fic fragment - once was loved
This was a story that died withered and died on the vine, i forgot where i was going to take it, it's 2k long and is in many places quite beautiful so I thought I'd share in the vague hope someone can see where it was going and i might be able to finish it.
edit:
these were the notes I left myself
no really
“At times I almost dream
I too have spent a life the sages' way,
And tread once more familiar paths. Perchance
I perished in an arrogant self-reliance
Ages ago; and in that act a prayer
For one more chance went up so earnest, so
Instinct with better light let in by death,
That life was blotted out -- not so completely
But scattered wrecks enough of it remain,
Dim memories, as now, when once more seems
The goal in sight again.”
Title: Once was loved
Author: Seraphim Grace
Archive: http://www.geocities.com/taliasen1256.html, http://www.Seraphim-grace.livejournal.com. If you want it ask.
Feedback: Always appreciated and replied to.
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: 18.
Pairings: Dean x Castiel
Warnings : Spoilers for Season 4 future fic!
Adult scenes, Adult situations!
O dear my loves, O faithless, once again
This one last gift I give: that after men
Shall know, and later lovers, far-removed,
Praise you, "All these were lovely"; say "He loved".
The Great Lover - a poem by Rupert Brooke
New York was where you went when the world fell apart, Dean found, especially at Christmas. The entire city was dressed up in fake snow and tinsel, with gay hearted children skipping through the streets. But the bars were open late and no one seemed to care that he wasn’t as happy as he probably should have been.
There would be no Christmas for Dean Winchester this year. It was just another winter day when some other supernatural son of a bitch decided to munch on some other happy householder, but this year he wasn't going to lift a finger to help them, instead he was going to drink as much of this cheap brandy as he could, and maybe then, maybe he’d forget how much he had been loved.
Love was a crock- brandy could be trusted. It was cheaper than whiskey, and it didn’t matter how drunk he got because even the impala was a memory.
Women came and went.
Men too.
Simple wells of flesh that might make him forget for a minute, an hour, a day.
There was Deborah, who had a rich husband, but liked a bit of rough and would come to his small apartment with her demands to be treated cruelly, to be abused, to be hurt.
She wouldn’t stay.
There was Chloe, who liked to tie him and shout obscenities at him.
She couldn’t make him hate himself any more than he already did.
There was Andrew who just wanted to sit at his feet and be seen. It didn’t matter that Dean’s gaze was blank and empty, he saw him and that was enough for Andrew.
It didn't matter at all to Dean.
They paid the rent on his small apartment, and they paid for his food and they paid for his brandy, each convinced that they would be the one to save him.
Deborah who wanted an escape from bourgeois boredom.
Chloe who wanted to bully him into submission.
Andrew who worshipped him.
It didn’t matter, Dean knew, not when he had been loved.
Dean had held the love of heaven in his hands and it was gone.
After that it was hard to care about anything.
New York was soulless, facile and cold. It suited him perfectly. He could be anyone here. He could be anything. He wasn't just a hunter with an old leather coat and a shit eating grin. He was anything anyone wanted him to be, for the right price.
New York was easy to lose yourself in, and that suited Dean just fine.
And if he saw something that looked like it might be a ghost, or a vampire or a werewolf, well that shit was someone else’s problem now.
Hadn’t he given enough?
Though sometimes his palms itched for the feel of his shot gun, and sometimes he could feel the downward thrust of a knife in his wrist.
He wasn’t a hunter anymore.
He was just washed up.
The end of the world had come and gone and there were worse things than facing it, Dean learned, you could survive.
No, the worst was surviving alone.
-----
Sam had stupidly huge feet and hair that no matter how much it flopped always fell into his eyes. He had hands that looked to be as big as Dean’s head, but they were clever and not clumsy. Dancing across keyboards or cleaning guns and knives sat cross legged on a horrible motel carpet.
He had always insisted on buying white briefs so they wouldn’t get mixed up with Dean’s, even though they quickly turned sock-in-the-wash blue or pink. And he’d roll his eyes the exact same way when Dean made some joke about his pink gay pants.
In his brother’s eyes Sam could do no wrong, but there wasn’t much point in telling him that - his head was big enough as it was.
