2,283 words, Teen and up, megstiel, highschool AU, AO3
This is my contribution to the @spnremixgiftexchange for @an-android-in-a-tutu
It picks up from where Sparks Fly leaves off: Cas and Meg are two troubled teens, and have an unconventional and antagonistic meet-cute. My fic looks at how their relationship develops from there, as two characters from different worlds develop a sense of fascination with each other.
You know I already thought you were a genius for writing “I said show me something”. But now I’ve read “ignite your bones”, and just wow. The panic room scene will stay with me for months.
thank you so much! the panic room scene was the first thing I thought of.
My favourite part of the first chapter of the post-s2 meljayvik epic that me and @yesitsterriblysimple are working on is the meljay reunion. I like to post about how Jayce represents a part of Mel that she feels like she's had to cut herself off from, and it's nice to be able to explore what that means for her when she sees him again.
So this is a pretty generic post-15x19, Cas-is-back-from-the-Empty fic. The setup is a lot like "Status quo ante bellum", in that Dean is still working towards fully expressing his feelings towards Cas, and Cas isn't sure where he stands. But Dean is being pretty clearly clingy, so Cas doesn't have the intense anxiety that he does in "Status quo". They go on the clown-mask-vampire hunt, Dean gets impaled, but Cas is there to heal him. But because Dean was so badly injured, it takes a lot out of Cas, and he passes out. Sam and Dean take Cas back to the motel and get him a room, and Dean stays with him overnight. The excerpt picks up the next morning. It's mostly just dialogue.
Cas wakes up first. Frozen, kind of terrified.
Dean is snuggled into him by now.
Dean wakes up. Jerks away in shock but recovers quickly.
Cas looks at him nervously.
Dean smiles bashfully, "Hope I didn’t wake you up?"
C: "No you didn’t"
D: "Good. How’re you doing? Anything screwed up?"
C: "No, I’m better."
D: Sighs, relieved. "I was scared."
C: Raises his eyebrows. "You were scared for me?"
D: "‘Course."
C: "Dean, you could’ve died."
D: "Yeah that scared me too."
C: "Yeah. Me too."
D: "But… if I died… you’d come see me, right? Sneak into my memory box, wake me up? And we could just… hang out on the holodeck?"
C: "It’s a poor substitute for life."
D: "But you’d do it?"
C: (softly) "Yeah."
D: "Good. Y’know, I think… I mean… I wanna spend forever with you."
Cas stares, entirely disarmed.
Dean’s eyes fall to his lips.
He leans in. Cas is very still, and closes his eyes. Dean kisses him very softly.
Cas’ eyes are still closed when he pulls away.
Cas opens his eyes. Looks unsettled.
So Dean kisses him again. This time something clicks with Cas and he starts to kiss him back.
2. Timestamp
This is the scene from "Forget your perfect offering" in chapter 4 where Claire goes off to talk to Dean in the kitchen. I wrote the dialogue when I wrote the chapter, so that I would have a clear idea of what was happening with Dean, even though I never intended to post it with the fic. I'm actually pretty sure that I posted it on tumblr at some point, but I can't find it now.
The setup is that Dean is trying to give Cas what he wants so that he'll stay. And Jody, Kaia and Claire come over for a family dinner. And Dean basically tells Claire not to screw it up with her attitude. But he apologizes later, and that's when this scene takes place. Under the cut.
Dean feels bad for telling Claire not to be a weirdo, and asks her to help him with dessert so they can talk in the kitchen.
Dean: Sorry for being, y’know…
Claire: An asshole?
D: Yeah. I guess this whole thing’s got me on-edge.
C: What whole thing?
D: Y’know. Being with Cas. It’s a mindfuck. I mean, you get it, right?
C: Get what?
D: You know…
Claire stares at him.
D: Suddenly being different from how you thought you were.
Claire keeps staring at him.
D: Oh, come on. Your dad was all into Jesus. He didn’t raise you to think being gay was normal. Don’t you ever get hung up on what he’d think if he saw you today?
C: (getting agitated) No, I don’t, because he’s dead. And I had an angel in me, so I know that none of that shit matters.
D: Yeah, but when you started being into girls, you’re saying you didn’t ever worry what other people would think?
C: What the hell, I’m not your therapist, Dean!
