I’m biting the bullet and starting the process of cross-posting my Zutara fics from fanfic.net to AO3 but frankly I don’t know if I’ll try to cross-post every single one, so if you have a fave you want to see posted to AO3 please let me know!
here’s the first part of my coda for s15e18 because i’m sad and so here’s some angst lol
read the second part: tumblr, ao3
read the third part: tumblr, ao3
The End of All Things: 15x18 coda
Dean sat on the floor with his head in his hands and he couldn’t stop fucking crying. The sounds shivered out of him in breathless sobs, his body shaking so violently he thought everything might shatter around him. Everything had shattered around him. Cas—
Cas was—
No. Dean dug the heels of his palms against his closed eyes, pressed until spots shone against the blackness. He sucked in a breath like he was trying to regain something, to put what he’d lost back in his body, but it was only cold air coating the emptiness. His insides were hollow. He thought he’d been ripped apart hundreds of times before. He thought he knew what it felt like to swallow a void. But it was never like this. When Sam died the first time, there was desperation and a fury that made him want to murder the world. When he held his mom in his arms, gone once again, he felt himself fracture like the jagged pieces of the empty whiskey bottle he’d thrown across the kitchen. When he watched light pour from Cas’s eyes, saw the outline of burned wings on the sand— even then there had been anger, carelessness, the desire to go on a hunt and not come back home. But this…
There was nothing for Dean to hold onto. Nothing for him to lean on. He tried to summon anger, or understanding, but he could never get past despair. The cold cement at his back sank down to his bones. The bloody handprint seeped into his shoulder. Part of him could still feel its warmth, could still feel the quick outline of Cas’s hand squeeze his shoulder before he was thrown across the room.
Cas was—
Dean’s phone buzzed across the floor. Another call from Sam. Dean knew, logically, that he should answer it, but he couldn’t bring himself to move. He couldn’t bring himself to speak. Couldn’t bring himself to tell Sam, to say the words—
Cas was—
The call went to voicemail. Again. Time was running out, Dean knew that. Chuck was burning through this world and reducing it to rubble. He and Sam had a job to do. They were the guys that saved the world. But right now, Dean didn’t care. He wanted to, but he couldn’t. Let the world end. What did it matter anymore? What did it matter because Cas was—
Cas was…
A dying sound crawled up Dean’s throat, snagged on his lower lip as he sucked it between his teeth. With every blink, Cas’s face appeared on the black screen behind his eyelids. Lips trembling, face slick with tears, blue eyes so wide. Confessing words that had been on the tip of Dean’s tongue for years. And then when it mattered, when maybe it could have made a fucking difference, his mouth had gone dry and he’d been too afraid to say it. Always too afraid to tell him.
Cas was—
And he never got to hear Dean say it back. Dean never got the words out.
“Cas,” he had said, his heart in his throat and his hands shaking and Cas was moving toward him and Dean could finally say it back, he had to—
“Goodbye, Dean.” The same hand that had gripped him tight and raised him from perdition clamped around his shoulder and Dean was airborne. Slammed against the wall, his head spinning from the impact when he looked at Cas. The Empty was reaching its liquid black tendrils toward him and Cas was—
It all happened so fast. The sigil on the door broke and Billie burst into the dungeon, the Empty materialized and sucked Billie into its nothingness, and Dean was frozen as the black tidal wave collapsed over Cas, consuming him whole. Dean never had the time to get to his feet, to try to get to Cas, to make sure he knew that he loved him.
He loved him.
It had happened years ago, something gradual and subtle that Dean could never pinpoint exactly when it started, but it was there all the same. He loved Cas, and that had been enough for him. It had been enough because he had known Cas could never love him back— Cas was so full of light and life that he deserved someone that could give him the world… and that was never Dean. All Dean could ever do was hurt Cas, over and over again, stabbing him in the back and plucking out his feathers one by one. Even when he tried to tamp down his anger, even when he tried to keep from lashing out at Cas when it was never his fault, Dean always managed to hurt Cas. So Dean had to push his feelings down, cast the butterflies in his stomach aside, because that was what had always been for the best. Dean could handle loving Cas from a distance, but he could never risk losing him. He was nothing without Cas.
“Damn it,” Dean whispered, a staccato breath to puncture the silence that weighed down on him. Slowly, still shaking, he peeled his hands from his eyes and blinked through the tears. His eyes felt swollen and sore, and the room swam with shadows. For a second, before he could really focus on his surroundings, he half expected to still see Cas standing across the room. Trench coat intact, free from the Empty, looking back at him like he hung the stars in the sky. But no. He wasn’t there. Dean was alone with the flickering lights and the sigils painted on the floor. Because Cas was—
Cas was. In love with him? Gone?
…Dead?