Smart and handsome under his stupid floppy hair, hairs that got everywhere and Dean knew that they weren’t his as he pulled them out of his butt crack, but they were there, proof of how close he and Sammy were, that his hairs got everywhere, because Sam was, like his floppy hair, everywhere.
Sammy was the beginning and the end, and at the end it was a single bullet that laid him low, dropping to his knees and then backwards unto the soil as Dean yelled for him to get down, not knowing that Sam was already gone.
And it hadn’t mattered how long he had knelt there in the mud and tried to breathe into his brother’s lungs when the back of his head was missing and his brain was just scrambled jello.
Now when he remembered Sammy he didn't remember the baby, fat and gurgling; the child curious and too bright to keep up with; the boy inventing things and reading everything that wasn’t nailed down and a few things that were; or the man, brilliant so brilliant, who had almost got away from hunting.
Now when he remembered Sammy he remembered him stood on that Arkansas field, with his eyes almost completely yellow, and that stark red spot on his forehead just before his legs crumpled underneath him. And Castiel’s hands on Dean’s shoulders, trying to pull him away, away, away.
When he remembered he’d empty his stomach in cold roiling waves, and then try to fill the emptiness with brandy and fall into someone else’s bed.
There was no use, he knew, in surviving, but suicide was a one way ticket downstairs.
-----
Andrew is whining. He’s sat at Dean’s feet and he’s whining. Dean is sat in a wooden dining chair, barefoot, and Andrew is whining about the stock market. It hasn't done what it was supposed to, and it is clearly the end of the world.
Dean wants to reach down and take that pretty pretty face in his hands and say you think that's the end of the world, well, guess what, you missed it, it happened and there was mud and blood and shit and rain, and it was cold and there were horrors there that you couldn’t ever imagine and my brother fell there.
My lover died there.
I saw the wings ripped from angels.
I saw demons cough up their own essence for it to shatter on the mud beneath them like bonfire toffee.
I saw the throat of dragons torn out and the spray ignite everything it touched.
I saw unicorns brought down and ripped to pieces which were then devoured by goblins.
I saw the ghosts of angels nail ancient kings to petrified trees.
And you think this, he would spread his hands, this- is the end of days and then he would laugh.
Instead he says nothing. He just lets Andrew sit at his feet, kneeling on the cheap carpet and whine about stock options and annuities and other things Dean doesn't care about.
"Let me blow you,” Andrew says, and Dean sees no reason not to let him. The familiar slip side of spit and suck - of over cared for hands on the curve of his thighs through denim, hard heels pressing down into the meat of him.
It’s what Andrew wants and Dean couldn’t care less.
It’s just flesh meeting flesh and flesh is just meat, dust and sweat and iron and protein just waiting for corruption. He learned that on the field. All that remains if flesh meeting flesh as it waits to rot.
--------
Castiel was beautiful.
He was otherworldly.
He was innocent and so very jaded in the same moment.
When Castiel looked at Dean it felt like a laser beam.
Sometimes when Dean saw the angel out of the corner of his eye he didn’t see the holy tax accountant, he saw the shining being of starlight and wonder and his heart would catch and he’d wonder why he had never tried to see Castiel in his true form.
But the holy tax accountant had a small kiss in the left corner of his mouth that was just for Dean alone. It made him feel like some damsel in a dime store novel, but it also made him feel very cherished and safe. And when Castiel touched him the very world fell away.
Angels were lusty beings, fire and brimstone and wrath and power and when they turned all that attention to you it was hard not to feel both cherished and incinerated, but then he would close the gap between them and his lips, chapped, dry, clumsy, would find Dean’s own and against the wall, grasping and grunting, two soldiers finding a place between the fighting.
Castiel didn't have time to lounge around in bed trading kisses and caresses so instead there was motel walls, couches, the shower with one foot on the toilet seat hoping it didn’t slip, and the feel of his holy tax accountant cock pushing into him like a spear into a hell hound and the wonder of it, head back, water falling on his chest and Castiel’s grunts and so close, so good, too much, too much, too much.
Yet, ultimately, never enough.
Castiel who never spoke in nonsense words of passion. Castiel who hardly ever spoke at all, but there, in the corner of his mouth, was a kiss that was just for Dean and made him feel like the very centre of the universe.
