Jul 20, 2022
Light & Shadow: Chapter 2
Ao3
Maybe that’s what I find hardest: I’m not sure where he begins and I end.
How do I even try to answer that question?
Credits for this amazing graphic to @hayllasworld
seen from Thailand
seen from United States
seen from Hong Kong SAR China
seen from China
seen from Hong Kong SAR China
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from China
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from Norway
seen from Germany
seen from Hong Kong SAR China
seen from Germany
seen from China
seen from Malaysia
seen from China
seen from Italy
seen from United Kingdom
seen from China
Light & Shadow: Chapter 2
Ao3
Maybe that’s what I find hardest: I’m not sure where he begins and I end.
How do I even try to answer that question?
Credits for this amazing graphic to @hayllasworld
Here comes a request ^^' For the 'definitionless' story, could we get a Skids POV on some of the events?
Skids, bodyguarding a mech who isn't intending to let him fade into the background, and breaking entering.
let it be stairways (AO3)
Skids was used to being treated as part of the background. It was what he was comfortable with, as a guard. People went about their lives and didn’t ask him to do too many things except stay close and keep a lookout. He could still do that. Even in this city that he’d never been in before, full of mechs going about their days, and sightlines, and noise.
He was getting used to the noise, shunting it into background processing. Still working on getting used to Prince Jazz’s disinclination to slot him into the background. Skids felt he shouldn’t be handsy with royalty, just as a general rule to ensure his continued health and safety. Not that there was much he could do about the royalty getting handsy with him. In the specifics, he also felt he probably shouldn’t be this close to his commanding officer’s almost-conjunx, but again. Not much he could do about that either. The prince clung like a scraplet. A pretty polite scraplet, but boy did he have a strong grip on Skids’s elbow that he was refusing to relinquish despite a lot of hints. Skids gave up in time to walk and not get dragged into the very big and shiny building Prince Jazz seemed to be steering them towards.
It was pretty fancy inside, all spacey décor and big chairs and big windows. Not as many places for mechs to hide as you’d expect, must have been constructed with security in mind aside from the same sniper sightlines issue as every other building around here. Skids completed a lookover pretty quickly, and looked to the prince to try and get some idea of where they were heading next.
Prince Jazz was frowning. His field had tapered off from that weird ringing cheerfulness he’d been projecting, going quiet.
“Hm,” he said, sounding suspicious.
“You sound suspicious,” Skids pointed out. There wasn’t much here to be suspicious of. What did Jazz know that he didn’t?
“I am suspicious,” Prince Jazz said, which—sure, Skids could see that. Mysterious prince, not a whole lot of reports on what he’d been up to during the war but his tires showed plenty of use and his fingers were still maintaining a deadlock grip on Skids’s plating.
Oh, he’d meant that he was feelingsuspicious.
The prince let go of Skids and wandered away, leaving Skids to fall into place next to him and look intimidating as they approached the desk near one of the only inhabited couches. Clearly inhabited by a couple of guards. Incognito guards, at that. Very sloppy. Too far to do immediate damage control if someone charged the vulnerable parts of the building, not portraying an obvious allegiance and backup that made it not worth it to mess with them, and not even getting out of sight in case someone was scoping the building. Skids stared them down while Prince Jazz made zero headway with the secretary. Sounded like he wanted to get to the governor’s office. Skidshad to break eye contact when the prince hooked him again, laughed, and steered him away from prying eyes. In a new direction.
“So, suspicious, what are we investigating?” Skids asked as Prince Jazz scoped the lobby. He was casual about it, especially with the visor hiding the direction of his optics, but that was some scopage if Skids had ever seen it. He’d gotten used to boring guard duties. Whatever else he was, this prince certainly wasn’t boring.
Skids hadn’t been on a mission, a real mission, in ages. He maybe let the excitement run away with him, not thinking about the possibility that Jazz might not be able to keep up with his covert-ops trained antics until he was already halfway up a vent.
Every time he looked down, though, Jazz was right behind him and hanging onto the vents with some seriously strong magnets. And waving to let him know he was okay. Huh. Maybe Skids should worry more about keeping up himself.
It was good to work with a partner again. He and Getaway hadn’t been on any serious missions since the one against Meister, where Skids had gotten injured. Skids had been waiting to use the ‘too damaged to be causing problems’ routine for something more serious than sneaking poker nights past command ever since. It worked a treat, even if he got banged up on the way down to the floor and a little more by guards grumpy to have their jobs interrupted.
Skids got them to let him off on the third floor, and then took a different elevator bank down the rest of the way so the secretary wouldn’t see him come out when he hadn’t gone up and think something was up. It took him a minute to find the vent they’d gone up again. Once he had, he stood guard in front of it so Jazz would have backup as soon as he came out.
It didn’t quite work. Jazz walked up from a different direction after Skids had barely been there a full vent cycle, looking like he’d gone a couple rounds with a too-tight tunnel in alt. He waved again.
“Yo, Skids. You made it down safe.”
“Yes, sir.” Skids pulled up to attention. Whatever hierarchy they had run that op on, it probably didn’t apply in public. Skids could be discreet, especially if that meant looking deferential. “You took a different vent?” If he was more interested in being unpredictable than doubling back to make it easy to stay together, Skids should probably know that now.
