"You must be Durian. Operator has told me much about you."
The young girl had this explained to her already; Asa figured out how to get ID profiles into the mech's databanks, but not yet how to reassign primary control. Long story short; Asa herself had to remain "Operator" or risk getting locked out of Beatrice's permissions.
To Durian, it didn't make much sense. Bea was an AI right? Why couldn't she make her own choices. Asa did her best to explain that too, that Beatrice was more akin to really big computers, not the AI cores that drove warpships.
Beatrice was smart, capable, and if you imagined her in her prime she would have been fully independent. But all that intellect was locked behind her programming, her limitations. And that was the big puzzle Asa was piecing together here, trying to figure out a way past the bullshit.
"Smart girl" was a common name for her, but she loved mechanics and that's all there was to that. The biggest problems in getting Beatrice up and running was code, lines of gibberish Asa could never figure out. But she knew enough of the software—derivates of the Artificial Sapience programs had been used for running agriculture communities long before Asa was born—to get a foot in the door.
Standing on a catwalk face to face with a giant robot, however, hit different. Especially for Durian, who'd only ever heard third- or even fourth-hand accounts. And so to the big machine's greeting, the implicit familiarity, the little girl could do nothing but jump forward and hug.
Her tiny arms could barely grip anything on the smooth metal-and-glass cranium of sensors and optics, a gesture inherently meaningless to a computer but one that had an understood connotation of friendship and compassion Beatrice was already aware of.
"I think I like this one, Operator," she said warmly through the thin static, somewhere in her processor only wishing she could in some fashion hug Durian back.
After climbing three excruciating flights of stairs to reach his bedroom, Kaz pulled a chair up to his window and seated himself, then opened the window and rested a gloved hand on the sill. His fingers uncurled, revealing a little cube of cheese that he had brought up with him. He let out a low whistle, and the sound was followed by the fluttering of wings as a crow came into view outside the window. The bird landed on his arm and waddled along the length of it, leaning down to pluck the cheese from the palm of his hand.
He had told Inej not to feed the crows when he had first recruited her into the Dregs, but it had been rather hypocritical of him to say. He fed the crows regularly, usually bringing them seeds and little bits of fruit, but the bird that currently stood on his arm was rather fond of different cheeses.
"I'm close, Jordie," Kaz murmured to the crow. The sleek black bird turned to face him, cocking its head curiously with the cheese still held delicately in its beak. Logically, he knew it wasn't his brother. He knew that. But sometimes, he could swear he saw the same light in this bird's eyes that had been in Jordie's when the two of them had first arrived in Ketterdam. For that reason, he had named the crow after his late brother, and often spoke to it as if it really was Jordie. "I'm so close..."
It was a secret, something he hadn't disclosed to the other Dregs. They didn't need to know that he spent his spare time babbling to a bird like a madman. He lifted his free hand and ran a finger down the crow's back, carefully stroking its dark feathers. It had taken some time for the bird to warm up to him at first, but it eventually came around, and had grown to trust him enough to let him touch it.
"You'll have your vengeance," he whispered against all reason. He was talking to a crow as if it were his own brother, come back to haunt him, and yet, somehow, it brought him some semblance of solace. "I just need a little longer."
With that, the crow swallowed the cheese in its beak and spread its wings, flapping away. Within mere seconds, it faded into the dark of night, and Kaz still stared at where it had disappeared for a long moment after the fact.
((okay hi hello i haven't written a fic in forever but i had this sad idea that kaz feeds the crows that hang out around the slat and the crow club and named one of them after his brother so i wrote This, you're welcome
Her question struck Durian like a bad smell. Or at least, she wrinkled her nose at it like Asa had suddenly unleashed some pungent disreputable scent from southward.
Maybe it was confusion, and in that Asa found herself quickly filling the brief silence with explanation. "They abandoned this place right? Didn't even pack up the mining gear, just locked the office and goodbye." Her arms flew up in emphasis, struck forward straight from the prone position.
"So, like, look at us! Next cycle we get an orchard, I heard Agg say. Fruit! We turned a rock into a home, and we didn't need anyone else to do it." She stares up at the stars above, beaming down their inspiration upon her soul.
"You're weird," Durian at last giggled. Asa smiled, maybe laughed, but in that her heart was not. She was elsewise, drifting through her own emotional cosmos and trying to pull strings of thought into one whole. In hindsight, it would have been hard to know that evening if the best times had already come, or if hardships of the future do not demean the good they reap as well.
At the least, no one of Tesselon could say their lives were unchanged after Asa found Beatrice half dead in that factory...
An old friend of Jessie's calls and the crew goes to Korea.
