daemonverse miscellany
Drabbles plucked from tumblr. Recaps are here, here, and here, in maximally confusing conversation format for your convenience.
Maybe a hundred to several hundred words apiece? No warnings apply.
one word prompts - lost:“I don’t understand,” Castiel murmurs, and Nina noses his fingers where they’re hanging curled at his sides. He pulls absently away from her, eyes skittering from branch to branch with a confusion that makes Nina’s whiskers quiver.
“Come on,” she says, “Let’s go back inside. It’s not here.”
“I saw it,” he says, “I saw it, Nina.”
She’s trying not to tremble against him, and Castiel turns to look at her in surprise.
“Are you cold?”
The sky is pale and gray beyond the black crisscross of branches overhead, so she nods, and tries not to look at him, and tries not to look at the flash of red she is always seeing in his eyes.
“I want to go now.”
one word prompts - trigger:Castiel is stiff and unyielding; Nina might as well be resting her head against a slab of cement. He smells like Jimmy, though, and if she closes her eyes she can almost feel him. He is so close, fluttering just under Castiel’s cold skin.
“See,” she says, “This is nice.”
“Yes.”
Castiel sounds unsure, but Nina doesn’t say so. Burying her face in the folds of his coat, she instead finds the place where his heart should be and presses her forehead there as if to reassure him - but Castiel is mechanical, breathes mechanically, moves mechanically. His pulse is lost low and dull in her fur. Nina would stoke the thing inside him if she could (the soul he doesn’t have! she thinks; if only she could follow Jimmy into the cavern of Castiel’s chest), prostrate herself on the flames, but Castiel is staring down at the serval gathered in his lap like she’s something breakable - like Nina’s going to slip if he doesn’t hold her here, and he can already imagine himself sweeping up the dusty yellow glass of her bones.
They sit for a few minutes in silence before resolve seems to stir in Castiel. He raises a cautious hand to pet Nina, running his palm down her spine in gentle strokes. It’s not how she likes to be touched, and his skin is too soft and too smooth from a lack of manual labor, but she hazards a purr anyway. She is discovering every day that there is a currency of affection with Castiel. He tickles her belly: she puts a paw on his knee. He drags his fingertips across her flank: she arches her back into the warm curve of his body.
Of Jimmy’s body.
Castiel is rubbing his knuckles at the base of Nina’s skull, and she twists away to look up at him. His eyes are the same fierce untempered blue as she remembers, and suddenly that is terrible, and she has done the worst thing - she is recoiling under his touch -
Nina scrambles away from Castiel, bristling frantic and wild with fear. She’s breathing hard, and she wants to run - wants to be away from here - wants to be away from him. But not him; not her Jimmy.
“I thought this pleased you,” Castiel says.
Nina can only press her belly against the floor and cower and hide her face.
“Don’t touch me.”
It is a blessing when she feels the brush of fur against her. Avery curls around her shaking body, and they stay like that, quaking together.
“Stop,” Avery hisses, and Nina is relieved to realize that ze’s not speaking to her.
When Nina untucks her nose from under her tail, Dean is gripping a stricken Castiel by his lapels, and Avery is watching them with flat hostility in hir eyes.
“What’s wrong with you?” Dean snarls, “You can’t leave - it’ll hurt her, you can’t -“
Castiel crumples, and Nina thinks it improper to watch.
in which I cry over a toad:zachariah’s daemon manifests at one point, but it means nothing to him; it’s a symbol of weakness, something dirty and pathetic. “look,” he says, and he waves the struggling toad under dean’s nose, “look at it. what a disgusting animal. what would I want with this, dean? what would I want with one of your pets?” zachariah's voice rises to a shout.
he kills it. zachariah kills his own daemon, and he’s fine, he’s fucking fine even as he crushes its skull under one polished black toe. dean wants more than anything to claw that smirk off his face. he's gone pale and unsteady with rage. avery trembles against his neck now - but dean would never, could never. the thought makes his vision lurch nauseatingly.
“did she even have a name?” dean asks, barely managing to scrape the words from his throat.
zachariah’s lips twist in a grotesque parody of camaraderie.
"peregrine. thought you'd appreciate the homage, deano."
there is no doubt in his mind: he is going to kill zachariah.
