ceeeelebrate good times (come on!)
It's not winter any more in Wisconsin, which means it's spider season. While I love my semi-rural adopted state with all its corn fields and lakes and cranberries, I could do without the daily spider patrol. Of course, the cat helps out, but then I have to be worried that she'll eat something poisonous, and overall it's not so fun.
I feel like it would go faster if I could kill them instead of having to do a patented catch-and-release routine that returns them to their natural habitat, but I am incapable of killing anything that isn't a house centipede.
This is beside the point.
The point is that I am in love with this whole Castiel-centric commentfic festival right now, to the point where I have written one 1000-word thing one 1500-word thing (that is TOTALLY NOT RPF about Castiel protecting Misha Collins-one-of-the-66-seals) because why write a short thing when I could instead write 2500 words of UNREPENTANT CRACK?
Yeah, I thought so.
Also, lassiterfics posted a prompt that was four words long (to wit: "Intrepid investigative journalist AU!") and has spawned a rather long, rather serious, and still-developing story about Dean the reporter, Castiel his best friend/also reporter, Sam his brother who is a lawyer working a pro bono case on behalf of some residents of a housing development who are determined to reveal a coverup, and Uriel the Landlord. There's angst! There's drama! There's dashing romance! There's probably a very Bullitt car chase!
Someday, anyway.
--
I am reposting both commentfics here in the interests of having everything I've written under my spn fic tag, but really you should not read them. Instead, you should go join the party and write more so I can read it and squee and abuse capslock.
Prompt (by maskedfangirl): Castiel fights A DINOSAUR!
Chaos
"And this," says Dean, his hands busy reloading the shotgun, "is why you never, and I mean fucking never, sit a trickster down with a Spielberg flick."
Sam grunts agreement from his position peering over the hood of the Impala, tracking the landscape with a sawedoff and a frown. "Hey, Dean?"
"Talk to me," says Dean, finishing his job, hands steady as he pumps the gun, crawls to kneel beside his brother.
"I know we didn't kill all of them."
"Maybe they got wise," says Dean.
Sam's frown deepens. "Yeah, maybe."
--
Bobby had called two days ago.
"Witness reports giant chickens with tails gutting cattle," he'd said.
Dean, his neck crooked to cradle the phone while he slid his knife against a whetstone, had said, "Killer chickens?" for Sam's benefit.
"Hell if I know. But it might be worth you boys checking out."
Dean had ended the call, shrugging the kink out of his shoulder, and said, "Fuckin' endtimes, man, and all they can come up with is pissed-off poultry?"
--
They find the first one wandering a pasture outside of town.
"That," Sam says, when they inspect its corpse, tattered with bullets, "is not a chicken."
"No shit." Dean nudges the thing with a boot, shuddering as it rolls, tail flopping lifelessly. It's light for its size.
"In fact," Sam says, in a tone so absolutely neutral that Dean turns to stare at him, "that seems to be a velociraptor."
"Awesome," says Dean, getting back into the car and holding down four on his cellphone.
When Cas picks up, Dean says, "Hey, you're pretty old, right?"
"Dean, we've talked about this. The concept of linear time--"
"You were around before people, though."
"I was created--"
"Hey!" Dean says as Sam snatches the phone away and says, "Cas, we have, well, I think we have anyway.... Um. Velociraptors?" A pause. "Yes, I know they're extinct. No, I'm not--and how would you, did Dean tell you--that was one time in high school, and Brad didn't tell me not to take the whole tab. Yes. A trickster, huh? We'd appreciate it."
Dean snickers when Sam hangs up. "You promised not to tell anyone about that," Sam says, sulking.
"White Rabbit was on," says Dean. "It just sort of slipped out. Plus, there was the one part, where you tried to kiss the fire hydrant."
"Shut up."
"And then you decided Cookie the pomeranian was your spirit guide and--"
"Shut up."
Dean shuts up, but slides his gaze to the side as he starts the car, and is rewarded by a smile softening Sam's tired eyes.
--
The plan, as far as Dean can tell, is to pile raw meat on one side of the car, and then stand between the other side of the car and a windowless warehouse to shoot the velociraptors as they come to investigate. Sam says it will work, so Dean tries not to think about razor claws scoring his paint job.
It works. It works well enough that inside fifteen minutes, a few dozen of the things have arrived. Nine of them venture into killing range. The rest disappear.