But things like that weren’t destined for Dean, nothing ever stayed, not even an angel, shining brilliant and bright, hard fingertips and chapped lips, expressive eyes and fuckswept hair.
The war took him too.
It took everything else, so why shouldn’t it take Castiel with Sam, the Impala, John and all those brief; blind mortal souls.
---------------
Jones is almost the last thing that anyone expects of an angel. Snake hipped, lizard shoed with shirt open to the elements and back combed hair. He’s taken to wearing eyeliner. Strangely, in New York, no one gives him a second glance, or if they do it’s with eyes that linger.
He has a complicated angel name but Dean can’t pronounce it and so he became Jones.
He’s sat on Dean’s ugly but very comfortable arm chair, lizard shoes on the coffee table, on crap other people have left there. He’s drinking Dean’s coffee out of Dean's favourite mug like he hasn't a care in the world.
Perhaps he doesn’t.
“Dean, my man,” he says when Dean opens the door and throws his keys down on the kitchen counter, “just the monkey I wanted to see.”
“Something tells me it wouldn't be Larry King in my apartment.” Dean drawls, something about Jones brings out the very worst in him. He can’t resist the snark, but it rolls of Jones like water off oil.
“You never know, what with your social life and all,” he grins, all white teeth and eyeliner. “I could have walked in here on an orgy,” his full lips linger over the words.
“You sure you’re an angel?” Dean asks as he flicks on the coffee maker.
“Wanna see the goods?” Jones asks him pulling his belt forward, but there is something in the way that Jones talks that makes the most innocent suggestions sound lascivious. He makes asking for milk in his coffee downright pornographic.
“You got something for me, Jones, or are you here just to drink my coffee and hog my best chair?”
“Your coffee aint worth the journey, man,” Jones tells him, “but this chair is fucking “A” despite being as ugly as a demon ass with ‘roids. I don’t just appear to sit in this fucking comfortable chair, if I did I’d just take it.”
“Doesn’t it say in the bible thou shalt not covet the hunter’s chair?” Dean can’t speak normally to Jones, something about him just activates the defence mechanisms and he attacks with every sentence.
Perhaps it’s just that he is so very different from Castiel.
After that first introduction he never mentions the other angel either.
---------------
edit:
these were the notes I left myself
no really
“At times I almost dream
I too have spent a life the sages' way,
And tread once more familiar paths. Perchance
I perished in an arrogant self-reliance
Ages ago; and in that act a prayer
For one more chance went up so earnest, so
Instinct with better light let in by death,
That life was blotted out -- not so completely
But scattered wrecks enough of it remain,
Dim memories, as now, when once more seems
The goal in sight again.”
Title: Once was loved
Author: Seraphim Grace
Archive: http://www.geocities.com/taliasen1256.html, http://www.Seraphim-grace.livejournal.com. If you want it ask.
Feedback: Always appreciated and replied to.
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: 18.
Pairings: Dean x Castiel
Warnings : Spoilers for Season 4 future fic!
Adult scenes, Adult situations!
O dear my loves, O faithless, once again
This one last gift I give: that after men
Shall know, and later lovers, far-removed,
Praise you, "All these were lovely"; say "He loved".
The Great Lover - a poem by Rupert Brooke
New York was where you went when the world fell apart, Dean found, especially at Christmas. The entire city was dressed up in fake snow and tinsel, with gay hearted children skipping through the streets. But the bars were open late and no one seemed to care that he wasn’t as happy as he probably should have been.
There would be no Christmas for Dean Winchester this year. It was just another winter day when some other supernatural son of a bitch decided to munch on some other happy householder, but this year he wasn't going to lift a finger to help them, instead he was going to drink as much of this cheap brandy as he could, and maybe then, maybe he’d forget how much he had been loved.
Love was a crock- brandy could be trusted. It was cheaper than whiskey, and it didn’t matter how drunk he got because even the impala was a memory.
Women came and went.
Men too.
Simple wells of flesh that might make him forget for a minute, an hour, a day.
There was Deborah, who had a rich husband, but liked a bit of rough and would come to his small apartment with her demands to be treated cruelly, to be abused, to be hurt.
She wouldn’t stay.
There was Chloe, who liked to tie him and shout obscenities at him.