5.03:sam has seen jess often enough in his dreams. he’s seen her black eyes and the spike of glossy yellow crawling in her hair. he’s seen the jackal prone at her feet, seen the sharp-toothed grin which was altogether not her own; he’s mourned for her. he’s ripped the cursed thing out of her night after night until his dreams festered with it, yellow, yellow spots glistening on the backs of his eyelids. this is something else.
it takes him a moment to notice that it isn’t hugo at jess’s feet. he had thought he looked strange, as if twisted into shadows by the low light; now he sees that it is not her daemon at all. the thing is long-necked and feral, its face gaping and dark and featureless in the gloom. beady eyes. black eyes.
“that’s right. you know who I am.”
4.22:there’s a flash of grey, and then avery is spitting and snarling on the floor.
“what the fuck -” dean begins, but before the words have so much as tripped off his tongue castiel is right there in his face, fingers closing around his shoulder with inhuman force. a hand claps over his mouth, and so the last syllable is a bite cut into castiel’s palm as he backs them roughly against the wall. dean’s chest is heaving like a wild animal’s where castiel is pressed flush against him, remarkably, unflinchingly still; his pulse seems caught somewhere between them, fluttering in the shared canyon of their ribs.
dean’s relieved to see that avery is apparently unharmed. hir teeth are bared cautiously at the goshawk straddling hir body, but neither animal struggles now. the bird is simply holding hir pinned under one strong yellow foot, and there is something terrible in the way that the wicked arc of its claws is applied with such gentleness. behind them, dean can see the tension in nina’s crouch, a hot prickle of alarm, as if she can’t decide whether to pounce on the bird or flee. the bird - castiel’s daemon, dean realizes belatedly.
in which dean winchester gets off on resurrection:dean is quite sure that if he were to push aside all that fur, he would find a mark wrapped around avery’s flanks just the same as the one on his shoulder. or maybe avery’s is burned into the inner seams of hir skin; castiel can do that, can flip a soul inside out so that its heart beats in the open air and he can lay his hands on its inner machinations and pry apart the ribs and say, here’s the problem. he can scour lungs of dust and crack open bones and siphon off the diseased marrow, dissolve cataracts and smooth over scars like roads all leading in one direction. he can snap his fingers to raise spinal columns teetering into the air, and he can catalyze every protein; he probably has labels for each instance, the fucker, cataloged by placement and function and this cell, this cell has a proclivity for the production of fine red pheomelanin - their name, not castiel’s; he knows it from foxes and deserts and wild horses and the symbol he writes is the red of breathing things - and here he’s tracing patterns in freckles and writing his name on dean’s shoulders and across the pads of avery’s toes.
castiel screwed teeth back into avery’s jaw and strung hir with muscles that made hir something more than a marionette. agency: he can do that, too. dean remembers, sometimes, thousands of hands teaching avery to walk again, one foot in front of the other - there, you only have four limbs to coordinate, and that’s not so hard, is it? feathers and wheels and the two of them swept up inside that impossible thing. it’s not so hard. let me help you.
when dean dreams of castiel, he feels avery from the ground up and he awakes with a warmth in his belly and a tightness in his chest that he’ll deal with the only way he knows how.
2.22:later with the crossroads cacodemon, all dean can think is that he’s offering up avery for this. maybe it’ll take years, but ultimately it’s going to be hir quick black eyes flashing as ze trots at the heels of the possessed. better this. the tail end of the thought is implicit; dean’s been biting it off for months, scrubbing the sick yellow stare from his bones and heart and mouth and dreams - only this time the salamander is a wolf, and that’s no kind of alternative at all.
novakcest/daemonverse/wild girls - in which one can never have too many crossovers:so it's like this. jimmy pulls nina into the shade, holds her tight against his ribs and the gasping animal of his heart. jacob is feral in this light. red-mouthed. it's wonderful, jacob is telling him, it's the most wonderful thing - you'll see, you'll see. jimmy shakes his head, but the words still tremble at the corners of his brother's lips, and when he parts them the tip of his tongue darts out like a lizard's. too much for one body, he says; the frayed edge of him is all glazed eyes and a deep, hollow hunger in his bones. jimmy knots his fingers clumsy and close in nina's fur. he's altogether too giddy with this, has to remind himself not to stare at the flex of his brother's ribs as he peels off his shirt. and again: you will. jacob shoots him a look over his shoulder before he dives in, this time with such conviction that jimmy fears for a moment that his brother is simply going to thrust quinn into his arms. the dryness in jimmy's mouth says he would take her gladly.
cas/meg for previousdreams:Naamah notices Castiel first. Her mouth peels into a rictus, canines flashing under her tawny lip. It ought to be a terrible sort of jubilation, but the way Naamah’s arrowslit pupils flex and narrow before settling on Phegan is at least as compelling in its naked hunger as it is grotesque. Already, Castiel can feel the lion crawling under his skin, pushing up against the capillaries, and he wouldn’t deny himself the cut of teeth against teeth that it’s rattling for. Let the ox hold its tongue. His blood has become light and burning dust, and the thing that stirs in his bones now (has been stirring for a while) feels like a wingspan reaching beyond what this body could ever contain.
