, such as it is, can kind of be considered AU, since season five ended with Dean going back to a previous girlfriend (due to a promise he made Sam to try to live a normal life and to not try to come after and save him) and Castiel going back to Heaven, to try to deal with the fallout and chaos up there, due to their successful last instant possible thwarting of Armageddon. So . . . readers might want to take this with a grain of salt. (In fact, freakin’ huge handfuls of salt might not be entirely out of line.) Okay?
3). Erhm, at the time when this story takes place, Castiel doesn’t consciously realizes yet what the possessiveness/protectiveness he feels towards Dean means, and Dean is definitely pretty much oblivious to even the possibility that Castiel’s tendency to want to take his side, when his so-called superiors are being particularly unreasonably cruel, and the way that the angel cares about Dean’s opinion of him being damaged, when he is forced to obey the orders of his superiors and those orders are contrary to Dean’s will, could be symptomatic of a far deeper attachment to him than is normal for an angel and a human. However, I still think that this story is preslash rather than gen, especially given certain revelations that occur in the other six stories in this series (which I’ve tentatively mentally tagged the Dreams ’verse, for lack of a better alternative).
------------------------------------------------------------
“Hope Is a Waking Dream”
This story can be found posted at: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/6387569/1/Hope_Is_a_Waking_Dream
Title: “Hope Is a Waking Dream”
Pairing: Mention of/implication of Sam/Ruby and of past Dean/Anna. Can most easily be read as preslash Dean/Castiel.
Rating: Uhm, probably a borderline PG-13-ish, maybe (?)
Disclaimer: I do not own any of the characters from Supernatural, more’s the pity (seeing as how they belong to Kripke and to the show’s writers)! What I do have is an extremely contrary muse that refuses to shut up and leave me alone . . .
Summary: As though Dean Winchester’s life weren’t stressful, insane, and just downright weird enough (seeing as how, by being a Righteous Man who’s shed blood in Hell, he’s inadvertently kick-started a process by which enough of the Seals keeping Lucifer locked inside Hell might be broken to free the Devil, permitting the fallen angel to start the Apocalypse), the angelic Hosts of Heaven have proven to be so morally deficient that they apparently have no problem whatsoever with threatening to either throw him back into Hell or else harm his brother, Sam, so they can gain Dean’s cooperation with their plans. Having outwitted both angels and demons by the skin of his teeth, in defense of a girl named Anna Milton (who turned out to be an angel who’d deliberately stripped herself of her Grace in order to experience free will and life as a human, and is now an angel again, having successfully regained her Grace), he’s not exactly in the mood to deal with any of the angelic dicks. Unfortunately, Castiel, the angel who hauled him up out of Hell, didn’t get that particular memo, and seems determined to have a heart-to-heart . . .
Warning: Around this time last year, I wrote a series of linked stories, (mostly) in response to the first handful of episodes of season five. Roughly two-thirds of this story was written out (longhand) at the same time as the last story I completed in that series and was meant to function as a kind of prequel to those Supernatural stories, “What Dreams May Come,” “Unless First We Dream,” “Dreams Are Free,” “Dreams Shall Never Die,” “My Dreams Under Your Feet,” and “A Dream Is a Wish . . . ” Initially, I’d thought that I was going to end up writing a series that would shadow the entire season five of the show, but then my grandma had to be hospitalized for a little while (because apparently having really bad rheumatoid arthritis can cause renal amyloidosis that can damage your kidneys enough that you end up having to have dialysis for the rest of your life) and a mod for two of the communities on the LJ I’d been posting the series to who apparently is incapable of keeping the rules of the two separate communities straight was such an unmitigated bitch to me that I just let the whole damn thing drop, because honestly? It just wasn’t worth the stress to try to reason with someone determined to be so damn hostile.