“Asexual?” Dean muttered under his breath. He remembered biology and the entire semester the class had spent on sexual versus asexual reproduction and how a species propagated genetics that way, but he’d never heard of a person capable of splitting in two that wasn’t supernatural.
“Asexual is a sexual orientation, Dean,” Cas explained, calmly. He’d taken to fiddling with the remote, trying to turn on the TV. Probably a good idea, because Jessie and Meg had looks on their faces which indicated that they’d made up (or were about to) and were gonna do some consummation of their own. “It means that someone does not experience sexual attraction, or if they do they don’t feel a drive to act on it. I’m given to understand that it’s a different experience for every asexual person.” Finally, the remote brought the TV to life and Cas switched it over to some K-drama and pointedly turned up the volume, just as Meg and Jessie shut their bedroom door behind them.
“Huh.” Dean pondered this for a few minutes, while Castiel raptly watched the K-drama that Dean couldn’t understand. Then he asked a question: “Is sexual orientation a humans-only thing?”
“Yes... and no,” Cas said, turning away from the TV. “Humans are, as far as I know, the only ones who have put names to their sexual and romantic desires. But from what I can tell, nearly all creatures have some sort of sexual or romantic orientation, whether it’s a complete lack of it or the ability to accept love or sex from all genders.” He shrugged. “It seems very complicated to me, trying to label something that could be different from person to person, but I suppose it probably makes people feel better to know they’re not alone.”
Dean tried to figure out how to phrase his next question without giving himself away. “So do demons just go full-on gay when they get turned into demons?”
Cas stared at him for a minute, trying to parse his meaning. “No,” Cas said, slowly. “Not that I’m aware of, anyway. A demon is a human soul; corrupted, but human nonetheless. Except in the case of fallen angels.” He frowned. “I expect most demons would either retain the sexuality they had prior to their descent into Hell, or, if their torture took the form of sexual assault, possibly revert to celibacy as a form of damage control.” He thought about it some more before adding, “I suppose that if a person had any hang-ups over their sexuality before descending, demonhood would probably erase those hang-ups. To be fair, that seems to be prevalent among most humans who’ve been turned into something non-human.”
He snorted and turned back toward the television. “Humans are the only ones so self-absorbed to think that sexuality actually matters.”
“You’re saying it doesn’t?” Dean asked, surprised.
“Not really, no.” Cas was flipping through the channels now, bored. “My Father never cared either way, and no one in the Heavenly ranks gave it much thought. Of course, we were wavelengths of celestial intent and didn’t inhabit bodies without reason, although some of us did develop gender identities, so sexual relations were something we didn’t engage in very often. I suppose it never crossed our minds.”
“Yeah, but what about that whole ‘lie with a man as a woman’ thing in the Bible?” Dean said. “Like, there’s whole cults built around the idea of gay people being hell-bound, and they have some pretty good Biblical case studies.”
“When have you ever known the Bible to get everything a hundred percent correct?” Cas said, wryly, turning his head toward Dean and smirking. “It was written by prophets that came before Jessie existed; their view into the celestial was...shaky at best.” He sighed and explained. “As long as a person’s sexual escapades aren’t hurting anyone -- as long as it’s not coerced rape, or violent rape, or using sex against another person to cause harm in some way, or sex with someone or something that cannot consent -- most everyone in Heaven doesn’t care.”
Then the angel snorted as something occurred to him. “It would be difficult to argue a case against sexuality in regards to access to Heaven anyway; the few angels that have engaged in sexual acts tend toward the pansexual. Gabriel himself would be banned from the Halls if we prohibited access based on sodomy or other same-sex relations.”
With that, Cas seemed to consider the conversation over, and he turned back to the TV.
Sam, who’d wandered over with a beer toward the end of the conversation, flung himself into the chair on Dean’s right, opposite Castiel. “An entire race of pansexual beings? That sounds kind of amazing.”
Cas blinked and then turned to Sam. “I didn’t say that all angels are pansexual, just that those who have engaged in coitus tend to be. This is mostly because a lot of us don’t develop a real gender identity in the first place -- in Gabriel’s case, I think he’s just a hedonist. But Anna considers herself a woman, and also identifies as heterosexual.”
“Yeah, but she was also human for a while,” Sam said, sipping off of his beer. He hadn’t offered one to Dean, and Dean realized his brother had been keeping tabs on what he did and didn’t consume.
“True,” Cas admitted. “Another case, then -- I spoke with Gadreel recently. He spent most of his time away from Earth, and yet he does consider himself a man, and also exclusively homosexual. His lover is a fellow angel, Abner, also recently resurrected, who considers himself a man and pansexual. Neither of them have actually been human, although Abner had a taste of the human life prior to his first death.”
“Huh.” Sam tried to parse this for a few seconds. Then he asked the question Dean had been studiously trying to avoid. “So, you’ve had sex. What do you consider yourself?”