Sam continues frowning over the car as Dean dials Cas again. "Got any leads yet?" he asks.
Instead of answering, Cas appears directly in front of the bait, his phone to his ear. They're on him in an instant.
--
When Dean was eleven and Dad was working a job in Oklahoma, he and Sam saw their first and only tornado. The funnel slid from the clouds and bit a plume of dirt out of the tilled fields stretched to the horizon. Dean had stood and stared at it, mouth open in wonder, until Sam had tugged at his shirt and looked up with eyes gone wide and terrified.
Cas touches down and the first velociraptor erupts into intestines and feathers that splatter the ground and the side of the car. Dean has a moment to hope the blood isn't corrosive before Cas hurls the next creature into the wall behind Sam and Dean whirls to shoot it before it has a chance to rise. He turns back to the fight just in time to watch Cas produce a long, curved blade from somewhere beneath his trench coat and hook the next raptor across the throat, sending its head in a bloody arc away from its body.
Cas is shouting something, Dean registers finally over the chittering of the animals descending on him. He makes out, museum and drive and won't stop until you. Sam yells, "Okay, Cas, you sure you're going to be--"
"Go!"
Dean hears that one, and Sam's climbing across the driver's seat and pulling Dean in after him, and the last thing he sees in the rearview is a swirl of khaki and a spray of gore like a rainbow in the sun.
--
They corner the trickster in the natural history museum. Their talk includes some waving of stakes, some yelling, and one iffy moment when she threatens to add an Allosaurus to the mix ("It's like a T-Rex, only smarter," Dean explains when Sam raises a confused eyebrow). Finally, she concedes that velociraptors lack subtlety and, after insulting Dean's lineage and sexual proclivities, decides she has better places to be, anyway.
She leaves an egg hatching at their feet. It opens to the beak of something so slimy it takes Dean a second to place it, and he dives to stop Sam before he shoots it between the eyes.
"That's an herbivore, asshole," he mutters, brushing a shell fragment away from the edge of its mouth. When he gathers it up, it chomps at his collar and falls asleep.
--
By the time they make it back to the warehouse, Cas has slaughtered the rest of the raptors. He stands loosely, the blade dripping blood, his coat hem sodden and catching at his ankles. Dean shivers, looking at him, and cradles the triceratops to his chest.
"It's done," says Cas.
"No, it's not," says Sam, pointing at Dean. "He won't let me kill it."
"It's not going to hurt you."
"It's a dinosaur."
"It's not like it's evil. And aren't you usually Mr. Bleeding Heart let's try to save the monsters--"
"They're not dinosaurs."
"Dean." Cas's voice cuts through their argument like thunder, and Dean remembers the tornado again, the hail and lightning along its edges. "Give the creature to me."
"What're you--"
"I'll take it back," Cas says. His sword disappears back under the suddenly pristine coat as he reaches to take the sleeping dinosaur from Dean's arms.
Dean watches it snuffle into Cas's shoulder and says, quickly, "Don't just dump it...I mean, it belongs pretty much just south of here, but Late Cretaceous."
"It will be safe with me," says Cas. Dean stares at him, and Cas stares back, somehow as dignified holding a baby triceratops as explaining Enochian sigils. A nod, a wingbeat, and he's gone.
Sam sighs, slumping back against the car. "Damn." And then, "Dude, Late Cretaceous?"
"Shut up," says Dean, and leans beside him, and closes his eyes.
----------------------------------------------------------
Prompt (by haruslex): Castiel has been put in charge of protecting a seal from being broken. The seal is a man named Misha Collins.
Gotta Break a Few Eggs
Ted's hooked him up with good shit before, but he's gotta admit, this whole out-of-body experience thing isn't his cup of tea. The funny part is, he can't remember exactly what it was he took, except he's staring at...well, at himself, and while the view isn't what he'd call bad, it's no kind of normal. Also, he apparently looks a lot like his character when he's tripping.
"Hello," he tries, wondering whether the other him (man, this encounter is forever going to fuck with his pronouns) will act like a mirror or talk back.
"You must come with me immediately," says the other him.
"Okaaay," says Misha, "here's the thing. No."
"Your life is in danger," says the other Misha.