I always meant to come back to the series at some point and to just write for myself and to hell with certain unreasonable individuals active in the fandom. However, since then, we discovered that my dad has a kind of cancer of the plasma cells known as multiple myeloma, and I basically stopped writing altogether because I know myself well enough by now to know what nothing but darkness and ugliness would come out of me if I attempted to write when I was so emotionally distraught. It’s been a couple of months since the diagnosis and we’ve gotten through radiation and started his drug therapy and things seem to be going well, so, since my idea beta has been encouraging me to write something fluffy and silly and romantic and enjoyable for NaNo this year, as a form of distraction, I thought maybe I ought to try to remind myself how to write and actually finish something before November can get here. So. I decided this would be a good test vehicle, since the story itself as written down is largely complete and I’ve always known how I meant for the darn thing to end, even if I didn’t get around to filing in a lot of the stuff around the dialogue or writing anything much past Castiel going down on his knees to formally petition for Dean’s forgiveness for what happened with Anna and etc. If the story seems a bit rough around the edges and it strikes people as odd that I’m writing about something set in season four, well, just please keep in mind the circumstances surrounding the writing of and eventual typing up of the story, okay?
Author’s Notes: 1). As with the other six stories in this series, I have no idea where this story came from. Part of it actually came to me prior to viewing episode six of season five and the writing of the sixth story in the series, with the rest pretty much coming to me at the same time I was trying to get that sixth story written, and the remainder filling itself in as I’ve typed the rest up. Since the story is an in between the scenes sort of thing, it’s canon-compliant (as far as I can tell) up through to and including the tenth episode of season four (and could be considered at least semi-spoilerish for the show up through that episode, “Heaven and Hell”) and I suppose could be read as (kind of) gen, though frankly the vibe that I’ve always gotten from Castiel when writing in this particular ’verse feels anything but gen and by the end of “What Dreams May Come” Sam’s pretty damned sure that an angel of the Lord is not only in love with but adores and reveres his brother and that his brother’s in the first stages of learning how to have enough faith to return the sentiment.
2). As I’ve said in the author’s notes for all of my other stories for Supernatural, this is kind of a strange fandom for me, in that, since the show’s largely refused to allow the main characters to have (or to keep) any romantic attachments or possible romantic attachments that aren’t either broken by death or else what some would consider blasphemous and/or unnatural in some way, I managed to be a fan for years without ever being tempted to seriously ship anyone on the show, before. The appearance of Castiel on the show and the dynamic of his evolving relationship with Dean, though, kind of threw me for a loop . . . and that rule of no shipping pretty much went straight out the window, as I found myself not only drawn more and more to the possibility of a Dean/Castiel pairing but actually having my mental arms twisted by one of my muses so that I’d write stories for this possible pairing.
I can’t even begin to guess what this darn muse thinks she’s doing - I spent most of season four actively avoiding embracing this possible ship, mainly due to the fact that (back then) it (mostly) seemed to be painfully one-sided (on top of which, frankly, it disturbs the ever living crap out of me to even approach the notion of a God who would deliberately send an angel to a human, all the while knowing that the essential nature of the two beings involved could only result in pain, Dean too scarred by his life/afterlife/second life to even be able to recognize love and faith when it is offered to him and Castiel having no choice - as a creature whose sole purpose is essentially to experience love and to glorify the divine and faithfully praise God by worshiping all of His creation - but to love) - but I’ve learned that it’s generally futile to try to resist a muse. (If I piss one of them off, she’ll just call in the calvary and they’ll all gang up on me and inundate me with stories until I’ll wish I’d just given in to the original story prompt being telegraphed my way in the first bloody place.)