“...No, I took the same vent.”
“Oh.” Skids had lost track, again. At least Jazz was nice about pointing it out instead of picking at him for it.
“You sure you didn’t hit your CPU too hard, there?” That reminded Skids he had never actually explained about his processor damage, which prompted Jazz to give him a looking-over that was about as subtle as his scoping out the building. Skids looked at him right back.
He was more beat up than Skids had thought at first glance. A lot of minor bumps and dings, especially noticeable when they were in places that didn’t really make sense for collisions in alt-mode. If Jazz’s op today was stealthy enough Prowl hadn’t briefed Skids on it, it was probably stealthy enough he shouldn’t get caught with damage that hard to explain.
“If I may, your highness,” Skids said, reminding them both that Jazz was supposed to be back here later for a meeting and should probably maintain his cover. Also being polite because they weren’t exactly friends and that made pointing this out kind of rude. “You look like you had a rough landing.” Jazz took that with some surprise, looking down at himself like he hadn’t noticed before. Skids tried not to be too amused at his expense. “General Prowl’s probably going to chew me out for it.” It certainly looked bad that he’d been assigned to specifically to guard Jazz and make sure he didn’t get hurt, only to bring him back looking much worse than he’d left. The general had certainly fussed enough over Jazz’s safety already, what with sweeping the entire house as soon as they’d arrived and insisting on regular security patrols and scheduling a trip to Staniz so the old security network that Skids and Getaway agreed probably predated the war and didn’t hook up to anything anymore could be entirely stripped from the walls of the house. He was probably entitled to a little overprotectiveness after an entire war.
Jazz paused halfway through his self-examination, field suddenly clanging with panic for an instant before it vanished. Too fast for it to actually have been dismissed. A soothing current thrummed up, and Jazz’s frame language shifted into something relaxed and...reassuring? “Don’t worry, I’m sure he won’t blame you. ‘Specially not if I can get this cleaned up before then. Meant to visit a detailer in the city.” He was shifting his shoulders back, loose like he was ready to dodge an attack. Something was happening here that even Skids couldn’t miss. “Don’t want to look all messed up for my conjunx, right? Prowl doesn’t have to know a thing.”
There was an urgency behind that line that Skids didn’t like one bit. He grabbed that tight, not letting it fall out of central processing before he could really think it over.
They weren’t exactly friends, but Skids had a feeling that the truest way of saying that ended with ‘yet.’ He liked Jazz, even if the mech was suspicious in more ways than one.
And he’d worked for Prowl for a while, but...as a subordinate agent, directly in his chain of command with a whole lot of checks and balances in between the way the general felt and the way he treated the people around him. He’d felt a lot of things about the general, but he’d never felt...afraid. Jazz was afraid.
Jazz was afraid, and he wanted to visit a detailer. That was something Skids could help with. Sideswipe and Sunstreaker had opened a shop out here, hadn’t they? Sunstreaker did good work, according to his own bragging and the grudging admittance of other mechs near his unit. That might work.
And on the drive over, Skids could figure out exactly what to do about Jazz being afraid of the mech he claimed so easily as his conjunx assigning blame.
Under the Sea
Series: Forever With You
Story: Under the Sea
(excerpt below)
“Oi, spaceman, what kind of ball is this?” Donna called from the wardrobe. He had purposefully given themselves plenty of time to get there. Donna and Rose had found excuses to wear costumes on almost all of their adventures together so far, and he knew adding Martha to the mix would delay them further.
“Fancy!” he called. He wasn’t nearly as bored this time, as he was changing too. He was checking himself over in the mirror when Rose walked into their bedroom.
“Look at you,” she said, smiling widely. He looked at her through the mirror, and swallowed hard.
“I could say the same,” he told her, flipping his tie through the loop and tightening it. She was wearing a white dress, with a sweetheart neckline and soft lace along her torso. The tulle skirt pillowed out, not quite a full ball gown, but lovely and ethereal all the same. Her hair, yellow and perfect, was resting in loose curls, and he noticed her hoop earrings were right where they belonged.
The Doctor’s mind flashed to an image of her in a similar dress, walking down an aisle to meet him. Rose smiled at him, moving to stand behind him and rubbed his arms, their eyes still locked in the mirror.
“Would you want to do that?” she whispered. They hadn’t talked about it since Jackie first mentioned doing an Earth ceremony all those months ago, and as he looked at her, she allowed her eyes to take him in as well. His hair was perfect and tousled, his jaw chiseled like that night in 2056, all of which was enough to make her knees weak, but it was the navy blue suit with the maroon shirt and tie that was slowly unraveling her.
“Would you?” he asked. Her chin came to rest on his shoulder, and her hand slipped into his. She flashed him her tongue in cheek smile.
“I asked you first,” she whispered. He pressed his head against hers, and gave her hand a squeeze.
“I...yes,” he whispered, finally breaking eye contact in the mirror so he could turn and face her. “I’d marry you a thousand times.”
She felt her heart skip a beat and kissed him, her arms wrapping around his neck. “Me too.”
“Yeah?” he asked, centimeters away from kissing her again.
“Yes,” she said. Their lips met, and Rose pulled away, tugging at his lapel.