Misha rolls his eyes and promises his wary kneecaps that this will not end like the time he convinced himself he needed to hurdle a wall to escape the KGB. "Look, you, whoever you, me. I'm not going anywhere. I'm drinking a gallon of Gatorade and lying down and closing my eyes until you go away."
The other Misha--who looks and acts, Misha thinks, disturbingly like Castiel--tilts his head and stares. "That's not an option. You're not well hidden; it's only a matter of time until Lilith finds us."
Misha laughs, turning away. "Who knew, all it took to be a great method actor was a hallucinogen and--"
The other him is suddenly there, far too close, and Misha catches a glimpse of two fingers aimed at his forehead before the world flips like someone changed slides.
--
"Would you like more water?"
Misha nods and accepts the glass without looking at himself--an angel--his character--whatever. "You're. Um."
The man--okay, fine, fuck it, Castiel--sighs. He's been treating Misha like a slow-witted child for half an hour now. If Misha were less freaked out, he'd find it insulting. He's a smart guy, after all. It's just, you know, not every day that your characters rope you into some larp-y version of the apocalypse, complete with demons and seals and angels of the fucking Lord.
"Don't blaspheme," mutters Castiel (Cas? he understands why Dean shortens the name; it's a bit of a mouthful.)
"I didn't," he starts, and replays his thoughts. Fair enough. "Fuck you, stop reading my mind."
They sit in silence. Misha's not sure where Cas has taken him. Inside a house, but it's dusty and crowded, a feeling of abandonment settled over the disarray. At least there's a couch, where Misha sprawled ungraciously upon their arrival, leaving Castiel to sit military-straight on a wooden chair after he finished salting and drawing a Devil's Trap by the door. Evidently, they're safe if they can make it to sunrise; whatever's going down has to happen tonight.
"This what angels do for fun?" Misha asks after a while. He's bored out of his fucking skull, and while Castiel doesn't offer much in the way of repartee, he did conjure the glass of water from nowhere. Maybe he can mojo some Scrabble or something.
Castiel blinks.
Great. Misha rearranges himself so he's lying back, staring at the ceiling. He barely has time to shout and throw his arms up to shield his face before the Scrabble box hits, flying open and spraying tiles across the floor.
"We have our methods of amusement," says Castiel, staring into space.
--
Castiel places ANESTRI to claim fifty bonus points and a triple word score. Again.
"What does that even mean?" Misha grumbles, because he's learned not to question the angel's vocabulary. Also, he does not want another Scrabble dictionary to land on his head.
"It is the phase of sexual dormancy in most female--"
"Thank you," says Misha, rearranging his tiles. He stares at his options, the tiny numbers in the bottom right corners of each tile reminding him that Castiel is currently several hundred points ahead. When the floor jumps, tipping the tiles forward off their rack, he has just enough time to think Seriously? before shit starts to get bad.
--
That whole wind-announcing-evil thing has never failed to make Misha roll his eyes at directors. Wind's sort of an outdoorsy phenomenon, and it's tacky otherwise. Plus, it makes the sound guys bitchy, as if they don't already have enough to complain about.
So when this Lilith chick blows into the room--literally, blows--his first thought goes something like, Again with the fans?
"You really should make these old houses more secure," she says, tossing a woman to the ground in front of her. The woman shakes, almost crying, but holding it together. "All it takes is a little threat to loved ones and humans can be convinced to do us so many favors."
Castiel appears in front of him, trench coat billowing. He's gotta admit, the coat thing can be pretty badass. It's the growl, though, that shocks him, the voice sort of like his but not his at all, saying, "You will not have him."
Something clenches in his chest--fear, but not really.... He struggles for a word and comes up with awe. This is a warrior of fucking God, standing between him and someone who looks, well, like a throwaway guest star juiced up with a whole lot of evil. And some minions.
Much as he appreciates his own minions, these look like they could chew through the lot.
He studies that thought for a moment, thinks of what would happen if he had access to his Twitter page right now, and changes his mind. Almost says, "My minions could kick your minions' collective ass," and decides that taunting the head demon with nothing but himself (plus, admittedly, some hit points) between them is a bad idea.
He's never faltered at bad ideas before.
"You kill me," he says, evenly, "and you will invoke the wrath of LiveJournal."
Both Lilith and Castiel turn to stare at him. Castiel recovers faster, whipping around with an open hand and an expression of serene, total concentration. Lilith catches his arm and sends him flying into a wall before charging after him, her eyes black. When Cas pulls himself up and comes at her again, she stops his fist and throws a punch at his throat, ending in a snarl as he spins and uses the momentum to hurl her past him.
