[the goal here is to provide a director’s commentary, a la the one i did for i fold in half so easily, though obviously less comprehensive. this commentary is for goldfish.]
ohohohoho this one will be fun. the thing about this fic is i was like... stretching my creative writing muscles more than i usually do, because normally i write within, i guess, really narrow parameters? like i have extremely limiting constraints on things like how characters react to situations, and in fact, what situations arrive because a lot of my conflict is character driven, because i need stuff to work in tandem with my interpretations. like, to me, ficwriting is less about creative writing and more just an extension of interpretation, you know? obviously this isn't always true, i've written a number of fanfictions which ask important creative questions like "what if this gross thing happened" and "what if horny," but like. on the balance, when i write it's mostly about interpretation. it's like, deductive reasoning as opposed to the inductive reasoning someone who might write a longer, plottier fic might use. like, i'm trying to work out fanfiction from first principles.
this is honestly mostly because creative writing is hard for me. it's not really one of my talents and it's not something that comes easily. i'm an interpreter at heart. i love to pull themes and meanings out of other things and show my work and such. i love pulling on a single thread and watching things unravel. i hate weaving the original tapestry to unravel because that's, like, hard.
anyway goldfish was an opportunity for me to indulge in character creation. the thing about lisa is that she does have some characterization in the show, but it's not a lot, and much more importantly, there's good reason for her to be different in goldfish. in the show she's got a ten year old son. parents, especially primary parents, really structure their lives around their kids, especially when they're that young. but goldfish is set like a decade later when ben would literally be off in college. lisa would have spent ben's more independent teen years unfurling a little, and would now be unfurling a lot. also importantly, lisa has experienced potentially personality altering trauma/brain damage from having her brain wiped, and the lingering memories cas didn't manage to get. i would expect that to change her at least some.
it was also fun to really write some cas and jack. like i haven't done a ton of that because a lot of the really solid cas and jack angst opportunities involve one of them being dead or absent. but in this case they can be together and still miserable <3. also the biggest motivation behind this fic in general was actually like. how bad it sucks that chuck kills jack instead of moriah getting any meaningful resolution. also stream the river by @davidfosterwallaceandgromit but that's kind of tangential.
The house is empty enough to make a woman stir crazy. Ben’s off at college, and the last few years Lisa has been making most of her money from her Youtube channel like a twenty first century Jane Fonda, so she only has students in her home studio once a week. She’s been going to the flea market every Saturday just to talk to people, and she finds herself actually looking forward to getting emails.
important to me that lisa makes gen x references. she's a gen xer.
So when the doorbell rings at eleven AM on a Tuesday in May, she’s not just curious, she’s thrilled.
oh another reason why i needed to reinvent lisa a little is that i needed her to be the kind of person who would let two strange men into her house even if they had weird vibes. and then she needed to not completely lose it when the vibes went from weird to rancid, or, at least, to not lose it so bad that the situation becomes unrecoverable. i needed her to be impulsive and open-minded, basically. so i wrote her that way.
In the distorted fisheye of her peephole, she sees two men. Maybe a man and a boy, she can’t get a good look at the second one because he’s behind the left shoulder of the first, his face in the most distorted part of the fisheye. But his forehead is baby-smooth, and his posture, the way he relates to the other one, suggests a certain skirt-clinging shyness. Neither of them appear to be carrying anything (or, the first one doesn’t; she can’t see the second one’s hands), and they’re not neighbors, as far as she knows. She can’t see any reason why they’d be at her door, but even if they’re Mormons or something, they’ll pass the time.
the thing about me is i'm not immune to jack hiding behind cas a little bit <3.
(They look a bit like Mormons, actually, or the first one does. He’s all dressed up like an accountant, with a big raincoat on. She’d call it a flasher coat if it was buttoned, but it isn’t, so it just makes him look like he’s following an office dress code. But it’s out of place in the seventy five degree spring sunshine, and besides, if this guy works a nine-to-five, what’s he doing here in the middle of his shift?)
i spent a lot of time thinking about like... how a normie would actually perceive cas and jack, in this fic. it's important to me to try and capture a truly outsider perspective - no insider knowledge leaking in and coloring things.