“Why blue?” she asked.
“What’s wrong with blue?” he said, and she bit her lip.
“Nothing,” she whispered. “I really like the blue, actually.”
They were kissing again, and this time it started to deepen. Rose pulled back, and he quirked an eyebrow at her as she led him toward the door.
“You know, Rose Tyler, we are in a time machine, we could absolutely do this and they'd all be none the wiser,” he said seductively and he pulled her back to him. She giggled, and kissed him, but pulled away again, and winked.
“We’re not alone,” she said, smirking at him.
He’d forgotten that entirely.
Darling, so it goes by disgruntledkittenface @disgruntledkittenface
Length: 195k
Harry Styles is a world-famous actor at the height of his career but a personal low point when he meets His Serene Highness Prince Louis of Monaco by chance. He doesn’t think they’ll ever see each other again, but after striking up a correspondence, it turns out they have more in common than he thought. Then they start to fall for each other. Louis is different from anyone Harry has dated before and their relationship moves fast as Harry realizes he’s ready for a change. Soon Harry finds himself adapting to an entirely new life, in a country where he doesn’t know the rules, the customs, even the language. Harry is used to people underestimating him, and he’s more determined than ever to prove them wrong.
He just needs Louis to meet him halfway.
Grace Kelly AU.
Ao3, Chaptered, Completed
Foolishly Laying Our Hearts On The Table by runaway_train @runaway-train-works
Length: 11k
“You think Harry wants that?”
“Dunno. Maybe. Wanna make him happy.” Harry takes advantage of the red light he’s pulled up to turn and look properly at Louis’ face. He’s not even looking in Harry’s direction though, focused instead on something out of his side window, head drooped, mindlessly playing with the string of his hoodie between his fingers, lost in his own world somewhere. For some reason, it makes Harry’s spine straighten.
“Because he’s your best mate?” Harry questions carefully.
“He’s my boyfriend.”
He couldn’t have heard him right. “What?”
Louis releases a deep breath, still not turning around. Harry wonders who he thinks he’s talking to right now. “He’s so pretty. Want to kiss him all day long. And buy him a big house and give him presents and marry him.”
Or
The one where Harry is in love with his best friend Louis but doesn't think he stands a chance until some wisdom teeth and a rather unusual confession might just change his mind.
Ao3, One Shot
Standing in Fields
Cross-posted to AO3.
The Thing ate souls. It had a name, all these fucking things had names, but it was in Polish, and the important thing was that it ate souls. It took them, maybe it didn’t actually eat them, but they didn’t come back.
Sam had just started really speaking to him again, if not actually wanting to look at him. He’d been on his best behavior for more than a month. Cas and Kevin had their own beefs, especially Cas, but they didn’t have shit on Sam’s ability to make his skin crawl with his own self-disgust. This started out as a perfect low-ball opportunity to work on some brotherly bonding. It was only once they started the interviews that they caught on to what a shitstorm this was gonna be.
It had taken hundreds of souls from around the state. People husked out, looking at their families with cold eyes when they’d gone to interview them. He had felt Sam shifting around beside him, tapping his pen against his pad. When the mother they were interviewing left the room to get the coffee pot, Dean reached over and patted his leg, trying to still the tapping. Gave the gigantic knee a squeeze. Felt his guilt and fear like a physical thing. Sammy couldn’t lose his soul again.
No leads, no pattern, no evidence. They had to go home and wait. This was the worst kind of waiting.
For 3 days they stay inside the bunker. Dean sits next to Cas while he cleans all their guns and watches Sam make notes. It is a long fucking 3 days.
It finally focuses on one place, a town only about 3 hours north of them.
Without souls, the men and women of Taurus Hill had been fucking each other up to an “inordinate degree”, as Kevin had noted. Hospital admissions were up by 155%. This time, Dean and Cas went out as Agents Bert and Ernest while Kevin and Sam researched and quizzed their network.
Cas had one of those faces that made it look like he was always one step away from knitting a kitten a sweater, or maybe building a log cabin for some orphans and nuns. Cas doesn’t know what he looks like, so when he squints sympathetically at the witnesses, they uniformly offer up information with almost no prodding. Looking like a tall, dark, and brooding fisherman-poet who needed someone to feed him had its perks. And if all Cas had to do was sit still and look pained, then fine, Dean could sit back and take notes.
They brought back their sketches and their eyewitness accounts to the bunker, gave them over to Kevin to cross-reference. As soon as Dean had traded out the suit for jeans and a t-shirt, he padded down the hall to the library to check on his brother.
The big room smelled like girl shampoo and old coffee. Sam’s giant head poked up from a stack of books and paper, laptop humming beside him. He looked tired. He gave Dean a distracted look before ducking back down, which meant he hadn’t been sleeping right since he and Cas left the bunker 2 days ago. Dean couldn’t help the frown spreading across his face. He wanted to slam the books shut, hide the power cord for the laptop, and bundle Sam off to bed, but he knew that wouldn’t fly with all the soul-stealing still going on. Plus, he was his own person, and a grown-ass man, and Dean was working on his tendency to control and impose his own will on others without their consent and blah blah fucking blah. He sighed.