D: Yeah. Right. Sorry.
C: (softening, just a little) I get that you need someone to talk to about this crap. But did you think that maybe that someone should be your boyfriend?
D: Talk to Cas? The dude spent eternity as, like, a giant lightbulb or something. I don’t think he knows what it’s like for everyone he knows to suddenly see him as some… some kinda… ugh.
Dean cuts into the rice krispie squares. Claire regards him cooly. The way Dean said "some kinda" gets under her skin.
Claire leans over the counter, and says to Dean in a low, icy voice.
C: Faggot.
Dean freezes and stares at Claire like she just slapped him.
D: What?
C: That’s what you were gonna say, right? That's what you are now.
Dean looks at Claire like he’s about to cry.
C: And you can wear your plaid, and carry a gun and talk like Batman, but that won't change the fact that that's all you are to some people. They'll see you and Cas together and that'll be it, they'll never see you as anything but dirty and wrong and weak. And I dunno, maybe your dad would've been one of them. But you gotta decide whether or not you're going to let them control your life. You gotta decide whether all that bullshit is worth it.
Claire takes the knife from Dean and goes back to cutting the rice krispie squares.
D: (after a long beat) Yeah. Yeah, Cas is worth it.
C: (significant look) I don't mean Cas. I mean being yourself.
D: (some kind of subtexutal reminder that Dean still thinks he's not really in love with Cas) Heh. Yeah. Thanks Claire.
C: Whatever. Don't start thinking I'm your gay Yoda.
D: It’ll be hard. You give good advice. For a dyke.
C: (good natured) Pansy.
D: Queer.
C: Cocksucker.
D: Nah, that’s not till later tonight.
C: Ew!
D: What, you don’t wanna hear about my plans for Cas’ cock?
Okay, I have two more Big Ideas for fic. I've talked about them before.
Set in s9. Sam died at the end of s8, and Castiel fell and is human, and both Dean and Cas are struggling with entirely recalibrating their lives. Entirely different vibes from "ignite your bones". Kevin would feature heavily.
Set in s8. Cas and Meg fucked off after 7x21, Sam and Dean dealt with the Leviathan on their own, and there's no Purgatory. Sam and Dean run into Cas and Meg while on a case, and they have to work together. Cas isn't "back to normal", but he is treated with dignity by the narrative. Deals with the theme of corruption/contamination: "the very touch of you corrupts", Meg developing real feelings for Cas, Cas' whole deal. Sam would also get POV.
So this is a thing I do now, post commentary on my fics. I've been sitting on this fic for a long time and I'm excited to finally talk about it!
Read the fic here
Chapter 1
The title of this fic is a reference to “Two Solitudes”, a novel which I’ve never read, but which is a point of reference for Canadian political science, about the fundamental division between Quebec and English Canada, and the two never being able to connect or understand the experience of the other.
And that’s one of the inspirations for this fic, exploring the degree to which Dean and Cas understand each other and misunderstand each other, and their attempts to communicate what they want from their relationship.
I do believe that Dean and Cas understand each other and connect and relate to each other to a large extent, and far better than some fans give them credit for. Sometimes I see the “Don’t go/Ask me to stay” dynamic exaggerated to an extent that I believe no longer makes sense, given their friendship.
At the same time, there is an underlying tension and disconnect between them. They don’t have a perfect understanding of each other. And that still matters quite a lot.
The other source of inspiration for this is that I haven’t written anything where Dean is the one with a handle on his feelings and wants to initiate something, since like 2013. And that I’ve never written anything set in season 12, despite that season having the perfect setup for Dean and Cas getting together.
And I was thinking, how do I push things further than what happened on the show? I usually like my fic to feel very situated in canon, and since Dean and Cas didn’t actually get together in s12, something else would have to happen, something to push Dean over the edge. Something that would also push Cas to make a realization.
So that’s how I ended up with the idea to lock Dean and Cas in a room together, with Dean thinking that Cas is dead, and Cas unable to do anything but watch. In my head, the alternate title for this story is “The Pear Jiggler fic”. Just stick them in a box and fuck with them. We also often talk about how Cas never gets to see how Dean reacts when he dies, so that was a fun thing to do as well.
And I just love a good bottle episode. Something that’s just all character-driven.