She opens the door and her mouth in the same motion, but finds she’s forgotten how to greet another person in a reasonable manner. Fortunately, she doesn’t have to - the man (and she can see now that his companion is a boy, maybe a few years younger than her Ben) speaks first.
“Lisa Braeden?” he asks, and his voice is odd. Gravelly. Something about it strikes her. Gives her goosebumps, actually. Maybe just because it’s weird, but… She shakes her head. If the voice reminds her of something, it’ll come to her eventually.
so she never actually MET cas but she WOULD have heard him and dean conspiring to wipe her brain while she was unconscious. chilling!
Much more unsettling is the fact that he knows her name. One of her girlfriends knocked doors for Hillary a few years back and said they’ve got these new apps that tell you the name of Democratic Party donors in each household, so probably it’s something like that, some kind of canvassing thing. At this point she’s hoping he’s a Mormon, actually. Because the other option is, well, you can’t upload videos of yourself to the internet wearing skintight clothes and doing yoga poses without acquiring a few of the less savory variety of fan. She’s never really had an incident, (she’s always thanked her advancing age for that - forty isn’t exactly over the hill but it’s definitely older in Youtube terms), but she knows girls who have, and it’s kept her on the lookout. But if he’s some kind of stalker, why would he bring his - son? Yeah, the kid has to be his son; looking at the two of them she can see it in their faces: the nose and lips and forehead, all identical, as well as the jawline and something about the eyes.
so i used to knock doors for bernie and they do in fact have a little app that tells you people's names. also it was very fun to use the straight woman definition of "girlfriend." anyway it's important to me that she perceive cas as a potential threat because again, he's a stranger. i know we know cas is a sugarplum, but she has no reason to see him as anything other than a random dude. a random dude who came to her house and knows her name.
“That’s me.” Her voice is flat. She leaves the barred screen door closed and locked, for the moment.
“May I come in?” The man looks… almost sad. Or maybe that’s just his face; his eyes are downturned at the corners in a way that makes her imagine he would look on the verge of tears even at a comedy show.
the thing about misha collins is he has tareme eyes in real life.
“How do you know my name?” She blurts, still not moving to open the barred screen.
“We- we have a mutual friend.” He looks down, now. Maybe he’s lying. His probability of being a stalker is rising by the minute, or so something hysterical in her is saying, but he doesn’t look threatening. Which is probably how a stalker would look, actually. But he looks… contrite. He’s not trying to charm her. Which is a good sign, probably. “We’ve never met, but… he asked me to do something terrible to you, once. And I did. You never found out, but I’ve… I’ve come to make amends.”
Well. Whatever that is, she’s pretty sure it’s not a stalker opener. She hears the click of the latch before she realizes she’s opening the screen. It swings open, and she and the man just sort of stand there, looking at each other. He steps back to avoid getting clipped by the door, and brushes against the kid behind him. The kid also steps back. She inclines her head, a wordless invitation to both of them, and watches him trail the man inside. He’s taller than his dad by a full inch and a half, but he’s such a bean pole that it only emphasizes how small he looks. Especially with the way he’s dressed: skinny jeans give his legs a rather baby deer look, and his windbreaker is a faux-letterman, navy blue with white stripes on the sleeves and collar, and like a letterman it’s cut to be baggy, so even though it clearly fits him like it’s meant to it makes him look swamped when paired with the jeans. Throw in his carefully combed mama’s boy hairdo and he’s got the seventeen going on seven thing down pat.
MORIAH OUTFIT MORIAH OUTFIT. anyway this is what we call tall jack agenda. alcal may be like an inch shorter than misha but To Me jack is the second tallest member of the household. i am not immune to doing stuff just 'cause it's cute. and again this is why lisa needed to be impulsive: why the fuck would you open the door for these dudes? or rather, i would, personally, i'm not a person who has a lot of fear of strangers and i'm extroverted and gregarious, but i'm also twenty five and have spent my life engaged with the kind of progressive politics where we deconstruct shit like stranger danger. lisa is a forty year old suburban mom who would have literally been in kindergarten during the satanic panic, and probably spent her whole childhood being told about pedophiles with candy vans, not to mention her whole adulthood being blasted with local news segments from stations with an "if it bleeds it leads" mindset genetically engineered to make well-off suburban white women like her feel hemmed in by danger. demographically, lisa is the kind of person who would probably call the cops in this situation, so figuring out why she doesn't is character building.
