[fic] steeplechasers: every living thing
[ Dean/Castiel ]
Title: every living thing
Writer: steeplechasers /
jimmynovaks
Status of work: Complete
Characters and/or pairings: Dean/Castiel
Rating: PG-13
Warnings, kinks & contents: [Click to read]mild drug use; disturbing animal behaviour/death
Length: 36 400
Summary: When a pair of hunters on the eastern coast witness the arrival of a very disturbing omen, it isn’t long before the news hurtles across the country, piquing the interest-and fear-of people everywhere. In a matter of days, the new, safe world that Sam, Dean, and Castiel have been inhabiting is flipped upside-down. Something enormous is coming-and this time, it’s something they can’t fight.
Faced with rapidly diminishing prospects, holed up in a tiny, empty Nebraska town, they are forced to confront fears, secrets, and emotions that might have otherwise never seen the light of day. It seems every story must end somehow, and the only thing that remains to be done is to make the most of what little time they have left.
Reccer's notes: I said in my comment to this story that I only intended to check out the first bit to see if I wanted to read it later, but I found myself entirely incapable of stopping. This one sucked me in completely. It's eerie, and the atmosphere of it was so rich and intense you could drown in it - really amazing. Um, okay, in an attempt to say something more USEFUL for this rec than just helpless garbled appreciation: this is a post S5 AU/divergence in which the world has made it past the Apocalypse (and Sam's not in the Cage), but, as the summary says, something is coming - something huge, on a scale that's hard to comprehend. The writer does a damned fine job of conveying that vastness, the feeling of a world on the edge of another apocalypse, and the characterisation felt fantastic throughout.
I particularly enjoyed that Sam, Dean and Castiel were in it together - I felt like it was a neat counter to the prodigious scale of the imminent Thing to pull it all back down to Sam and Dean and Castiel, holed up in an empty town with just the radio while they wait. I might say claustrophobic, but I'd be meaning it 100% as a positive thing; the tight focus on the three of them and how they're experiencing the situation (as a group, as Sam and Castiel, as Dean and Castiel, as Sam and Dean, and in isolation) keeps it anchored. I read with my eyes wide and my heart in my throat; I gasped at the tension more than once, and I have a feeling this one's going to linger.
Since I'm reccing in the D/C category this month, I should perhaps spare a line for the category's titular lads; we see Castiel coming to realise how he feels about Dean, and travelling from an already acknowledged position that there are things he loves about Dean, to the knowledge that he loves Dean; I don't want to give the whole game away, but I very much liked how the relationshippy aspect was handled.
A note - the chapters aren't linked internally, so keep the masterpost tab open for navigation. Do check out the art, too, but it's very spoilery, so read first!
[Short excerpt]
Cas likes traveling days, the rollicking way of them, the hours spent in idle conversation or in playing the alphabet game with the brothers, who know nearly every tract of empty road and every landmark so well that they almost end up winning by default. From the low-slung car, the countryside, to him, always seems endless and green, or golden and folding, into hills and valleys, plains and prairies, and gazing at them fills a kind of hunger in him-to know the endless movement that defines the two men he loves most. It's becoming his life, too. Has been for the last two years, and while he sometimes misses Heaven and the songs of his siblings in the back of his head, he loves the freedom that comes with the curving straits of asphalt, the smell of gasoline, the click and clatter of the tape deck. Unfettered. And it seems, especially from this vantage point, watching the Impala's hood eating up the ground, that there is an infinite amount of space to move in, to see, to know.
Dean manages to find a station that isn't gabbling about the birds and sings along to every song he knows, obnoxious and loud, and his voice carries them over the Texas border.
They're thirty minutes onto a lonely stretch of I-35 when something hits the windshield.