In terms of characterization, one thing that’s very important to me is that Cas knows that Dean cares about him. He’s not some poor soul who thinks he’s on thin ice all the time, or thinks that he has to be useful to be loved. He understands that Dean cares, but the misunderstanding is the degree to which Dean needs him in his life.
Cas does have a drive to be useful, to solve problems, but it’s internally motivated. He has to prove that he’s useful for himself, not for Dean. Even when Dean gets pissed at him, Cas doesn’t take it too, too personally, because he does still know that he’s important to Dean.
For Dean, the emphasis is really on the way he retreats when threatened, emotionally. When he behaves badly, it’s partially because he’s worried, but also as a defence mechanism. He only puts words to his feelings when he has nothing left to lose.
It’s been a while since I’ve written a version of Cas that wasn’t fully tuned in to his feelings for Dean. One of the more fun things about this angsty fic was having Cas thinking about Dean wistfully, and not imagining that Dean might be in love with him, or that his feelings are anything other than friendship.
I guess the other option was to write mutual pining, Dean and Cas both being aware of their feelings but neither realizing the other feels the same way. But for me, the realization that what they feel is love is a really fun part of the story, so I wanted that moment for at least one of them.
Of course, Dean isn’t fully there yet either. Like he knows, but he’s not 100% there. But it’s just caution that’s holding him back. A lot of the time in fic, when it’s Dean’s POV and he knows he’s in love with Cas, there’s a whole big self esteem thing that holds him back. And I never really buy that. Plus it’s unnecessary.
I’ve noticed that in a lot of my fics, I get Dean out of the driver’s seat of the Impala, or out of the Impala entirely. It is about getting him into a new situation, making him feel off-kilter in some way. Switching up the status-quo.
I’ve been playing the Sims quite a bit, mostly building homes, and therefore looking at a lot of fancy real estate postings for inspiration. I find brutalist architecture quite compelling in its own right. I wanted a setting that feels foreboding, but still like a place where someone might actually have lived. A room with very little in it that could provide distraction. And a space where light plays an important role, which it does in brutalist buildings, I think. I do find it unlikely that a desk and chair would have survived, but Dean needed something to smash up, so. And the fountain wall is there to create a sense that the building is being taken over by something, it has something growing in it.
The monster itself isn’t consciously based on anything. It’s what it needs to be for the story. Whatever lore I made up only exists to support its function in the story. Even the way Sam kills it, just serves to underline that it’s unique and powerful, and therefore able to keep Cas contained.
Chapter 2
I didn’t have the idea to do the split-screen until I was well into planning the fic. To emphasize the division between Dean and Cas, their mismatched perspectives.
For a second I considered just having two unbroken columns, so that the reader would have to decide when/if to go back and forth, but that would have been kind of confusing. And ultimately, Cas is reacting to Dean, so you need to keep going back to Dean to understand Cas.
I wrote Dean’s side first, as the independent variable. Deciding where to break, and switch to Cas was a bit of a back-and-forth process, because it had to work both in terms of story and in terms of rhythm.
One thing I liked about this is that I didn’t have to decide whose POV to write in. Unless a story is strictly one character’s POV I usually plan out scenes from both of their perspectives and then decide which one is better to take for the story, and sometimes that can be kind of tough.
Of course, the entire conceit of this scenario is that it’s a metaphor for their relationship. Or it takes the tension in their relationship and brings it to the next level. They’re together, but there’s something preventing them from fully connecting. They understand each other, but they misunderstand each other at the same time. And it’s by making that disconnect physical that they start to kind of be able to deal with it. Because it gives Cas a perspective on Dean that he didn’t have before. They don’t fully resolve their problems by the end, and to be honest I wouldn’t want them to. But they make some progress.
I had fun with the imagery for this. Dean and Cas sharing the same space, being separated by light, and by illusion.
Dean’s alcoholism figures very heavily in this. But it is not addressed as a problem for him to overcome. I neither feel equipped to write a story about alcoholism per se, nor do I want to. A running theme throughout a few of my fics is that Dean and Cas do not fix each other. They keep being the same fucked up guys. And I think getting Dean to a place where he wants to deal with his substance abuse problems would require a lot more story behind it.