The two sit primly on her couch, mirror images of each other. The kid seems to watch his father, mimicking whatever he does, and what the father is doing is sitting knees together on her couch, hands folded in his lap, shoulders slightly hunched. She offers them water and both decline with the same polite no, thank you, but she bustles off to the kitchen anyway because her mouth is, as of seeing two strange men sitting on her nice burgundy leather couch, bone dry.
two of them. also lisa is channelling bilbo baggins here. there's guys in her house and it is ABSOLUTELY outside her parameters of normal and she's panicking a little, not really because they're a threat but because the whole situation is a little stressful.
While she’s in the kitchen, she notices the bottle of Merlot she’d left out when she’d decided to hit the mommy juice this morning. Can she even call it that anymore? She’s still technically a mother, but her kid doesn’t even live at home except in the summer these days. At this point it’s probably more honest to just call the habit “day drinking.” Or “functional alcoholism.” She snaps a reusable cork, the one with the little frog and lily pad sculpted on it, into the bottle, and stashes it under the counter.
the thing about lisa is that she's very lonely. and also she has brain damage that fucks her up in ways she is incapable of even noticing because of the brain damage.
Then she slides a hand into her purse and tries not to rattle her keyring as she retrieves it. There’s a lot of dangly bits on it: a set of cat shaped charms Ben had bought her when he was fifteen, a miniature flashlight which she still hadn’t removed despite the ubiquitous nature of the mobile phone light rendering it obsolete, and of course thirteen different keys of varying degrees of usefulness, but what she wants is the tiny canister of mace attached to the ring by a two inch chain.
Just in case.
fun fact i got into a long discussion with my feminist methodology professor like two years ago where we talked about how frequently she used to ask her female students and her male students to talk about their experiences of walking alone outside at night and the male students would be like "idk i just do it" and the female students would be like listing off the ten steps of their security routine that they would go through just to walk the hundred yards to their car. and then she (my professor) read more statistics and was like wait a minute. actually men and women experience stranger attacks at approximately equal rates. maybe i shouldn't use this as an example of structural misogyny anymore. anyway that security-conscious culture is part of a bigger ball of things that contribute to patriarchy AND white supremacy AND carceralism and and and. and actually, tangent but also not really, it has impacted lisa's life in specific ways because like. so there's the myth that women are extra vulnerable to attacks by outsiders. so therefore they need men to protect them. and anything those men do in the name of that protection, either to other people, or to the women they protect, becomes justifiable. which is what happened to lisa when she was with dean. like dean feels the need to protect lisa from monsters and the supernatural and in the course of that protection violence against lisa (and as an extension, ben) (insert dean hitting ben compilation here) becomes eminently justifiable. which is why the mindwipe happened. like obviously the mindwipe is ridiculous because it wouldn't be effective, but also even if it was, this ideology is still backing it up. (obviously dean is also using lisa and people like her to justify killing monsters as well, but that doesn't really touch her, personally).
She slips the whole rat’s nest into her back pocket, and tries to remember why she came into the kitchen in the first place. She finds herself staring at the back door. The real estate agent said it was good fire safety, having a door in the kitchen. It means you can get out if something goes wrong with the stove. Means you can run. She could just run, let the strangers take over the house and leave.
representation for girls with rat's nest keys <3. anyway again i think that lisa's sort of... frenetic flightiness is a result of the brain damage. like i think she experienced a blow to her executive functioning capacity when cas wiped her brain. but also she's like. a little tipsy right now. so.
When she returns to the living room, her guests appear to have quite literally not moved a muscle. She keeps trying to look at them out of the corner of her eye, to see if they still breathe when she can’t see them.
She takes a sip of her water.
“So, uh…” she starts. The man stares. His gaze isn’t hostile, but it is persistent, and she finds it makes her nervous. “What should I… call you?”