The woman who broke the salt lines crawls into a corner, so Misha, who's honestly not feeling that magnanimous towards her, concentrates on the demons instead. They're readying some sort of altar, complete with cloth, bones, and cup, which can't be good. Misha doesn't know a whole lot about stopping demons, except that holy water stings like a sonovabitch. Not helpful here.
Oh. Unless. He backs away from the fight (Castiel trying to get a hand near Lilith's face, Lilith getting a knee between them and ow, even an angel's gotta feel that) and towards the Scrabble board. The glass of water Castiel handed him.
He picks it up, hefts it in his hand, and splashes it over the demons setting up the altar. They scream and sizzle--neat trick--before shaking it off as one and looking up at him, three sets of pitch-dark eyes. So, alright, maybe he should have thought this through, but fuck if he's going to take part in opening the gates of Hell.
"Cas," he says, softly, as the demons advance on him. Then, "Cas!"
When Cas appears, unruffled, and places an almost-gentle hand on the first demon's forehead, all Misha can think is Man, that lighting's impressive. The other two follow after a scuffle so short Cas barely looks winded. The angel turns, shoulders up, hands open and curved in front of him, his eyes like the first angry breakers that herald a storm.
Lilith, who's about as smart as demons come, chooses an escape, streaming out of her host's mouth in a swirl of black smoke that dissipates into the dawn. The woman she brought with her stands and brushes herself off, refuses to make eye contact with either of them, and leaves.
--
"Hey," says Misha after Cas returns him. "Thanks, you know, for not letting me die."
Cas stares at him, and it's disconcerting, being picked apart by your own eyes. Especially when you know the brain behind those eyes can read your mind.
"I was following orders," says Castiel. A human would shrug. He just...stands.
On a crazy impulse--because seriously, when is he ever going to get to do this again?--Misha reaches out, touches his shoulder. Flattens a palm to his chest. Thinks about hugging him, but decides that would be like hugging a tree for reasons unrelated to raising awareness about the environmental impact of irresponsible forestry. "Really. Thanks."
"You're welcome."
Misha blinks, taking a step forward as if drawn to the vacuum where the angel used to be. "Huh," he says, and smiles.
I feel like it would go faster if I could kill them instead of having to do a patented catch-and-release routine that returns them to their natural habitat, but I am incapable of killing anything that isn't a house centipede.
This is beside the point.
The point is that I am in love with this whole Castiel-centric commentfic festival right now, to the point where I have written one 1000-word thing one 1500-word thing (that is TOTALLY NOT RPF about Castiel protecting Misha Collins-one-of-the-66-seals) because why write a short thing when I could instead write 2500 words of UNREPENTANT CRACK?
Yeah, I thought so.
Also, lassiterfics posted a prompt that was four words long (to wit: "Intrepid investigative journalist AU!") and has spawned a rather long, rather serious, and still-developing story about Dean the reporter, Castiel his best friend/also reporter, Sam his brother who is a lawyer working a pro bono case on behalf of some residents of a housing development who are determined to reveal a coverup, and Uriel the Landlord. There's angst! There's drama! There's dashing romance! There's probably a very Bullitt car chase!
Someday, anyway.
--
I am reposting both commentfics here in the interests of having everything I've written under my spn fic tag, but really you should not read them. Instead, you should go join the party and write more so I can read it and squee and abuse capslock.
Prompt (by maskedfangirl): Castiel fights A DINOSAUR!
Chaos
"And this," says Dean, his hands busy reloading the shotgun, "is why you never, and I mean fucking never, sit a trickster down with a Spielberg flick."
Sam grunts agreement from his position peering over the hood of the Impala, tracking the landscape with a sawedoff and a frown. "Hey, Dean?"
"Talk to me," says Dean, finishing his job, hands steady as he pumps the gun, crawls to kneel beside his brother.
"I know we didn't kill all of them."
"Maybe they got wise," says Dean.
Sam's frown deepens. "Yeah, maybe."
--
Bobby had called two days ago.
"Witness reports giant chickens with tails gutting cattle," he'd said.
Dean, his neck crooked to cradle the phone while he slid his knife against a whetstone, had said, "Killer chickens?" for Sam's benefit.