Cas blinked. “I’ve never really given it much thought,” he said. “I suppose I’ve inhabited my vessel for long enough that I consider myself male, although I never really had a gender identity prior to taking Jimmy as a vessel.” He thought about this for a few minutes, very quiet. The two brothers sat, stiffly aware that they’d brought up a facet of Castiel that he hadn’t really known about himself. “What a strange feeling,” the angel continued. He seemed to be mentally turning the idea of having a gender identity around in his head.
“I’ll bet,” Dean muttered. He was a dude too, through and through, but he’d never struggled with his gender identity -- although he knew a few trans people who had and empathized well enough with their issues. Hey, he was a Democrat, or had been when’d actually bothered to vote, despite his dad’s devout conservatism. Maybe in response to it, he didn’t know. He just knew that he’d seen enough of the variety of life to know that condemning it on Earth was stupid. But it was nice to know that his views had Heavenly approval.
“With that said, considering myself male,” Cas said, slowly, “I’m still unsure of what my sexuality would be. Had my singular sexual encounter been more consensual and less -- terrifying, I guess -- I’m sure I’d have gone on to experiment more. But the experience left a bad taste in my mouth and I haven’t indulged enough to really discern if I have a sexuality at all, let alone what my preferences are.”
“Great big question mark, huh?” Dean said, fingers twitching. He was glad they’d moved from the topic of demonic sexual preference prior to Sam coming back to the living room, because he really didn’t want to discuss that. At all. “I’m sure there’s lots of people who share the feeling.”
Cas eyed him, that soul-baring stare that he had that made Dean feel like he was reading Dean like a book, before he turned back toward the TV. “I’m sure there are, Dean.”
Meg finds out the truth; the team finds out about Meg; a trip to New York City and a meeting with a former demon host takes place.
Finally, Jessie spoke. “Well, uh, you know how I can like...teleport, and shit?”
“Mmmhmm?” Meg said. It was a very blank sort of acknowledgement, and Sam felt a sinking feeling in his stomach. “This have anything to do with how you’re somehow Kevin’s dad?”
Sam winced. So did Cas.
“Uh, yeah, kind of.” There was a pause. “So, there’s this thing. Um. All prophets, or potential prophets, are the children of the Son of God.”
There was more silence, and then Meg spoke up, sounding deadly.
“You mean to tell me I’ve been dating the motherfucking Son of God?” she hissed.
“Yehoshuah of Nazereth, at your service,” Jessie said, weakly.
“You fucking asshole!” Meg exclaimed. There was the sound of a fist hitting fabric, and the Chevelle swerved wildly in front of them.
“I didn’t think you’d take it so bad,” Jessie responded.
“That’s a hell of a bomb to drop on me, of all people,” Meg retorted.
“What the hell does that mean, on you?” Jessie exclaimed.
“This needs to stop, please let this stop, this is so weird,” Kevin muttered.
“I can hear that, stop praying,” Jessie demanded.
“You’re telling me you can’t tell?” Meg asked, and her voice had gone very quiet -- hurt, almost.
“I can’t tell who any demon was,” Jessie replied. “Your faces always change.” A silence and then, “But I knew you, I think. At some point.”
“Yeah. Yeah, you did,” Meg replied. “I was one of your most devout followers. I believed in you, and you just fucking disappeared on us, and you came back and then you went again and fuck you, you asshole!” Her voice had been getting progressively louder and then the car swerved again; Sam could just barely make out Meg punching Jessie, hard, in the shoulder, from the rear window of the Chevelle.
“What?” Jessie gasped.
“Mary! Mary! My name was Mary, you dickhole, Mary of Magdalene, and I trusted you, loved you, and you just abandoned us!” Meg was shouting now, and her punching hadn’t ceased, although the car had stopped swerving. “You abandoned us when we needed you most and you never! Came! Back!” There was sudden and dead silence after this; Sam could see that the passenger seat of the Chevelle was empty now.
There was silence.
“That could have gone better,” Jessie said, voice strained.
“Well, Mr. Winchester,” the woman said, smiling, and Sam froze; he’d used a fake name at the door. On autopilot, his hand went for his gun. “My boss can certainly help you with your little predicament. Which I’m told is a doozy.”
She leaned back and crossed her arms. Her smile turned into a smirk. “But to get to my boss you’ve got to get through me.”
Sam regarded her warily. “Are we going to have to fight?”
Her smirk broadened and she snickered slightly. “You Winchesters. So quick to fall to the sword. Let’s simplify things: to fix your problem you need my boss. To get my boss, you need me. So,” and she parted her lips to inhale deeply, almost relishing the words. “Convince me.”