She couldn’t make him hate himself any more than he already did.
There was Andrew who just wanted to sit at his feet and be seen. It didn’t matter that Dean’s gaze was blank and empty, he saw him and that was enough for Andrew.
It didn't matter at all to Dean.
They paid the rent on his small apartment, and they paid for his food and they paid for his brandy, each convinced that they would be the one to save him.
Deborah who wanted an escape from bourgeois boredom.
Chloe who wanted to bully him into submission.
Andrew who worshipped him.
It didn’t matter, Dean knew, not when he had been loved.
Dean had held the love of heaven in his hands and it was gone.
After that it was hard to care about anything.
New York was soulless, facile and cold. It suited him perfectly. He could be anyone here. He could be anything. He wasn't just a hunter with an old leather coat and a shit eating grin. He was anything anyone wanted him to be, for the right price.
New York was easy to lose yourself in, and that suited Dean just fine.
And if he saw something that looked like it might be a ghost, or a vampire or a werewolf, well that shit was someone else’s problem now.
Hadn’t he given enough?
Though sometimes his palms itched for the feel of his shot gun, and sometimes he could feel the downward thrust of a knife in his wrist.
He wasn’t a hunter anymore.
He was just washed up.
The end of the world had come and gone and there were worse things than facing it, Dean learned, you could survive.
No, the worst was surviving alone.
-----
Sam had stupidly huge feet and hair that no matter how much it flopped always fell into his eyes. He had hands that looked to be as big as Dean’s head, but they were clever and not clumsy. Dancing across keyboards or cleaning guns and knives sat cross legged on a horrible motel carpet.
He had always insisted on buying white briefs so they wouldn’t get mixed up with Dean’s, even though they quickly turned sock-in-the-wash blue or pink. And he’d roll his eyes the exact same way when Dean made some joke about his pink gay pants.
In his brother’s eyes Sam could do no wrong, but there wasn’t much point in telling him that - his head was big enough as it was.
Smart and handsome under his stupid floppy hair, hairs that got everywhere and Dean knew that they weren’t his as he pulled them out of his butt crack, but they were there, proof of how close he and Sammy were, that his hairs got everywhere, because Sam was, like his floppy hair, everywhere.
Sammy was the beginning and the end, and at the end it was a single bullet that laid him low, dropping to his knees and then backwards unto the soil as Dean yelled for him to get down, not knowing that Sam was already gone.
And it hadn’t mattered how long he had knelt there in the mud and tried to breathe into his brother’s lungs when the back of his head was missing and his brain was just scrambled jello.
Now when he remembered Sammy he didn't remember the baby, fat and gurgling; the child curious and too bright to keep up with; the boy inventing things and reading everything that wasn’t nailed down and a few things that were; or the man, brilliant so brilliant, who had almost got away from hunting.
Now when he remembered Sammy he remembered him stood on that Arkansas field, with his eyes almost completely yellow, and that stark red spot on his forehead just before his legs crumpled underneath him. And Castiel’s hands on Dean’s shoulders, trying to pull him away, away, away.
When he remembered he’d empty his stomach in cold roiling waves, and then try to fill the emptiness with brandy and fall into someone else’s bed.
There was no use, he knew, in surviving, but suicide was a one way ticket downstairs.
-----
Andrew is whining. He’s sat at Dean’s feet and he’s whining. Dean is sat in a wooden dining chair, barefoot, and Andrew is whining about the stock market. It hasn't done what it was supposed to, and it is clearly the end of the world.
Dean wants to reach down and take that pretty pretty face in his hands and say you think that's the end of the world, well, guess what, you missed it, it happened and there was mud and blood and shit and rain, and it was cold and there were horrors there that you couldn’t ever imagine and my brother fell there.
My lover died there.
I saw the wings ripped from angels.
I saw demons cough up their own essence for it to shatter on the mud beneath them like bonfire toffee.
I saw the throat of dragons torn out and the spray ignite everything it touched.
I saw unicorns brought down and ripped to pieces which were then devoured by goblins.
I saw the ghosts of angels nail ancient kings to petrified trees.
And you think this, he would spread his hands, this- is the end of days and then he would laugh.