"Hell if I know. But it might be worth you boys checking out."
Dean had ended the call, shrugging the kink out of his shoulder, and said, "Fuckin' endtimes, man, and all they can come up with is pissed-off poultry?"
--
They find the first one wandering a pasture outside of town.
"That," Sam says, when they inspect its corpse, tattered with bullets, "is not a chicken."
"No shit." Dean nudges the thing with a boot, shuddering as it rolls, tail flopping lifelessly. It's light for its size.
"In fact," Sam says, in a tone so absolutely neutral that Dean turns to stare at him, "that seems to be a velociraptor."
"Awesome," says Dean, getting back into the car and holding down four on his cellphone.
When Cas picks up, Dean says, "Hey, you're pretty old, right?"
"Dean, we've talked about this. The concept of linear time--"
"You were around before people, though."
"I was created--"
"Hey!" Dean says as Sam snatches the phone away and says, "Cas, we have, well, I think we have anyway.... Um. Velociraptors?" A pause. "Yes, I know they're extinct. No, I'm not--and how would you, did Dean tell you--that was one time in high school, and Brad didn't tell me not to take the whole tab. Yes. A trickster, huh? We'd appreciate it."
Dean snickers when Sam hangs up. "You promised not to tell anyone about that," Sam says, sulking.
"White Rabbit was on," says Dean. "It just sort of slipped out. Plus, there was the one part, where you tried to kiss the fire hydrant."
"Shut up."
"And then you decided Cookie the pomeranian was your spirit guide and--"
"Shut up."
Dean shuts up, but slides his gaze to the side as he starts the car, and is rewarded by a smile softening Sam's tired eyes.
--
The plan, as far as Dean can tell, is to pile raw meat on one side of the car, and then stand between the other side of the car and a windowless warehouse to shoot the velociraptors as they come to investigate. Sam says it will work, so Dean tries not to think about razor claws scoring his paint job.
It works. It works well enough that inside fifteen minutes, a few dozen of the things have arrived. Nine of them venture into killing range. The rest disappear.
Sam continues frowning over the car as Dean dials Cas again. "Got any leads yet?" he asks.
Instead of answering, Cas appears directly in front of the bait, his phone to his ear. They're on him in an instant.
--
When Dean was eleven and Dad was working a job in Oklahoma, he and Sam saw their first and only tornado. The funnel slid from the clouds and bit a plume of dirt out of the tilled fields stretched to the horizon. Dean had stood and stared at it, mouth open in wonder, until Sam had tugged at his shirt and looked up with eyes gone wide and terrified.
Cas touches down and the first velociraptor erupts into intestines and feathers that splatter the ground and the side of the car. Dean has a moment to hope the blood isn't corrosive before Cas hurls the next creature into the wall behind Sam and Dean whirls to shoot it before it has a chance to rise. He turns back to the fight just in time to watch Cas produce a long, curved blade from somewhere beneath his trench coat and hook the next raptor across the throat, sending its head in a bloody arc away from its body.
Cas is shouting something, Dean registers finally over the chittering of the animals descending on him. He makes out, museum and drive and won't stop until you. Sam yells, "Okay, Cas, you sure you're going to be--"
"Go!"
Dean hears that one, and Sam's climbing across the driver's seat and pulling Dean in after him, and the last thing he sees in the rearview is a swirl of khaki and a spray of gore like a rainbow in the sun.
--
They corner the trickster in the natural history museum. Their talk includes some waving of stakes, some yelling, and one iffy moment when she threatens to add an Allosaurus to the mix ("It's like a T-Rex, only smarter," Dean explains when Sam raises a confused eyebrow). Finally, she concedes that velociraptors lack subtlety and, after insulting Dean's lineage and sexual proclivities, decides she has better places to be, anyway.
She leaves an egg hatching at their feet. It opens to the beak of something so slimy it takes Dean a second to place it, and he dives to stop Sam before he shoots it between the eyes.
"That's an herbivore, asshole," he mutters, brushing a shell fragment away from the edge of its mouth. When he gathers it up, it chomps at his collar and falls asleep.
--
By the time they make it back to the warehouse, Cas has slaughtered the rest of the raptors. He stands loosely, the blade dripping blood, his coat hem sodden and catching at his ankles. Dean shivers, looking at him, and cradles the triceratops to his chest.