Cas had beat him to the library, and tucked himself into a corner, away from the lights. Kevin emerged from the stacks and heaped about 15 solid looking books on the desk in front of him. Another perk of working with a former celestial being; no language was off-limits when they were researching. Cas seemed to take this wordless deposit in stride, because he started pulling the books towards him and mumbling to himself in German.
They could all use some sleep. Even in the motel last night, both he and Cas had laid there, silently, sleepless almost the whole time. Dean had watched the ceiling the whole night, feeling Cas radiate the same sleeplessness across the gap.
His eyes were dark today, his shoulders slumped.
He dragged a hand over his face. He picked up a stack of notes by Sam’s table, aimlessly flipped through them, and asked, “How do we kill this, Sammy?”
His brother looked up again, lost for a second, staring out from his pile of books. This one was the look he got on his face when he didn’t want to go into the cellar when he was a kid, but he knew he had to; you weren’t a Winchester and got to just not do things you were deathly scared of. His dad would’ve made Sammy go down into that cellar, maybe by himself if he showed he was afraid. Dean couldn’t be his father. He’s never been any good at it.
Sam taps at his open book and shrugs. “Not sure, Dean. It seems to be speeding up though.”
“Godammit.” He scrapes at the beard coming in on his neck. He hadn’t bothered to shave this morning. Tense and distracted.
Sam opens his mouth to speak again, but Kevin gets there first. “Well, the only thing we’ve got is from this Polish monk’s journal from 1810. I think we’re dealing with the same thing…probably. If they are the same creature, then based on Google translate, this Thing can be killed just like any other person-shaped creature.”
They all stare at Kevin, who looks expectantly at them. After a few seconds of their blank looks, he makes a disappointed scholar noise.
“Cut it’s head off.” He makes a little chopping motion with his hand. “The monk did it with some kind of axe.”
“Great, but no one can even get close to this thing if it can suck your soul out at a hundred yards.” Dean can feel his frown deepening as he picks up one of Sam’s discarded books and hefts it.
“Hold on, this word could mean “pledge” or “oath”, let me-” Kevin abandons his laptop and drags what must be the biggest Polish-English dictionary ever across the table.
They all sit a little less easily while Kevin pages back and forth, looking for his words.
“Okay! Cool- I’ve got something. I think the monk was talking about some kind of pledge for souls. He references some other, French book…maybe we have his book somewhere..” He’s pawing through the mess on his table, looking for another goddamned book.
“Kev-Kevin. Tell us, first. What’s that mean?” Sam tips his head towards the paper Kevin had been scribbling on.
“It means that these soul-takers, or soul-eaters can’t or won’t take a soul that’s already been pledged to someone or something else.”
Dean slams his mouth shut.
Sam looks like he’s thinking it over. “So, if you’d sold your soul to a demon or something like that?”
“I guess, yeah. But, this Polish monk didn’t do that. Looks like he-”
Cas interrupts Kevin with his own gravelly pronouncement. “He gave his soul over to his friend. He was also a monk. Aron and Dawid.”
“Cas, do you remember this actually happening?” It reminds Dean of when Sam first met Cas, the polite handshake, the excitement at meeting an actual angel. An angel that could pull Dean out of hell. Proof that there was something bigger than them, something that was watching, and seemed to have a plan.
And now look at them.
He keeps his mouth shut.
Cas hesitates a little. “I remember Aron and Dawid. Heaven does not look favorably upon humans that would presume to pledge their souls to one another, so they were angry. I believe their monastery wasn’t exactly pleased with their solution either. The spell only worked because they cared for each other-loved each other. In their monastery, nothing was supposed to be set before God.” He traces at the table edge with a finger. His eyes are shadowed.
“I-I don’t remember what happened to them.” He looks sick at that.
Dean is a coward and turns away from his expression. He wants this to be different.
So, this Thing couldn’t take a soul that was pledged. You might get bounced around or beheaded, but it had to leave your ugly, tattered soul where it was.
Dean pictured it, grey and small, inside his chest. Some days, straining to keep him together when he’d been close to coming apart.
They absorb that. Sam’s neanderthal brow is all scrunched up and thoughtful, broadcasting that he thinks he should be the one, to go up to the Thing and challenge it. It exhausts Dean.
Having to go around and around, talking for hours about why it shouldn’t be Sam, it should be him; why it was dangerous for Sam to do it, better for him.
The simplest way to stop all that endless wrangling before it even started was to just tell the truth. So, he blurts it out as Sam is opening his mouth and gearing up to go over his lawyerly arguments.
“I can do it.” Eyes swiveled to him, away from Sam’s shocked face. He rushes to tell the truth, because he hadn’t been doing that too often lately. His credibility was a joke, and he didn’t want anyone to laugh at this.
“This Thing, eats-takes souls, so I’ll give my soul away first, then kill it. It won’t have anything to hurt me with.”
“Dean-“ Sam looks ready with another speech, most likely about pig-headed brothers who sacrifice themselves and go to Hell, so Dean interrupts him again.
“I can give it to Cas.” He says this softly, hears the cracks in his own voice. He clears his throat, and avoids Castiel’s side of the room.
They all stew in that for a while.
Kevin finally makes a weird noise, that could be a laugh, but probably isn’t. Dean is familiar with the types of noises people make when they don’t know what else to say.