“My name is Castiel. This is my son, Jack.” So she’d been right. A small moment of self-congratulation distracts her from nervousness.
“Jack Kline.” The kid’s voice is expressionless. He extends a hand without getting up. It’s an awkward motion, clearly practiced and not quite understood. Fits with the rest of his behavior, the way he imitates his father. Maybe he’s got some kind of disorder. She shakes his hand.
my dad once referred to my obviously autistic chemistry teacher as having "some kind of social disorder" which is a way of normies (i say normies because my dad is Not neurotypical he just thinks of himself as normal) discussing and vaguely dehumanizing autistics that i was quite charmed by.
“You have a beautiful home.” The father seems to be staring at her cut glass chandelier. It had been quarter-price at Home Depot; the thing had a manufacturing error and one of the little chains had been shorter than the others. But it was fine. She’d just cracked out the set of needle nose pliers (padded and sold as “comfortable for smaller hands”) she’d bought herself after she’d dumped her last boyfriend six years ago and basically given up the whole “dating” thing, and used the built in wire cutters to trim the others down to match.
i'm very interested in lisa's independence and her drive for it. like obviously part of the reason she gave up dating was unremembered but still impactful trauma from 1) dean 2) matt's death and 3) having her brain wiped of All That. like i think that would kinda wreck a person's relationship with dating. and like, lisa's been a single mom for two decades at this point, she's gotte have a pretty impressive independent streak.
“Thank you.” The hard shapes of her keys dig into her behind as she sits, but the crackly, sticky sounds of the white leather armchair (it’s mainly for guests and doesn’t get a ton of traffic; her and Ben tend to sit on the couch, which is butter-soft from years of use) cover any jangling. He nods absently.
suburban moms will say the word "behind." also. cas and jack sitting where lisa and ben usually sit :3 :3 :3.
“Is it just you and your son here these days?” he asks, head tilted.
“Well, actually, it’s really just me these days, Ben’s off…” she realizes, too late, what she’s saying to a strange man in her living room. “Ben’s off at work so much,” she lies, and it isn’t smooth, but maybe it’s convincing to someone who isn’t her, “it barely feels like he lives here anymore. Today’s the only day of the week he’s home before eight pm. He- he comes early so we can have family dinner with my new boyfriend… Don.”
The father nods.
“And what does Ben do for a living?” He sounds like he’s reading off a script. Maybe the kid got it from his dad.
“He works construction,” she says, and it’s easy. She has the picture so clearly in her head, even though Ben’s in school for screenwriting. “He puts up siding on houses, mostly. What about Jack? Is he in high school?”
the construction job and naming the fake boyfriend don are both obviously about dean. like obviously she has all these memories of dean that are blocked from her conscious mind but they impact stuff like her imagination. so even though she can't Remember the image of dean putting siding on houses, she still remembers it.
That gets a blank look for a moment, but it passes quickly.
“Yes, Jack is- Jack’s in high school. He gets, uh, very good grades.” Yeah this guy is definitely just kind of stiff and awkward. She glances at the kid. He hasn’t said a word. She realizes he actually hasn’t spoken unless prompted this entire time.
oh soulless jack.... it's important to me that he's just kind of empty. a doll of his former self.
“Okay, Mr. Kline,” she turns back to the father. His eyes widen slightly when she says it, and he flinches back almost imperceptibly. But he shakes his head and recovers, smiling slightly. She guesses he doesn't like the formality, or just isn't used to it. Another tick against him actually having an office job. “Would you mind, um, telling me why it is that you’re here? And who our mutual friend is?”
i really enjoyed like. writing lisa making assumptions (like calling cas mr. kline) which are reasonable with the information she has, but incorrect. also, real time footage of cas Processing being called that.
Mr. Kline opens his mouth, then closes it. He blinks.
“It may be easier if I simply…” He leans forward, looming over her, approaching quickly enough that she can’t do anything but lean back and squeeze her eyes shut.
She doesn’t even feel his fingers touch her forehead.