"It's done," says Cas.
"No, it's not," says Sam, pointing at Dean. "He won't let me kill it."
"It's not going to hurt you."
"It's a dinosaur."
"It's not like it's evil. And aren't you usually Mr. Bleeding Heart let's try to save the monsters--"
"They're not dinosaurs."
"Dean." Cas's voice cuts through their argument like thunder, and Dean remembers the tornado again, the hail and lightning along its edges. "Give the creature to me."
"What're you--"
"I'll take it back," Cas says. His sword disappears back under the suddenly pristine coat as he reaches to take the sleeping dinosaur from Dean's arms.
Dean watches it snuffle into Cas's shoulder and says, quickly, "Don't just dump it...I mean, it belongs pretty much just south of here, but Late Cretaceous."
"It will be safe with me," says Cas. Dean stares at him, and Cas stares back, somehow as dignified holding a baby triceratops as explaining Enochian sigils. A nod, a wingbeat, and he's gone.
Sam sighs, slumping back against the car. "Damn." And then, "Dude, Late Cretaceous?"
"Shut up," says Dean, and leans beside him, and closes his eyes.
----------------------------------------------------------
Prompt (by haruslex): Castiel has been put in charge of protecting a seal from being broken. The seal is a man named Misha Collins.
Gotta Break a Few Eggs
Ted's hooked him up with good shit before, but he's gotta admit, this whole out-of-body experience thing isn't his cup of tea. The funny part is, he can't remember exactly what it was he took, except he's staring at...well, at himself, and while the view isn't what he'd call bad, it's no kind of normal. Also, he apparently looks a lot like his character when he's tripping.
"Hello," he tries, wondering whether the other him (man, this encounter is forever going to fuck with his pronouns) will act like a mirror or talk back.
"You must come with me immediately," says the other him.
"Okaaay," says Misha, "here's the thing. No."
"Your life is in danger," says the other Misha.
Misha rolls his eyes and promises his wary kneecaps that this will not end like the time he convinced himself he needed to hurdle a wall to escape the KGB. "Look, you, whoever you, me. I'm not going anywhere. I'm drinking a gallon of Gatorade and lying down and closing my eyes until you go away."
The other Misha--who looks and acts, Misha thinks, disturbingly like Castiel--tilts his head and stares. "That's not an option. You're not well hidden; it's only a matter of time until Lilith finds us."
Misha laughs, turning away. "Who knew, all it took to be a great method actor was a hallucinogen and--"
The other him is suddenly there, far too close, and Misha catches a glimpse of two fingers aimed at his forehead before the world flips like someone changed slides.
--
"Would you like more water?"
Misha nods and accepts the glass without looking at himself--an angel--his character--whatever. "You're. Um."
The man--okay, fine, fuck it, Castiel--sighs. He's been treating Misha like a slow-witted child for half an hour now. If Misha were less freaked out, he'd find it insulting. He's a smart guy, after all. It's just, you know, not every day that your characters rope you into some larp-y version of the apocalypse, complete with demons and seals and angels of the fucking Lord.
"Don't blaspheme," mutters Castiel (Cas? he understands why Dean shortens the name; it's a bit of a mouthful.)
"I didn't," he starts, and replays his thoughts. Fair enough. "Fuck you, stop reading my mind."
They sit in silence. Misha's not sure where Cas has taken him. Inside a house, but it's dusty and crowded, a feeling of abandonment settled over the disarray. At least there's a couch, where Misha sprawled ungraciously upon their arrival, leaving Castiel to sit military-straight on a wooden chair after he finished salting and drawing a Devil's Trap by the door. Evidently, they're safe if they can make it to sunrise; whatever's going down has to happen tonight.
"This what angels do for fun?" Misha asks after a while. He's bored out of his fucking skull, and while Castiel doesn't offer much in the way of repartee, he did conjure the glass of water from nowhere. Maybe he can mojo some Scrabble or something.
Castiel blinks.
Great. Misha rearranges himself so he's lying back, staring at the ceiling. He barely has time to shout and throw his arms up to shield his face before the Scrabble box hits, flying open and spraying tiles across the floor.
"We have our methods of amusement," says Castiel, staring into space.
--
Castiel places ANESTRI to claim fifty bonus points and a triple word score. Again.
"What does that even mean?" Misha grumbles, because he's learned not to question the angel's vocabulary. Also, he does not want another Scrabble dictionary to land on his head.