Given that plus the fact that there just might be more going on underneath the surface of Dean and Castiel’s . . . relationship (for lack of a better word) than is immediately obvious and that Kripke et al might deliberately be using the connection between Dean and Castiel - the choice Castiel made, in Dean’s favor, and the reasons why, and the possibility that Dean might one day choose Castiel (and, by extension, his God) back, willingly, for reasons of his own - to enrich the show’s already hugely complex background and mythology, I’m finding myself having to seriously contemplate the possibility that Dean/Castiel (of some form or another) could end up being the penultimate ship of the show . . . and that this probability would likely end up having a direct and profound impact on the ultimate outcome of the show, especially since another way was found to defeat Lucifer and avert the destruction of humanity and the Earth that didn’t involve Dean being forced to give in to his so-called “destiny” as the Sword of Michael and it seems to have left both Heaven and Hell (and, thus, Earth) rather in chaotic disarray.
Because of this, the Dean/Castiel ship - or at least some version of it - is rapidly becoming a lot more important to me, as a fan of the show. I honestly don’t know yet if I’m seeing things that are really there or not or what the hell I’m really doing, floundering about in this fandom, grasping at possible ways to smooth a path between Castiel and Dean. (This ship makes me feel like I’m stumbling around in the dark with an armful of nitroglycerin, which is more than a little disturbing.)
The whole thing still kind of freaks me out - there are consent issues here that are just . . . freakin’ insane. Angel of the Lord, y’all. Inherent lack of free will plus the whole created to worship and glorify and adore thing. And Dean Winchester, poster boy for, well, using free will as a convenient excuse to stomp all over monsters, demons, corporate angel asshats, and assorted other company - and I’m seriously, seriously confounded by the fact that, while their connection so far largely seems to be more mental/spiritual or even emotional than physical (much less sexual), that handprint of Castiel’s is still blazoned on Dean’s arm like a mark of ownership, where he gripped him tight and raised him from perdition, not to mention worried as hell over the fact that, while Castiel appears to have spent season five becoming more human, Dean’s capacity for self-blame and self-loathing are still such that any alteration to the angel’s apparent nature is (upon reflection) entirely too likely to make Dean panic over the possibility that he’s somehow corrupted/lessened/damaged Castiel.
So, in short (not to repeat myself or anything, but), I really have no clue what I’m doing here or where this story came from or why I seem to think it’s a good idea to pursue this crazy idea of mine (courtesy of my muse) in what is apparently a nascent between-the-scenes series in the making, given that it’s meant to smooth the way for the previous stories my insane muse bullied me into writing for this fandom. I get the feeling that I’m going to end up regretting allowing myself to be bullied and pulling out handfuls of hair whilst trying to figure out what in the hell this thing really is and just what Dean and Castiel truly are to one another. In the meantime, though, since I’ve no intention of trying to puzzle this out any further right now, allow me to point out that, though this specific story is canon-compliant up through the ending of the tenth episode of season four (at least to a point, inasmuch as it follows the events of the show), the between-the-scenes nature of the story means that it can, technically, also be read as AU. And, in any case, the whole series, such as it is, can kind of be considered AU, since season five ended with Dean going back to a previous girlfriend (due to a promise he made Sam to try to live a normal life and to not try to come after and save him) and Castiel going back to Heaven, to try to deal with the fallout and chaos up there, due to their successful last instant possible thwarting of Armageddon. So . . . readers might want to take this with a grain of salt. (In fact, freakin’ huge handfuls of salt might not be entirely out of line.) Okay?
3). Erhm, at the time when this story takes place, Castiel doesn’t consciously realizes yet what the possessiveness/protectiveness he feels towards Dean means, and Dean is definitely pretty much oblivious to even the possibility that Castiel’s tendency to want to take his side, when his so-called superiors are being particularly unreasonably cruel, and the way that the angel cares about Dean’s opinion of him being damaged, when he is forced to obey the orders of his superiors and those orders are contrary to Dean’s will, could be symptomatic of a far deeper attachment to him than is normal for an angel and a human. However, I still think that this story is preslash rather than gen, especially given certain revelations that occur in the other six stories in this series (which I’ve tentatively mentally tagged the Dreams ’verse, for lack of a better alternative).
------------------------------------------------------------
“Hope Is a Waking Dream”
This story can be found posted at: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/6387569/1/Hope_Is_a_Waking_Dream