-
Lisa must have fallen asleep over her computer. She’s uncomfortable, all twisted up and a little cold and definitely not in bed. Her teeth feel unbrushed, and she has the tell-tale headache that says she didn’t drink enough water last night. She groans and brings her hands to her eyes, instinctively shielding them from what she knows is going to be too-bright light. She rubs at her eyes, and blinks them open.
She shrieks.
There’s a man- she somehow fell asleep in the armchair and there’s a man standing over her and-
Mr. Kline.
She remembers exactly what happened today, even if she’s not totally sure how she ended up asleep, and instinct kicks in. She whips the keyring out of her back pocket so fast that she hears a tearing sound. The keys must have caught on the seat of her sweatpants, but it doesn’t matter, she already had the little canister of mace in hand and is letting loose on Kline.
god i spent so long trying to pad out the time between the setup and payoff of the mace cannister (for example, that was my ulterior motive for the paragraph about the pliers), but i'm still not happy with it really.
And he’s just standing there. Pepper spray is dripping from his chin, and she’s still pumping at the nozzle, and he’s just sort of squinting at her in seeming confusion. He hasn’t even closed his eyes.
man i had a lot of fun with this joke. personally it still gets a sensible chuckle whenever i think about it. polite angel immune to pepperspray what will he do.
“Ms. Braeden, what are you doing?”
At this point, there’s enough mace in the air that she coughs. And somehow, the coughs change and shift, and then she’s laughing, and she knows it’s hysterical, but she can’t stop, and even if she could she keeps coughing, too. And every time she looks up he’s still just sort of staring at her.
asthma experiencer voice what would it mean to laugh without coughing. i have never done this. they're the same thing to me.
“Well,” her voice is hoarse, “I was trying to pepper spray you, because you’re some kind of stalker or a rapist or something, but I guess that didn’t work, and now my living room is full of pepper spray and you’re still here.”
“I see. I’ve made you uncomfortable.” He gives her a polite nod, and then takes a couple steps backwards until the backs of his shins are against her sofa, as if everything is normal, as if he isn’t dripping mace onto her white carpet. It’s probably gonna leave orange stains. The kid’s still on the sofa, he looks like he hasn’t even moved.
i think pepper spray is slightly orange in large enough quantities? don't quote me on that
She gives another half-crazed giggle. Her knees just sort of buckle of their own volition, and she ends up back in the armchair with a sticky crunch of stiff leather.
Seeming to take a cue from this, he sits down as well, which draws a fresh bubble of laughter from somewhere down in her gut.
“You know, actually, it’s fine,” she says. It’s breathless, and she doesn’t know why she’s saying it. She waves a hand. “It’s all fine. I don’t mind.” She’s not sure what she’s giving him permission to do, but he seems reassured. There are a few beats of silence, broken up only by a slight rustling sound. She realizes the kid is tugging on the edge of his dad’s coat, or, no, he’s just holding it, crumpling and uncrumpling the fabric in his hand.
he is stimming. cas and jack touch agenda.
“How are you… feeling?” Kline says, and stares at her with knit brows.
“Me? I’m fine. There’s a strange man in my living room who is immune to pepper spray, but I’m fine.” She closes her eyes for a moment.
“But… are you dizzy? Are you confused? Do you feel that your mind is as it should be?” He sounds so earnest and concerned it’s really kind of hard to stay freaked out, but she does her best.
“What the hell kind of question- what did you do?” Her voice should be rising with panic, probably, but it’s just resigned.
“Do you know who Dean Winchester is?” and suddenly Kline’s stare is piercing.
“Dean? My ex? We broke up more than a decade ago. What does he have to do with anything? I haven’t seen or even thought about him since- since-”
She can’t breathe again, and this time it isn’t the mace in the air. Something’s wrong. She can’t- she can’t reconcile Dean- it’s all- something’s wrong. Because he was- he was a hunter . He killed demons. He saved the world. She used to keep a shotgun loaded with rock salt in the kitchen cabinet in case she needed to defend herself, but then- then when she had moved out of that house she had found it and she hadn’t known where it came from. She had taken it to the pawn shop because she didn’t want Ben to grow up around guns, she knew they were dangerous to have with a growing boy in the house, and she’d sold it, and the owner had asked what was the deal with those weird rounds, and she’d said I don’t know. Because she didn’t. She used to know. And then she didn’t. And she can’t- why hadn’t she put up warding sigils around this house when she’d moved in? Dean had shown her how. Told her she needed protection. From things that go bump in the night. But she just hadn’t put them up. It hadn’t occurred to her. No Devil’s Trap under the welcome mat. No holy water by the door. No inlaid silver on the handle. Why didn’t she-
Kline’s hand is on her shoulder. It’s stiff, and strange, but she’s thankful for it. It forces her into the present. He’s staring into her eyes.