"It is the phase of sexual dormancy in most female--"
"Thank you," says Misha, rearranging his tiles. He stares at his options, the tiny numbers in the bottom right corners of each tile reminding him that Castiel is currently several hundred points ahead. When the floor jumps, tipping the tiles forward off their rack, he has just enough time to think Seriously? before shit starts to get bad.
--
That whole wind-announcing-evil thing has never failed to make Misha roll his eyes at directors. Wind's sort of an outdoorsy phenomenon, and it's tacky otherwise. Plus, it makes the sound guys bitchy, as if they don't already have enough to complain about.
So when this Lilith chick blows into the room--literally, blows--his first thought goes something like, Again with the fans?
"You really should make these old houses more secure," she says, tossing a woman to the ground in front of her. The woman shakes, almost crying, but holding it together. "All it takes is a little threat to loved ones and humans can be convinced to do us so many favors."
Castiel appears in front of him, trench coat billowing. He's gotta admit, the coat thing can be pretty badass. It's the growl, though, that shocks him, the voice sort of like his but not his at all, saying, "You will not have him."
Something clenches in his chest--fear, but not really.... He struggles for a word and comes up with awe. This is a warrior of fucking God, standing between him and someone who looks, well, like a throwaway guest star juiced up with a whole lot of evil. And some minions.
Much as he appreciates his own minions, these look like they could chew through the lot.
He studies that thought for a moment, thinks of what would happen if he had access to his Twitter page right now, and changes his mind. Almost says, "My minions could kick your minions' collective ass," and decides that taunting the head demon with nothing but himself (plus, admittedly, some hit points) between them is a bad idea.
He's never faltered at bad ideas before.
"You kill me," he says, evenly, "and you will invoke the wrath of LiveJournal."
Both Lilith and Castiel turn to stare at him. Castiel recovers faster, whipping around with an open hand and an expression of serene, total concentration. Lilith catches his arm and sends him flying into a wall before charging after him, her eyes black. When Cas pulls himself up and comes at her again, she stops his fist and throws a punch at his throat, ending in a snarl as he spins and uses the momentum to hurl her past him.
The woman who broke the salt lines crawls into a corner, so Misha, who's honestly not feeling that magnanimous towards her, concentrates on the demons instead. They're readying some sort of altar, complete with cloth, bones, and cup, which can't be good. Misha doesn't know a whole lot about stopping demons, except that holy water stings like a sonovabitch. Not helpful here.
Oh. Unless. He backs away from the fight (Castiel trying to get a hand near Lilith's face, Lilith getting a knee between them and ow, even an angel's gotta feel that) and towards the Scrabble board. The glass of water Castiel handed him.
He picks it up, hefts it in his hand, and splashes it over the demons setting up the altar. They scream and sizzle--neat trick--before shaking it off as one and looking up at him, three sets of pitch-dark eyes. So, alright, maybe he should have thought this through, but fuck if he's going to take part in opening the gates of Hell.
"Cas," he says, softly, as the demons advance on him. Then, "Cas!"
When Cas appears, unruffled, and places an almost-gentle hand on the first demon's forehead, all Misha can think is Man, that lighting's impressive. The other two follow after a scuffle so short Cas barely looks winded. The angel turns, shoulders up, hands open and curved in front of him, his eyes like the first angry breakers that herald a storm.
Lilith, who's about as smart as demons come, chooses an escape, streaming out of her host's mouth in a swirl of black smoke that dissipates into the dawn. The woman she brought with her stands and brushes herself off, refuses to make eye contact with either of them, and leaves.
--
"Hey," says Misha after Cas returns him. "Thanks, you know, for not letting me die."
Cas stares at him, and it's disconcerting, being picked apart by your own eyes. Especially when you know the brain behind those eyes can read your mind.
"I was following orders," says Castiel. A human would shrug. He just...stands.
On a crazy impulse--because seriously, when is he ever going to get to do this again?--Misha reaches out, touches his shoulder. Flattens a palm to his chest. Thinks about hugging him, but decides that would be like hugging a tree for reasons unrelated to raising awareness about the environmental impact of irresponsible forestry. "Really. Thanks."
"You're welcome."
Misha blinks, taking a step forward as if drawn to the vacuum where the angel used to be. "Huh," he says, and smiles.