Sam just looks at him, like maybe he’s trying to read something, something he thought was in Latin, but turns out to be in some totally fucked up new language that makes no sense.
Dean still avoids looking at Cas’ side of the room, but his instincts tell him nothing’s moving over there. His corner is still and quiet.
Kevin and Sam are both still sending their stares at his face, and he doesn’t want to be in this fishbowl anymore.
“Gonna go make us something to eat.” He mutters, then drops the book he’d been holding, maybe too hard, he misjudged the distance to the table, and it thumps and shakes their empty glasses. He slinks away, feeling vaguely sick with panic.
In the kitchen, he opens a couple cans of soup, dumps them into a pot, and starts heating them up. He does this all on autopilot. His head is filled with what he just did. A rushing noise.
He hears Cas coming in the kitchen, hears him lean against the counter behind him and to the right. Just because his head is a boiling mess, doesn’t mean he’s not still a hunter.
He fiddles with the empty soup cans for a minute, twisting the lids off.
He girds himself, and turns. Cas is pulling bread from the bag. He glances up at Dean, explains “I thought I’d come in and help you.”
Dean is so fucking grateful for that opener that he feels some of the pressure drain away from his head.
He lets himself glance at him again as he reaches for the drawer beside his hip. He grabs a spoon, and pauses.
Cas’ hands are tanned. They’ve always been brown, but seeing them pull out the slices of white bread, Dean now knows it’s a tan, that he tans like a man, just like any other man.
He lets the soup sit there, all clumpy, while he looks at Cas making sandwiches.
He wants, this just the worst fucking way to do it. So soon after all the Metatron and Ezekiel bullshit, dragging it out, into the light, in front of Kevin and Sam, too. Fuck.
Cas still hasn’t said anything, or even reacted to Dean’s “plan”. Maybe he doesn’t know, doesn’t care.
He can’t believe that.
Maybe Cas is going to do it because he thinks it’s not his decision.
How badly has he fucked up, literally all his relationships?
He taps the spoon against the counter.
“You know, you can tell me what a bad idea you think this is. Tell me you don’t want to do it.”
Cas keeps making sandwiches. “Yes, I know.” Dean sighs.
“Do you even want things, Cas? Do you want to be here, with us?” He half-turns, back to the stove, stirs at the soup, tired and anxious. Tired of being anxious.
He can’t even work up any anger at Cas; normally he has it, just under the surface of everything. Anger at him for not listening, for lying to him, for leaving. For throwing himself in front of any fucking disaster he can find. For letting Dean do the things he did to him.
Having Cas at the bunker seems to be carving down at all the other bullshit, washing it away. Every time he searches for the old familiar feelings of anger, or resentment, or even the formerly near-constant crippling guilt, he comes up with less. He has less to say when Cas wants to come on a hunt. Less to stew over on nights they sit together, watching movies. Less to worry about when he helps Sam, or Kevin. There is less, and it leaves space in Dean’s head.
Some days, there is so little other stuff there, that it’s terrifyingly simple in his head.
He just wants him.
Cas glances at him, sees Dean trying to figure it out.
“I want you. Of course.” He says it like it’s a foregone conclusion.
Well, of course this man-angel who pulled him out of hell, who protected him and beat him up, who sacrificed everything for him, who watches Star Trek together with him while wearing his pajamas wants him. Don’t be stupid, Dean.
Cas spreads mustard on the bread in front of him. Do normal people have conversations like this?
He grips at the edge of the stove. Watches the colour drain from his knuckles.
“Cas, we don’t know what doing this will actually mean- what you’ll have to do or feel-”
Cas finally turns fully to look at him; he leaves the knife on the counter, and comes closer to put his hands on Dean. His fingers curl around his collar.
“Your soul will always be the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. And, please, of the two of us, only I have seen it, so do not try to convince me otherwise.”
Dean has nothing to say to that, his mouth is probably hanging open, his brain doing that thing again, where the only words that would come out of his mouth would be useless garbage.
“Uh…okay, yeah.” See.
Cas goes back to making sandwiches, and Dean supposes they just got engaged.
Fuck.
The soup is burned.
Sam and Kevin eat the soup and sandwiches like they’ve been starving. You leave for 2 days, and it all goes to shit. There’s towels on the floor, an empty milk carton in the fridge, and no one knows how to feed themselves. He makes them all eat a second sandwich and another bowl of soup.
His hands shake, so he jams them in his pockets.
Sam and Kevin were busy while he and Cas were putting together dinner.
They’ve started to plan. They trade a piece of paper back and forth over the table, writing and crossing things out, arguing quietly with each other. Cas has drifted away, clutching his coffee mug, and if there was a window in the bunker, he’d be staring creepily out of it and frightening the townsfolk.
They’ll never be able to have neighbours. Dean looks at his back, and feels a surge of such pure want that his sinuses burn.
He had decided he wouldn’t have this, and Dean doesn’t like changing his mind after he’s decided something; that’s flakey and weak.
But, this is slow and careful and warm, and Dean doesn’t want to keep pulling up on it anymore. He’s too tired, and they haven’t had enough chances for something good.
So he would pledge his soul to Cas. Stand outside, before the sunrise, in the field behind the bunker, and do that.