“You remember.” There’s a gravity to his tone, like what he's saying should make sense to her.
“I-” she searches for the right verb, the right concept for what’s happened to her, but she doesn’t know. Maybe there isn’t a right word. Maybe it’s not something knowable.
She focuses on Kline’s face. It’s lined, with deep eye-bags. She can see the pores on his nose. The skin of his eyelids is slightly shiny, a sleep-deprived greasiness. There’s a small drop of liquid just below his cheekbone. Pepper spray.
She stills.
“You’re a demon.” She’s not scared, or rather, she is, but at this point there is nothing she can do. If this man is here to kill her, there is nothing she can do to stop him. Not really even anything she could do to make it harder. “Or a vampire. Or something.”
Kline pulls back. Grimaces a little.
“Or something. I’m a fr- I knew him. Dean.”
oooooh yes babygirl update your relationship status in real time.
“Why am I- do you know why I- why the- why?” She hopes desperately that he knows what she’s asking, because if- if an or something showed up at her house the same day as- as this, then surely he has to at least know. It happened after he touched her and collapsed. That’s- that can’t be a coincidence.
Kline’s grimace deepens, and he looks away from her.
“Your memory has been tampered with.” He takes a breath. Glances at the kid. “I tampered with it, years ago. Because Dean asked me to.” He stops, sighs, looks her in the eye. “I came here to undo it. Because it was wrong.”
cas is doing a lot of things here. like, he is forcing himself to apologize for himself, and as a symbol of his new policy of applying critical thinking to the things dean has asked him to do, and as a way of going against dean symbolically to prove himself to jack because it's partly his fault that jack was in a situation to be in danger from dean in the first place. but he is also trying to set an example for jack.
“Oh,” she says, because there doesn’t seem anything else to say.
“And I want to tell you that I am sorry. I’m sorry for what I did. To you and- and to others. There’s nothing I can do to truly reverse the effects of my actions. But I can reverse the memory removal. I have reversed it. This is the one thing I can do.” Kline is staring at her, but his hand is wandering. She can see it reach behind him to squeeze his son’s shoulder. The kid doesn’t seem to be paying attention. He’s still holding the hem of Kline’s coat. Like Ben used to hang onto her when he was-
the thing about the mindwipe is it's literally like the only awful thing dean ever had cas do that's fixable.
Ben.
Dean. Dean and Ben. Dean had been so good with Ben. Ben had known Dean.
“My son.” Her voice is cold, and she’s glad it came out that way, because there was maybe a 50/50 chance of it coming out shaky instead. Kline flinches. He catches the kid’s hand in his own.
cas voice my son too <3.
“Yes. I took his memories as well.”
She finds herself standing. Taking a wobbly step.
“How dare you. You come into my house after- Give them back. Fix him.”
Kline grimaces.
“I am not… sure that ‘fixing’ is the right term. The damage has already been done, and cannot be undone. I removed your memories as an adult, and processing their return was still… difficult. Returning your child’s memories may have deleterious effects.”
Her blood runs cold. She knows he can see it on her face, and he winces.
“If you want me to return his memories, I will. You may also be able to simply… jog them, by discussing Dean. He’s your child.” His hand find’s the kid’s hair, making a fist in the long, sandy-brown locks. “It’s your choice.”
“I’ll… I’ll wait.” She needs to think. “What kind of ‘deleterious effects’?”
“I’m not sure,” says Kline. “None of my kind had ever removed the memories of a human on this scale before I took yours.” He’s looking away.
“None- what? I mean, why not?” It was the first question that popped into her mind, but she feels immediately ridiculous for letting it pop out of her mouth.