Naamah nods conspiratorially. There is something privately unkind about the gesture, as if the meeting of their eyes is a cosmic joke passed behind Meg’s back. I won’t tell if you don’t. She is so old. Castiel can smell the years on her, the warm reek of dust and ancient fear, and she buckles easily into the rut of creatures relegated to his memory: primal, monstrous, branded like a sigil in his grace. Cacodemon. Phegan shifts on Castiel’s shoulder at the thought, pupils set black and starved in the cold red corona of hir stare.
Finally, Naamah touches the tip of her tail to Meg’s ankle, and she snaps around to grin at Castiel in perfect reflection of the fossa’s snarl. He tries to lick the dryness from his mouth, but Meg’s looking at him madly, blindly, and Naamah is slinking around her feet like a rhetorical question mark.
“Back for more, Feathers?”
If Castiel hates her, then at least there is solidarity in loathing.
one word prompts - slither:It is some failure of this human body that brings the daemon to him time and again, flashing brazen through the undergrowth and crowing every night for the death of him. Daemons are flies at the mouths of the sick, and though this one has no interest in the skin Michael is wearing, it’s licking at his seams. The creature must have heard the beating of his vessel’s heart and guessed, slithered in through the arteries one day in a gasping moment of arrhythmia.
Michael has tried choking the daemon from his grace. If there’s allegory in the fat curl of its belly around his feet, well, so be it. That's human frivolity for you, scraps of meaning gnawed from a skeleton of a word: dawn bringer, morning star, a backbone wrought for a creature that preferred to crawl. Where did you come across those names, daemon, that you saw fit to plunder them for yourself?
Maybe a hundred to several hundred words apiece? No warnings apply.
one word prompts - lost:“I don’t understand,” Castiel murmurs, and Nina noses his fingers where they’re hanging curled at his sides. He pulls absently away from her, eyes skittering from branch to branch with a confusion that makes Nina’s whiskers quiver.
“Come on,” she says, “Let’s go back inside. It’s not here.”
“I saw it,” he says, “I saw it, Nina.”
She’s trying not to tremble against him, and Castiel turns to look at her in surprise.
“Are you cold?”
The sky is pale and gray beyond the black crisscross of branches overhead, so she nods, and tries not to look at him, and tries not to look at the flash of red she is always seeing in his eyes.
“I want to go now.”
one word prompts - trigger:Castiel is stiff and unyielding; Nina might as well be resting her head against a slab of cement. He smells like Jimmy, though, and if she closes her eyes she can almost feel him. He is so close, fluttering just under Castiel’s cold skin.
“See,” she says, “This is nice.”
“Yes.”
Castiel sounds unsure, but Nina doesn’t say so. Burying her face in the folds of his coat, she instead finds the place where his heart should be and presses her forehead there as if to reassure him - but Castiel is mechanical, breathes mechanically, moves mechanically. His pulse is lost low and dull in her fur. Nina would stoke the thing inside him if she could (the soul he doesn’t have! she thinks; if only she could follow Jimmy into the cavern of Castiel’s chest), prostrate herself on the flames, but Castiel is staring down at the serval gathered in his lap like she’s something breakable - like Nina’s going to slip if he doesn’t hold her here, and he can already imagine himself sweeping up the dusty yellow glass of her bones.
They sit for a few minutes in silence before resolve seems to stir in Castiel. He raises a cautious hand to pet Nina, running his palm down her spine in gentle strokes. It’s not how she likes to be touched, and his skin is too soft and too smooth from a lack of manual labor, but she hazards a purr anyway. She is discovering every day that there is a currency of affection with Castiel. He tickles her belly: she puts a paw on his knee. He drags his fingertips across her flank: she arches her back into the warm curve of his body.
Of Jimmy’s body.