“No,” Dean muttered, fear starting to make him tremble all over again. “No no no no no no!” The words echoed off the walls, rang in his ears. There was no one here to hear him. No one here that could make him snap out of it, that could wake him up, because this had to be some kind of nightmare, it had to—
All of a sudden, Dean felt like he was suffocating. His jacket was shrinking, tightening on him, and the handprint was burning through layers of clothing and skin to try to stain his very soul. On the verge of hyperventilating, Dean wriggled out of the jacket, his arms getting caught in the sleeves. Every movement caused a scent to rise in the air, a scent that had been embedded in the fabric— salt from the sea, the sticky sap of pine trees, and honey being poured over tea. Dean knocked his head back against the wall, his hands stilling with the jacket balled up in his lap. He would know that smell anywhere. Cas.
Cas was—
More than anything, Dean wanted to feel Cas’s warmth beneath his hands, dig his fingers into the fabric of his trench coat instead of into this ruined jacket. Maybe if he had been a little bit braver, he could have had the things he wanted: Cas curled up in his arms, Dean’s lips leaving soft kisses along his jaw as he inhaled the wild nature of the angel. That was the cruel reality of this. All this time that Dean had spent loving Cas in silence, knowing it was unrequited… and Cas had loved him back. Wholly and entirely.
If Dean had been a bit braver, none of this would have happened. Cas would still be here. He wouldn’t have felt like he needed to sacrifice himself to kill Billie, to save Dean from her wrath. Cas wouldn’t have been taken without knowing that Dean felt the same way. That Dean loved him back.
God, if only he had been able to say it. His whole life, saying I love you had never been easy. Something had always stopped him, had kept the words from meeting the air. And it was true that he tried to show his love in other ways, but Cas deserved more. He deserved to hear it. He deserved to hear Dean say his name like it was holy, because it was, in a way that was older than Heaven or Hell or the universe itself. Cas deserved to hear that he changed Dean’s life, that Dean had never truly been alive before they met, not really. Cas deserved to know how important he was— how nothing ever felt quite right when he was away from the bunker, or how Dean had felt like his insides had been scraped out by grief’s knife when he had had to bury him after Jack was born. Dean needed to tell Cas all of these things, and then some, and Cas needed to understand that he wasn’t just some pawn that could be thrown away whenever the going got tough. Dean needed him. Not to save him at the end of the world or from Death, but to save him every day and keep on saving him. In all the little ways: making sure Dean got his coffee in the morning, sending emojis that were wildly inappropriate for the conversation, pulling Dean out of the liquor bottle whenever he felt like too much, grounding him with the knowledge that they always came back to each other, always.
You’re supposed to come back.
But Dean was too afraid to let himself hope.
“Why does this sound like a goodbye?” Dean had asked, and the sad acceptance in Cas’s eyes had made him want to throw up.
“Because it is.”
Another jagged breath and Dean threw his jacket across the room; it hit the opposite wall and slumped to the ground with a muffled thud. The world was supposed to end with thunderous applause and bangs like a thousand gunshots fired into the air. It was never supposed to end this quietly, with a heart being shredded, rendered unrepairable. Dean knew that when it was his own time to finally die, it would be a bloody, violent end, but Cas… Cas was supposed to live forever. He definitely was never supposed to throw everything away for a broken, bitter man. Dean was supposed to be the one to sacrifice himself, to make up for all the wrong he had done, to go down fighting so Cas could live to see another day. Not the other way around. The story wasn’t meant to end like that. Their story wasn’t supposed to end like this.
The phone scuttled across the floor again, the vibrations at last shocking some recognition out of Dean. The world was ending, for real, even if Dean felt like he had already seen it all crumble before him. Dean had people relying on him. Sam had lost Eileen and was hurting, everyone around them was disappearing, and something was off about Jack. And on top of it, Dean was going to have to pick up the phone and explain to them what happened, how he had screwed everything up and forced Cas to pay the ultimate price because Cas was—
No. Cas wasn’t.
He couldn’t be. Because that wasn’t how their story ended.
Cas had told him. He had told him. No matter how bruised and broken he felt on the inside, Dean was more than an instrument of destruction or a tool of war because Cas knew who he really was. He knew. Cas had seen Dean’s flayed soul in Hell and had decided to rescue him anyway. Had decided to reassemble him with care— gingerly aligning his bones, bleeding the color from ferns to give him back his eyes, pulling constellations down to scatter freckles across his cheeks. Cas knew who he was, inside and out, and nothing— not the raging fury or hate or the ugly vicious things inside him— nothing had made Cas turn away completely. Cas loved him in spite of these things and he loved him because of these things. Even if Dean couldn’t see it, couldn’t quite accept it yet, didn’t mean it wasn’t there. And because of Cas, because of how he had put him back together, both in Hell and time and again when he was lost— with the Mark, when he was a demon, when Michael wouldn’t let him go— Dean finally understood. Happiness isn’t in the having, it’s in just being.