They work the rest of the night on the incantation. They don’t talk any more about what it means.
Dean can’t follow much of what they’re doing. His face is hot. He sits quietly until they ask him a question, and then he tries to answer.
No one gives him any shit for it.
They leave the bunker at about 5am with an incantation and their two witnesses, Sam and Kevin. Dean had voted for zero witnesses, but Sam came down pretty hard on the other side of that argument. Dean does not fight him on that, because he is being a better brother.
But, maybe also because this would be the only wedding he’d ever get.
The crumbling green book they’d created the incantation from vaguely promised “soulfire”, which made something in Dean’s gut tighten, but seemed to alarm Sam in a different way. He was holding a bucket of holy water, and Kevin clutched a fire extinguisher from the kitchen. Where an hour ago they’d been teasing Dean about missing a bachelor party, this morning they were quiet and subdued.
Dean pressed his right hand against the slight shape in his jeans pocket, feeling stupid and scared.
Castiel walked in front of him, taking big strides through the fog.
They make a silent line in the weak light.
Wet grass against his legs, he feels it start to seep through his jeans.
Cas starts to strip even before he’s totally stopped. He pulls his shirt over his head, and Dean registers in the grey light that it’s one of his. His chest hums.
Kevin starts to make a noise behind him, something to break tension, or ease the weirdness of seeing one of your two friends that are about to do something strange and ceremonial together start to strip off his clothes. He stops before he really starts, because he probably feels it too, this heavy, buzzing thing, pressing against the skin. Dean can feel it in his hands, they tremble. How can anyone not feel it?
It’s in Dean, bad.
Sam is looking at him with that bucket at his feet, hands dangling. He’d wanted to tape this thing, had brought a little camera, “for the record”. Dean had been going to smack it out of his hands and onto the ground, but he doesn’t care about it anymore. Neither does Sam, because it’s still stuffed in his jacket pocket, and it doesn’t look like he’ll be getting it out anytime soon. He looks at him with what will always be his little brother face. He looks surprised, and a little like he’s surprised he’s surprised.
Dean thinks again about this plan and the stupidity of it. He thinks about his grey soul and what exactly he’s got to offer.
Cas stands across from him, watching him. Dean pulls his shirts off, and drops them behind him. Skin is best, the green book had hinted through a confusing mix of Polish and Latin. Dean had scoffed at that, last night, but now he feels it.
He’d made a little joke with Cas about their “wedding night” and how much skin Cas should show, but he’s not laughing now.
He can tell their skin is how it should be done.
It buzzes at him; it hums at him.
Later, he’ll remember this as almost already being in some kind of stupor, but they haven’t done anything yet. Maybe it’s the green book; Sam has it stashed in his other jacket pocket. Does it know what they’re going to do? Dean can’t bring himself to care about how fucked up that sounds. He thinks about Cas’ skin.
They look at each other, and Cas just blinks.
He lurches forward, their feet bump and brush. His boot is untied. He reaches out, almost blindly, with his arms, elbows bent. Cas does the same, and now he’s holding his left wrist and his right forearm. His skin is hot, and looks like gold, which isn’t right, because there’s still only a washed out, pale light creeping over the edge of the field.
He breathes in deep, pulling in the air, because it occurs to him, suddenly, he maybe doesn’t have enough. His face is close, right there, and Dean wants to lean into him, drop his forehead against his, and just be still.
A throat clears. Dean swings his face to the side, looks at Sam. He raises his eyebrows at Dean; it wasn’t a dickish throat clearing, but the kind that said “we have to start”.
Dean nods, a little jerkily. He hears Cas’ slow breathing in front of him.
Sam nods back, and his eyes go down to the printout of their cobbled together incantation. He starts to read.
It’s loud in the small clearing, and it doesn’t feel like the kind of incantation that needs to be loud. Dean shivers a little.
He hears the click of a marker being uncapped. Kevin approaches their two man circle with the black sharpie. He’s going to mark down Dean’s binding oath on Cas, and suddenly, Dean feels a sharp sting of wrong. Kevin should not be doing that, because Castiel is his.
He feels his face go warm, nervous they can see that thought on him. How do they not know? They must know. He’s standing half naked and shivering, holding Cas’ arms in a field before dawn, and they must know. He is naked.
He watches Kevin press the marker against Cas’ shoulder. He doesn’t press hard enough, maybe he’s nervous, and he has to trace over the first few letters again. He knows his Latin, Enochian, Greek, and probably a bunch of others, but it’s Dean’s oath, and he had quietly insisted that it should be in English.
Kevin presses “Dean Winchester pledges his soul to this being, in Heaven and Earth and Hell, forevermore,” into Cas’ shoulders and back, over and over again. Dean had written it out on a scrap of paper, with hands that had turned clumsy. He’d gone over the wording for almost an hour, before finally settling on that.
Cas had said he wasn’t sure he was a man or an angel. He wasn’t sure it would work, so Dean had simply crossed out “man”, and written in “being”. They can deal with their identity crisis later.
He looks at Kevin, tries to catch his eyes, tell him to hurry, but Kevin won’t look at him. He writes faster anyway.
He moves his marker up to Cas’ neck, reaching up, and Cas tilts forward for him, lowering his head so Kevin doesn’t have to stretch.