Castiel is rubbing his knuckles at the base of Nina’s skull, and she twists away to look up at him. His eyes are the same fierce untempered blue as she remembers, and suddenly that is terrible, and she has done the worst thing - she is recoiling under his touch -
Nina scrambles away from Castiel, bristling frantic and wild with fear. She’s breathing hard, and she wants to run - wants to be away from here - wants to be away from him. But not him; not her Jimmy.
“I thought this pleased you,” Castiel says.
Nina can only press her belly against the floor and cower and hide her face.
“Don’t touch me.”
It is a blessing when she feels the brush of fur against her. Avery curls around her shaking body, and they stay like that, quaking together.
“Stop,” Avery hisses, and Nina is relieved to realize that ze’s not speaking to her.
When Nina untucks her nose from under her tail, Dean is gripping a stricken Castiel by his lapels, and Avery is watching them with flat hostility in hir eyes.
“What’s wrong with you?” Dean snarls, “You can’t leave - it’ll hurt her, you can’t -“
Castiel crumples, and Nina thinks it improper to watch.
in which I cry over a toad:zachariah’s daemon manifests at one point, but it means nothing to him; it’s a symbol of weakness, something dirty and pathetic. “look,” he says, and he waves the struggling toad under dean’s nose, “look at it. what a disgusting animal. what would I want with this, dean? what would I want with one of your pets?” zachariah's voice rises to a shout.
he kills it. zachariah kills his own daemon, and he’s fine, he’s fucking fine even as he crushes its skull under one polished black toe. dean wants more than anything to claw that smirk off his face. he's gone pale and unsteady with rage. avery trembles against his neck now - but dean would never, could never. the thought makes his vision lurch nauseatingly.
“did she even have a name?” dean asks, barely managing to scrape the words from his throat.
zachariah’s lips twist in a grotesque parody of camaraderie.
"peregrine. thought you'd appreciate the homage, deano."
there is no doubt in his mind: he is going to kill zachariah.
5.03:sam has seen jess often enough in his dreams. he’s seen her black eyes and the spike of glossy yellow crawling in her hair. he’s seen the jackal prone at her feet, seen the sharp-toothed grin which was altogether not her own; he’s mourned for her. he’s ripped the cursed thing out of her night after night until his dreams festered with it, yellow, yellow spots glistening on the backs of his eyelids. this is something else.
it takes him a moment to notice that it isn’t hugo at jess’s feet. he had thought he looked strange, as if twisted into shadows by the low light; now he sees that it is not her daemon at all. the thing is long-necked and feral, its face gaping and dark and featureless in the gloom. beady eyes. black eyes.
“that’s right. you know who I am.”
4.22:there’s a flash of grey, and then avery is spitting and snarling on the floor.
“what the fuck -” dean begins, but before the words have so much as tripped off his tongue castiel is right there in his face, fingers closing around his shoulder with inhuman force. a hand claps over his mouth, and so the last syllable is a bite cut into castiel’s palm as he backs them roughly against the wall. dean’s chest is heaving like a wild animal’s where castiel is pressed flush against him, remarkably, unflinchingly still; his pulse seems caught somewhere between them, fluttering in the shared canyon of their ribs.
dean’s relieved to see that avery is apparently unharmed. hir teeth are bared cautiously at the goshawk straddling hir body, but neither animal struggles now. the bird is simply holding hir pinned under one strong yellow foot, and there is something terrible in the way that the wicked arc of its claws is applied with such gentleness. behind them, dean can see the tension in nina’s crouch, a hot prickle of alarm, as if she can’t decide whether to pounce on the bird or flee. the bird - castiel’s daemon, dean realizes belatedly.
in which dean winchester gets off on resurrection:dean is quite sure that if he were to push aside all that fur, he would find a mark wrapped around avery’s flanks just the same as the one on his shoulder. or maybe avery’s is burned into the inner seams of hir skin; castiel can do that, can flip a soul inside out so that its heart beats in the open air and he can lay his hands on its inner machinations and pry apart the ribs and say, here’s the problem. he can scour lungs of dust and crack open bones and siphon off the diseased marrow, dissolve cataracts and smooth over scars like roads all leading in one direction. he can snap his fingers to raise spinal columns teetering into the air, and he can catalyze every protein; he probably has labels for each instance, the fucker, cataloged by placement and function and this cell, this cell has a proclivity for the production of fine red pheomelanin - their name, not castiel’s; he knows it from foxes and deserts and wild horses and the symbol he writes is the red of breathing things - and here he’s tracing patterns in freckles and writing his name on dean’s shoulders and across the pads of avery’s toes.