Instead he says nothing. He just lets Andrew sit at his feet, kneeling on the cheap carpet and whine about stock options and annuities and other things Dean doesn't care about.
"Let me blow you,” Andrew says, and Dean sees no reason not to let him. The familiar slip side of spit and suck - of over cared for hands on the curve of his thighs through denim, hard heels pressing down into the meat of him.
It’s what Andrew wants and Dean couldn’t care less.
It’s just flesh meeting flesh and flesh is just meat, dust and sweat and iron and protein just waiting for corruption. He learned that on the field. All that remains if flesh meeting flesh as it waits to rot.
--------
Castiel was beautiful.
He was otherworldly.
He was innocent and so very jaded in the same moment.
When Castiel looked at Dean it felt like a laser beam.
Sometimes when Dean saw the angel out of the corner of his eye he didn’t see the holy tax accountant, he saw the shining being of starlight and wonder and his heart would catch and he’d wonder why he had never tried to see Castiel in his true form.
But the holy tax accountant had a small kiss in the left corner of his mouth that was just for Dean alone. It made him feel like some damsel in a dime store novel, but it also made him feel very cherished and safe. And when Castiel touched him the very world fell away.
Angels were lusty beings, fire and brimstone and wrath and power and when they turned all that attention to you it was hard not to feel both cherished and incinerated, but then he would close the gap between them and his lips, chapped, dry, clumsy, would find Dean’s own and against the wall, grasping and grunting, two soldiers finding a place between the fighting.
Castiel didn't have time to lounge around in bed trading kisses and caresses so instead there was motel walls, couches, the shower with one foot on the toilet seat hoping it didn’t slip, and the feel of his holy tax accountant cock pushing into him like a spear into a hell hound and the wonder of it, head back, water falling on his chest and Castiel’s grunts and so close, so good, too much, too much, too much.
Yet, ultimately, never enough.
Castiel who never spoke in nonsense words of passion. Castiel who hardly ever spoke at all, but there, in the corner of his mouth, was a kiss that was just for Dean and made him feel like the very centre of the universe.
But things like that weren’t destined for Dean, nothing ever stayed, not even an angel, shining brilliant and bright, hard fingertips and chapped lips, expressive eyes and fuckswept hair.
The war took him too.
It took everything else, so why shouldn’t it take Castiel with Sam, the Impala, John and all those brief; blind mortal souls.
---------------
Jones is almost the last thing that anyone expects of an angel. Snake hipped, lizard shoed with shirt open to the elements and back combed hair. He’s taken to wearing eyeliner. Strangely, in New York, no one gives him a second glance, or if they do it’s with eyes that linger.
He has a complicated angel name but Dean can’t pronounce it and so he became Jones.
He’s sat on Dean’s ugly but very comfortable arm chair, lizard shoes on the coffee table, on crap other people have left there. He’s drinking Dean’s coffee out of Dean's favourite mug like he hasn't a care in the world.
Perhaps he doesn’t.
“Dean, my man,” he says when Dean opens the door and throws his keys down on the kitchen counter, “just the monkey I wanted to see.”
“Something tells me it wouldn't be Larry King in my apartment.” Dean drawls, something about Jones brings out the very worst in him. He can’t resist the snark, but it rolls of Jones like water off oil.
“You never know, what with your social life and all,” he grins, all white teeth and eyeliner. “I could have walked in here on an orgy,” his full lips linger over the words.
“You sure you’re an angel?” Dean asks as he flicks on the coffee maker.
“Wanna see the goods?” Jones asks him pulling his belt forward, but there is something in the way that Jones talks that makes the most innocent suggestions sound lascivious. He makes asking for milk in his coffee downright pornographic.
“You got something for me, Jones, or are you here just to drink my coffee and hog my best chair?”
“Your coffee aint worth the journey, man,” Jones tells him, “but this chair is fucking “A” despite being as ugly as a demon ass with ‘roids. I don’t just appear to sit in this fucking comfortable chair, if I did I’d just take it.”
“Doesn’t it say in the bible thou shalt not covet the hunter’s chair?” Dean can’t speak normally to Jones, something about him just activates the defence mechanisms and he attacks with every sentence.
Perhaps it’s just that he is so very different from Castiel.
After that first introduction he never mentions the other angel either.
---------------