The withdrawal is there to make things that much more horrible for Dean, not to actually deal with alcoholism as an issue.. And it adds an extra sense of threat. I didn’t do a ton of research on what happens when someone goes through withdrawal, I just looked up a timeline for symptoms (it can start after just six hours! I didn’t know that before). And I confirmed that someone could die from withdrawal.
For Dean, chapter 2 is about making him sit with his misery. Unlike every other time he’s lost Cas on the show, there’s nothing to distract him here. And that’s one of the things that pushes him to vocalize his thoughts and feelings..
As well, anger, guilt, fear and love are all very much intertwined for Dean. And that’s accentuated by the situation. So he says “I hate you” before he says “I love you.” But then, as his motivation to survive kind of drains away, his defensive instincts do as well.
For Cas, it was about forcing him to accept that things are outside of his control. There’s no more desperate moves, he can’t throw himself on his sword. Like Dean, there’s nothing to distract him, he’s forced to stop and reflect on what’s happening. He has to face what he means to Dean.
When Cas says “I’m not worth it” - that’s something that came up when I was freewriting dialogue and it just felt right. But I spend zero time unpacking it. Again, it’s one of those things - Dean and Cas are both fucked up, they both have their problems, and this experience doesn’t change that. In fact, it probably makes him worse.
Another aspect of Cas’ powerlessness is how he relates to his human body. Not having it, or not being able to use it, makes him more possessive over it.
Still on the topic of Dean and Cas not being able to fix each other, you see that when Dean says he’s in love with Cas, and it finally clicks for Cas. It doesn’t solve anything. I did really want to make the point that the two of them being in love doesn’t change anything in terms of their plans or obligations. And it doesn’t really change much about how they relate to each other either. I’ve said before that their friendship and their romance are indistinguishable imo. And the other side of that is that Dean and Cas are both more than their relationship, and the pressures and stresses they face mostly come from outside their relationship (which is a fact that fans lose sight of sometimes).
Whether they’re officially In Love or not, they want to be together, but there’s other forces, both internal and external, keeping them apart.
I hope Dean lying down with Cas’ dead body works. It’s super melodramatic, but it’s also kind of gruesome and I like that. I also love the idea of Cas being jealous of the illusion of his dead body.
Chapter 3
A dynamic that I really like in storytelling is when The Big Event in the story is not the thing that pushes the characters towards the resolution, but it primes them for the next little thing tipping them over. I do that here, and I kind of do that in Life Skills too. It feels more real to me, and it creates more space to explore the ending imo. So Dean tries to go back to normal!
The fight in the parking lot was probably the scene that was the most fun to write. Like it’s still frustrating and angsty, but it’s kind of funny too.
And yeah, Cas still feels trapped. The repetition of the gray and green imagery reflects that. He still feels powerless, and it just takes one more shove to get him to open up about it.
Dean has a bit of an impulse to be controlling here. First of all, because I do think it’s in character, but also because I think it’s fun. Like I don’t like to go super-toxic with Dean and Cas, but there’s a measure of toxicity. Again, they keep being fucked up. For Dean, I just touch on it briefly, but I think one aspect of his upbringing is that love has to be proven. Like, he loved his father, so he did what was asked of him. If Cas loved Dean, then he would do what Dean asked of him - this is the main concept that underlies my read of Dean’s reaction to Cas collaborating with Crowley in s7.
For Cas’ part, he doesn’t really register that there’s anything wrong with Dean’s behaviour, or he reads in the best intentions. Which is a fun idea to me.
I really grappled with whether or not to have a sex scene as part of the resolution. It felt formulaic to do so. There wasn’t a story that I wanted to tell with their sex. But on the other hand, I know there would have been a time when I would have been disappointed to read something like this and not get a sex scene out of it. They go through such intense emotions, it only seems fair to the reader. Ultimately it came down to the fact that there wasn’t anything else that I wanted to say about Dean and Cas.
I kind of grappled with the end in general. Usually, I write fic with a particular ending in mind. For this one, the journey was the focus more than the ending. But I think the ambiguity works. Nothing is fixed, but they’re trying.
And that’s what listening to the tape at the end is about. The tape is Dean’s way of trying to communicate with Cas. But Cas didn’t really get it before. Now Dean is trying to help him to understand. I considered including lyrics at the end. But the scene isn’t about the lyrics, the lyrics could be anything, it’s about the fact of them listening together.