castiel screwed teeth back into avery’s jaw and strung hir with muscles that made hir something more than a marionette. agency: he can do that, too. dean remembers, sometimes, thousands of hands teaching avery to walk again, one foot in front of the other - there, you only have four limbs to coordinate, and that’s not so hard, is it? feathers and wheels and the two of them swept up inside that impossible thing. it’s not so hard. let me help you.
when dean dreams of castiel, he feels avery from the ground up and he awakes with a warmth in his belly and a tightness in his chest that he’ll deal with the only way he knows how.
2.22:later with the crossroads cacodemon, all dean can think is that he’s offering up avery for this. maybe it’ll take years, but ultimately it’s going to be hir quick black eyes flashing as ze trots at the heels of the possessed. better this. the tail end of the thought is implicit; dean’s been biting it off for months, scrubbing the sick yellow stare from his bones and heart and mouth and dreams - only this time the salamander is a wolf, and that’s no kind of alternative at all.
novakcest/daemonverse/wild girls - in which one can never have too many crossovers:so it's like this. jimmy pulls nina into the shade, holds her tight against his ribs and the gasping animal of his heart. jacob is feral in this light. red-mouthed. it's wonderful, jacob is telling him, it's the most wonderful thing - you'll see, you'll see. jimmy shakes his head, but the words still tremble at the corners of his brother's lips, and when he parts them the tip of his tongue darts out like a lizard's. too much for one body, he says; the frayed edge of him is all glazed eyes and a deep, hollow hunger in his bones. jimmy knots his fingers clumsy and close in nina's fur. he's altogether too giddy with this, has to remind himself not to stare at the flex of his brother's ribs as he peels off his shirt. and again: you will. jacob shoots him a look over his shoulder before he dives in, this time with such conviction that jimmy fears for a moment that his brother is simply going to thrust quinn into his arms. the dryness in jimmy's mouth says he would take her gladly.
cas/meg for previousdreams:Naamah notices Castiel first. Her mouth peels into a rictus, canines flashing under her tawny lip. It ought to be a terrible sort of jubilation, but the way Naamah’s arrowslit pupils flex and narrow before settling on Phegan is at least as compelling in its naked hunger as it is grotesque. Already, Castiel can feel the lion crawling under his skin, pushing up against the capillaries, and he wouldn’t deny himself the cut of teeth against teeth that it’s rattling for. Let the ox hold its tongue. His blood has become light and burning dust, and the thing that stirs in his bones now (has been stirring for a while) feels like a wingspan reaching beyond what this body could ever contain.
Naamah nods conspiratorially. There is something privately unkind about the gesture, as if the meeting of their eyes is a cosmic joke passed behind Meg’s back. I won’t tell if you don’t. She is so old. Castiel can smell the years on her, the warm reek of dust and ancient fear, and she buckles easily into the rut of creatures relegated to his memory: primal, monstrous, branded like a sigil in his grace. Cacodemon. Phegan shifts on Castiel’s shoulder at the thought, pupils set black and starved in the cold red corona of hir stare.
Finally, Naamah touches the tip of her tail to Meg’s ankle, and she snaps around to grin at Castiel in perfect reflection of the fossa’s snarl. He tries to lick the dryness from his mouth, but Meg’s looking at him madly, blindly, and Naamah is slinking around her feet like a rhetorical question mark.
“Back for more, Feathers?”
If Castiel hates her, then at least there is solidarity in loathing.
one word prompts - slither:It is some failure of this human body that brings the daemon to him time and again, flashing brazen through the undergrowth and crowing every night for the death of him. Daemons are flies at the mouths of the sick, and though this one has no interest in the skin Michael is wearing, it’s licking at his seams. The creature must have heard the beating of his vessel’s heart and guessed, slithered in through the arteries one day in a gasping moment of arrhythmia.
Michael has tried choking the daemon from his grace. If there’s allegory in the fat curl of its belly around his feet, well, so be it. That's human frivolity for you, scraps of meaning gnawed from a skeleton of a word: dawn bringer, morning star, a backbone wrought for a creature that preferred to crawl. Where did you come across those names, daemon, that you saw fit to plunder them for yourself?