“There was no reason. None of us had ever… involved ourselves so heavily in human affairs. We were meant to serve G- a higher cause, not man.”
cas is really trying not to have the angel talk right now, not least because losing his faith in dean has really made the near extinction of angels, and the fact that cas has participated in the destruction of a lot of his siblings, a fresh new pain for him. like cas and jack are really truly all alone without the winchesters, and part of that is because cas bought into dean for so long.
“But you…” She catches herself before she says it, but Kline grimaces.
“Serve man?” The words hang in the air uncomfortably for a moment, and she can’t stop herself from wincing. Kline’s eyes are closed. “I did. I used to- to serve Dean. I thought it was righteous. I thought even when- even when I didn’t agree I thought he knew better. But Dean- Jack… lost something. And then he- Dean- there came a moment when I realized…” Kline trails off. He’s looking down at the kid, now. Finger-combing his hair with both hands.
A single tear rolls down Kline’s cheek as the kid stares off into space.
crucial to me for cas and jack to do the lal and data i will feel it for both of us thing. as i've said. jack can't experience the hurt of what dean did (yet) so cas will process it for him.
Lisa feels a shiver pass over her body.
Ben wasn’t even able to talk about it after, when Dean shoved him. Lisa doesn’t think she’s ever been that angry before or since. She wasn’t generally a breakup kind of gal, most of her relationships had just sort of coolly fizzled away. But with Dean…
She sees it, in Kline’s face. In the way he touches Jack, half grounding, half possessive. Like Jack has survived some calamity. Like Kline can’t believe he’s really there. Like he might not be, if things had gone differently.
The first sentence that pops into her head when she finishes up with her dot-connecting is You know, I’m actually not surprised that Dean was gay the whole time, but she manages by the grace of God not to let it come out of her mouth. She doesn’t want Kline to think she’s homophobic or anything.
gay dean truthing NEVER sleeps. if anybody noticed it would've been lisa. anyway i like to break up a solemn moment with a bit of levity. i love that lisa is afraid of being homophobic <3.
Instead, she stays silent a moment.
“I see.”
He nods, and his face crumples.
She realizes that he must have taken it as a statement of judgment. She would have, in his place.
the thing about cas is that he did fail where lisa succeeded. like, in the end, lisa was not willing to let dean harm her son. cas was.
“No, no.” She shakes her head to emphasize the point, aggressively enough to send her hair flying everywhere. “I mean, you- you and I- we are-” she leans forward. Takes his hand.
His eyes widen.
“I don’t understand,” he says, and the tone of conviction he uses makes the phrase slightly ridiculous.
We’re the same, she wants to say. We could have been. Instead, she glances at the kid. At Jack, with his quiet obedience and empty stare.
“Don’t fix Ben. Don’t- don’t bring his memories back. He doesn’t need to remember. And I don’t-” I don’t want him to know. To know that someone who loved him could do that to him. She isn’t sure whether she means laying a hand on him or taking his memories. I don't want it to break him.
this is a little dramatic but the thing about lisa is she is CURRENTLY LOOKING AT another kid dean traumatized. who is (seemingly) about ben's age. who dean was a stepdad two. cut the woman some slack.
“Alright,” Kline says, snapping back to himself, “but if you change your mind-”
“I’ll contact you,” she says, but she already knows she won’t. She makes up her mind to lose his number, if he even gives it to her. If he even has one to give.
The immediate instinct is to go old school and say Hanahaki disease, but I have so much to work with in this horrible little fandom. So, because of my Mary Campbell Derangement Disorder, I think I would write something about Mary's doubt in her era of falling in love with John Winchester, her undercurrent of something isn't quite right here, but she has all of these big (cupid induced) feelings for John, and John is a chance to be normal, so she tells herself no one dies from love.
And then she does.
send me a fic title and i'll tell you what i'd write for it !!
Here's one of my fics for Angelfishofthelord's follower celebration! It's based on the prompt for day 2: "Blasphemy/Divinity." Of course it ended up too long to post on Tumblr, so here's the AO3 link instead. It was so fun getting to participate in her special event!!!