Dean was nothing without Cas. Would be nothing without Cas. Cas had changed him, had given him faith and had taught him what it meant to truly love someone, and now to be loved in return, even when he had always believed he was too damaged.
Even if Cas couldn’t be his, even if he couldn’t have what he wanted, he held firm to the one truth he had always known: Cas always comes back. Dean’s whole life had been written in a book, but Cas was never supposed to be in the story— Chuck said so himself, twelve years ago: You’re not in this story. And Cas, the angel that tore up the plans and defied God himself: Yeah, well, we’re making it up as we go.
Their story wasn’t over because it wasn’t written in stone. Cas was never supposed to fall from Heaven, never supposed to fall in love with Dean. That wasn’t something Chuck made up. It wasn’t something that could be manipulated. You asked what about all of this is real, Cas had said. We are.
That was the answer. The truth. Chuck could pull the strings, could abandon the storyline if he didn’t like it anymore, but this was one thing he could never figure out as a writer— this profound bond linking Dean and Cas together, reuniting them over and over.
Cas was not allowed to die without knowing how much Dean loved him, how his heart threatened to burst from his chest and follow Cas to the unknown. Cas was somewhere. He was in the Empty and he had gotten out of there before and, goddamn it, he was going to do it again. The Empty was a place— that was something Dean could do, somewhere he could go. If they had been writing the story all along, Dean damn well knew how he was going to plot the ending. With his hands reaching through the darkness to clutch at Cas and pull him out, bring him back home.
He had to tell Cas he loved him.
Dean shook his head once, rolling back his shoulders and stumbling to his feet. He cast a momentary glance at the room, at the ground where Cas had stood with tears rolling down his face and all his light shining out from his smile.
I love you.
Dean swallowed down the hopelessness, put a hand out to steady himself on a bookshelf. If he let himself think too hard, he knew he would fall to his knees and never get up again.
“Don’t worry, Cas,” he murmured, forcing his gaze forward as he ripped the door open. “I’m coming for you.”
He had work to do.
tagging some mutuals just because @rambleoncas @flowersforcas @valleydean @fingergunsbidean @credentiast @chill-legilimens @mishha @castyel
let me know if you want to be tagged/removed from tags!
summary: Klaus went with Five to buy the first cat. And Allison went with him to adopt the second. Diego found him the third, Vanya the fourth and Luther the fifth.
Only thing is, none of them informed the others that they were getting Five a cat. And Five didn't inform any of them that he already had one, then two, then three--
They just know he has a little black kitten called Dolly, and Five's been feeling a lot happier since she came around.
based on this post by @7-umbrellas (and the amazing additions by @chocolate-with-raisins) and this art by @cryptixcreations)
Cullen x Trevelyan | A little one-shot, written from the perspective of my Inquisitor, that I wrote. Pls reblog/like/reply if you like it. Constructive criticism welcome <3
“And what of your escape?” His voice was desperate.
Our eyes met.
In that one look, I tried to signal to him everything I had hidden - how every time he smiled at me from across the war table I had to catch my breath, how hearing him speak so passionately of his plans for the inquisition brought out a determination in me I had long since forgotten, how I had lain and thought about the one time our hands touched by accident every night. In the few months I had known him, he had startled something in me I had not felt in years, and now I was going to die without him ever knowing.
Well, if I was going to die, then fuck it.
I grabbed his shoulders, pulled him towards me and kissed him as hard as I could. He was stiff at first, but after a moment I felt one hand around my waist and the other balled up in my hair, pulling me closer and my breathing quickened. I wrapped my arms around the back of his neck and let all that I had been holding back release itself into our kiss, pleading with Andraste that I might be able to one day kiss him again.
But the people of Haven needed a distraction, and I had already cheated death once. I pulled away and realised my cheeks were wet with tears. His eyes searched mine, pleading.
“Perhaps you will surprise it, find a way…” He trailed off, not quite taking his hands off my waist.
I smiled, not knowing what to say.
A soldier barked at him then, something about the civilians, taking his attention away. I took the opportunity to make my escape, but not before ripping the chain off my neck and thrusting it into his hand.
“Remember me, Cullen,” I whispered.
Running out the chantry doors, I resolved not to look back. I didn’t want to find out if he felt the same way. This way, in my last moments, I could pretend he did.
I love your work💚 wcpahwcbat is probably my favorite fanfic to ever grace the internet
To be fully honest, I’m not sure. I really like To Take Your Honey, it’s one of my more unique fics and I look over it at least once a year because there are parts of it that I really like! I’ve thought about turning it into an original science fiction novel and have also thought about potentially taking the narrative and applying it to a video game. I know that doesn’t properly answer your question. The best I can say for now is that it’s still in limbo.
I’m so glad you love WCPAH! That story remains very special to me and it means so much that it still resonates with others. While I won’t be updating To Take Your Honey anytime soon, I do have a new reylo one shot for Valentine’s Day coming soon as I participated in the RFFA this year 💜