His hair brushes Dean’s face, and he knows he should move back a little, give Kevin some more room, but he only edges back superficially. He draws his left arm up, hesitates, then brushes his hand through Cas’ hair, pushing it back, away from his own face. He wants to crowd closer, lean in, nudge against the base of his neck, smell him. Instead he holds himself very still, one hand now resting on the back of Cas’ head.
Sam is still reading their incantation, pronouncing everything correctly in Polish, with no hesitations. Cas had written it out phonetically for him.
Kevin steps away from Cas’ back, eyeing his work.
Dean drops his eyes to their arms in front of him. He feels Kevin move behind him, and his neck prickles at having someone at his back. He’s exposed. He concentrates on his fingers wrapped around Cas’ wrist. He rubs his thumb back and forth over the smooth skin there. Cas stays still.
He feels the marker on his back, the ink on his skin, drying almost immediately. Markers are much easier to write with than blood. Dean would complete every mystical spell with a Sharpie if he could.
Sam’s voice goes on and on
He feels Kevin tracing Cas’ Enochian words on his back, and he listens to Cas breathe in front of him.
It’s quiet, and they don’t need the fire extinguisher or the holy water, but Dean’s skin gets warmer, and his heart beats a little faster as Sam finishes up the last page. He wants to be alone with Cas, because he wants to stare at him, and stare at his own name written on his back, trace the lines with his fingers. He’s still with it enough to know he doesn’t want to do that in front of Sam and Kevin.
He feels the heat from Cas’ hands as well, looks up to see his face. His fingers are still in Cas’ hair; it’s soft.
Cas is staring at him. Blue eyes.
Okay.
Okay, this then.
He lets go to shove his hand in his pocket. He brings his hand back out, holding the last piece to this thing. He pulls Cas’ left hand to him again, holds it at waist height. His hand is steady. He pushes his father’s ring onto Cas’ ring finger. Sam has stopped speaking. It’s quiet, there are no traffic noises from the road, or even bird noises from the trees.
Cas flexes his hand inside Dean’s hold, then pulls him in, closer. He slides the ring they’d scrounged from the Men of Letters jewelry box onto Dean’s finger. It fits well enough. Not like his Dad’s had, but that’s Cas’ now.
“I think you’ll need something.”
Dean looks up from the paper that’s gone fuzzy. “Be more vague.”
“Keep being a dick, please. I’m just trying to create a brand new spell out of a two hundred year old badly translated French copy of a thousand year old Greek text so we can lock your soul down into a mystical ether with your best friend’s soul so they can forever mingle in eternity and barf soul sparkles and ponies..”
“Kevin has a point...”
Dean clenches his teeth. “Shut it, Cas. Translate faster.” Cas actually shuts up, unlike some others Dean could mention, and it makes him feel kinda shitty.
“Ugh, what I’m trying to say is that it would help if you both had some kind of object, like a homing beacon for each other’s souls.”
Dean sighs deeply and lets his forehead slump down to rest on the table in front of him. His vision is blurring, and he’s sick of this room, the noise of breathing in it. But it’s already midnight, and dawn is at 5:54 this morning.
He groans, pushes back from the table, and thinks about what his father would say about any of this. Fuck.
He doesn’t tell them where he’s going, or what he’s going to look for, but he figures Sam will know. He watches him leave the room like he knows, anyway.
Dean lets himself breathe out, grabs Cas’ hip and waist, finally gets what he wants, and presses his face against his cheek, his jaw, his neck.
He feels the rumble against his chest before he actually hears Cas speak. Where Sam had been proclaiming, Cas is only just talking to him.
Kevin had said this part of the spell was supposed to be just between the two doing the pledging.
Dean doesn’t understand much Enochian, aside from the swear words he made Cas teach him, but he knows what Cas is saying. He grips at Cas’ belt loops and grimaces at the words, not liking what this is doing to him.
He’s not stupid; he knows that’s fucked up. He just never figured he’d ever be able to really do anything about it. It’s much easier to be fucked up about this stuff in theory, and never get the chance to test it.
He wonders what his mother would have thought about all this. Maybe she would have made Dean wear a collared shirt, at least. Would she have been happy to see her eldest son marry this otherworldly, ancient, weird man-shaped angel? Ex-angel.
He can’t help the nervousness creeping into him when it’s his turn to talk. He sticks to his script, pretty much.
“Yeah, it’s Dean Winchester, and I’m giving my soul to Castiel, servant of God, willingly, and in sober mind. I, uh, pledge fidelity and loyalty to him, and accept his pledge, too. On Earth, in Heaven, and in Hell...um, amen.” How else do you finish a sentence like that?
He feels Cas’ smile, he feels it, which is really fucking weird, but his body is also really super hot now, and buzzing, and his back itches like a motherfucker…
Bright lights. No sound.
Nothing is different. He feels the same.
It’s wonderful and terrible, just like always.
They have to use the fire extinguisher on the grass around their feet.
Sam doesn’t want to wait to test out their new soul set-up, so they all climb in the car, with zero hours of sleep between them, and drive three hours away to Taurus Hill. Dean doesn’t remember much of the drive. It’s all muscle memory, as his brain keeps reaching for the feeling of Cas touching his neck in the field.
He is mine.
His ring clicks on the steering wheel.
They dangle their deceptively youngish looking, soul having bodies around town for a few hours before retreating to an empty feedlot near the highway.
He insists Kevin and Sam stay in the car, and lists all the reasons. Top reason: we didn’t sell our souls to each other in a cold field to get your souls sucked out. Sam shuts up after that, and climbs into the car after Kevin. Cas wards the car against “evil sight”, but who knows if that’ll work.
They don’t have to wait long.
It appears, and immediately starts blabbing on about souls, and power, and who fucking knows. It looks like a regular dude, but it sure talks like the worst B movie villain ever.
“You humans don’t get it- you don’t see what your souls can do. You just waste them, your little lives. So much potential, just waiting for something powerful-” Dean shoots it with rock salt just to interrupt the constant stream of clichés.
It does not enjoy that, and flings Dean halfway across the yard without even touching him. He hits the ground, hard. The shotgun skids under a pile of rotted wood. He blinks at the sky, rolls over, and spits up some blood. Breathes in dust and rocks.
Sam and Kevin watch helplessly from inside the Impala. Sam smacks the glass, and just as it looks like he’s about to do something supremely stupid, Cas steps in between the Thing and the car.
Dean picks himself up, and can’t help the gut-punched feeling that turns him to ice when he sees Cas’ pissed off expression. The Thing smiles. Dean lurches in their direction, too slow.
The Thing puts its hand to Cas, like it’s trying to call something. It’s trying to pull his soul out, and Dean stumbles faster.
What if this was all bullshit? Standing around in a field, the power of love. He’s not enough- why would he ever be enough to hold a million year old soldier of God’s soul?
Cas lights up.
Motherfucker. He’s lit up like a fucking Christmas tree and the Thing is grinning.
Oh Jesus.
His hand is burning. He tries to ignore it as he limp-runs towards Cas, but it burns.
His fucking hand is on fire- no, it’s the ring. It’s burning him.
He should want to rip it off because the burning hurts. It hurts worse than the bruises from getting thrown, it hurts worse than getting shot. It’s white-hot burning like coals in your guts.
He sees Cas’ shoulder twitch as the Thing twists its hand like it’s got hold of something Dean can’t see.
He won’t take the ring off.
He keeps moving.
Cas is on his knees now. Dean can’t see his face. He’s grabbing at something on the ground, grappling with the Thing with his other arm. The Thing now looks seriously pissed off with the lack of soul that he’s sucking. It’s screaming something at Castiel and seems to be trying even harder.
His hand throbs now.
He hears Sam yelling behind him, but there’s buzzing in his ears, so he doesn’t know what he’s saying. He could just be yelling. Is that what you do when you see a good friend of yours about to blow up in some kind of soul explosion?
Dean fucked this up, bad.
He’s about 15 feet away when he sees the muscles in Cas’ neck move- and that’s his tell. He always tenses his neck before he hits anything.
God, please. He is not a begging man.
Please.
Cas stabs the Thing right in the fucking throat. It crumples like wet paper.
Dean covers his eyes with his hands for a second. He is shaking, and there’s too much spit in his mouth. He has to lean on his knees and press his palms hard into his eye sockets. Just for a second.
He barks out a laugh. It’s a nervous, relieved reaction that he has no control over, but as soon as he does it, he starts laughing for real.
They’re okay. And it’s because they married each other in a pre-dawn mystical hippie ceremony in front of his brother and a prophet.
He even wrote his own fucking vows.
“How d’ya like us now, you soul-sucking motherfucker!” Dean crows as he limps over to stand beside Cas. They loom over the Thing, which is still gurgling.
“You-you sold your soul to a demon? Why can’t I-” Cas just stands over it, looking down with a dark expression on his face, so Dean crouches low, gets nice and close, and answers for him.
“Guess what, ugly? You’re not the only thing that knows how to fuck around with souls. Me and Cas, this ain’t our first rodeo.”
“You’re human, what did you do? You’re not supposed to…”
Dean laughs in its face.
Kevin uses a souped-up exorcism spell to flush what souls they can out of the Thing. Cas flinches, but stays where he is, watching. The Thing howls. It lunges, tries to rip Kevin’s arm off, so Sam whacks its head off with their axe.
It starts rotting immediately, which is both very gross, and convenient.
The fire burns away the rest.
Dean’s in rough shape from getting tossed, so he flips the keys to Sam. “You two lookie-loos can take us heroes home.”
He tries to arrange himself in the back somewhat comfortably, avoiding the tender bits. His knee aches, and he hisses as he palms at it through his jeans. That’s going to suck tonight. Cas climbs in the other side. He looks at Dean’s hand over his knee and makes a Cas face of disapproval. Dean thinks he might be smiling, but he can’t tell for sure because his face is numb.
“Move.” He reaches over and gently pulls at Dean until he shifts and rests his leg in his lap. Cas nods at that, then lets his left hand rest against his knee. The heat helps with the throbbing, a little.
Sam catches his eyes in the rear-view mirror, and Dean has no idea what he sees, but he’s trying.
They drive home, and while Cas dozes, Dean watches the setting sun hit the silver on his hand.