ＣＡＳＴＩＥＬ (angel of thursday) (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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abraxaslogs2023-04-10 09:04 pm
unwings) wrote in abraxaslogs2023-04-10 09:04 pm
Entry tags:
[open] these hands of mine were clumsy, not clever
WHO: Castiel and others
WHAT: catch-all, OPEN and CLOSED threads below
WHERE: Horizon, Free Cities
WHEN: May
WARNINGS: Will add as needed, noted in comment headers
OTHER: Will match brackets or prose.
It's a secret I keep tucked inside my chest
With this heart of mine that's guilty, not remorseful
There is love that doesn't have a place to rest
But it would have buried you if it had settled on your shoulders
WHAT: catch-all, OPEN and CLOSED threads below
WHERE: Horizon, Free Cities
WHEN: May
WARNINGS: Will add as needed, noted in comment headers
OTHER: Will match brackets or prose.
With this heart of mine that's guilty, not remorseful
There is love that doesn't have a place to rest
But it would have buried you if it had settled on your shoulders
no subject
Not that it matters. Not that Dean’s response to Castiel’s hypothetical feelings for him would ever come into play. Even if the emotion is there, he cannot, will not, put his mission to protect and support dean into jeopardy for something so trivial. Not with the world at risk, not with all they fight for and all Dean’s been through, the peaceful, normal life he knows Dean’s always longed for. Dean wasn’t meant for him, not like that. A million reasons could apply.
The truth about what might lay in his heart changes nothing about how he’ll behave with Dean in the future, Cas is determined. ]
Dean can despise me before I’ll abandon him to this.
[ or anything else, barring an abandonment for his protection, like in purgatory. He shakes his head, appears on the verge of explaining, but the words aren’t there. His head feels like a roaring wind tunnel, so much going on and nothing he can pinpoint with certainty. It won’t work like this. ]
I need to show you something.
[ Cas pulls at Jo’s hand, fingers still woven together, and lies back against the cushions, preparing to slip into the horizon once more. The tub at her arm signals a request she come with him.
On the other side, they’re stood face to face in the serene quiet of the botanical gardens in Castiel’s domain. Wind rustles the bushes, flowers and insects flit about oblivious to their issues. Cas raises his hand, two fingers outstretched to Jo’s forehead, and he halts, hesitant, before touching. ]
You need to see it.
[ to get the full picture of what Dean is now, perhaps. To experience what happened, what shook him so thoroughly, how it uprooted his understanding of the most basic and core principles of his beliefs, family, purpose. The moment he realized Dean is somehow the linchpin holding it all together. Cas breathes out a slow, shuttered sigh, making certain this is something he wants to share with jo, something he even should burden her with. If he can even stand another soul with a front row seat to his deepest humiliation. He’s not sure. He can’t be sure.
He swallows thickly, and meets her eyes with sympathy and sorrow, before tapping her forehead. ]
I’m sorry.
[ jo finds herself rushed through the archives of Castiel’s mind, depositing her behind his eyes in Kyle’s domain, to spectate as the scene plays out. ]
no subject
This thing he thinks she needs to see to understand.
That Castiel, who always has too many words, has almost none.
She doesn't want to know, doesn't want to see; doesn't look away from Cas' blue, blue eyes, frost-bitten broken, rattled to a deep dark place she hasn't seen even this horrible sickness leech out of him. Something like—a gutting of hope. Which is esoteric even for her to think. But somehow, even as it feels awkward to think, it feels right, too. She squeezes his hand a last time after they both close their eyes, and all of the natural world fades away.
He says I'm sorry, but Jo's mouth only gives the faintest quirk of movement.
She doesn't need to be handled softly. She has to know everything they're going to face.
At least that's
Everything is briefly disorienting all at once. The foreign location, the clarity of her vision, and the shifted perspective it is seen through that very much isn't hers; the angle—from Cas' height?—is wrong. So is the way every bit of the breath left in her chest obliterates, in sync with the sensation shattering through her, as his(/her) gaze lands on Dean.
Dean pinning another tall guy she doesn't know (but feels like she knows; can almost feel the name on the tip of her tongue, even though she's never met him) hand in his dark hair and at his waist, the guys hand around Dean's upper back. Visceral bile and an alarm shrieking somewhere in Jo's consciousness, but there's no way to tear her gaze back, away.
It's not her face. Her body. She's not here.
Because Cas put her there.
In the beginning. Not the end. Not something else he couldn't say. The full-on, whole enchilada, except she isn't even in her own goddamn fucking body. She can't press her toes into the ground, her hands into fists, nails into palms, teeth tight to each other. She can't ground herself into her skin, into physical pain, and ride roughshod of the feelings to keep them in check. She's an echo inside of a moment that has already happened. With nothing to ground herself from the emotional avalanche entire in swing.
(She hates everything about the traction of it already.
The helpless, unmoored inability to steady herself.
She is not flotsam in a river's rapid.
Except she is now.)
Bile in the throat she doesn't possess, shock in the mind she's inside of, everything a jarring too high note again, and he's not wrong. Cruel, Cas said, and Dean is. Cruelty is lined into the sharp lines of his face. There's some volatile kicking brutally at nothing when he comes up black-eyed and black-faced (more than the skin, warped, emanating into him deep and dark and wrong as can be wrong and goddamn endless) and all those words he throws out first as insultingly dismissive as they are aggressively uninterested.
Cas is far more sensible than she would have been, and she's stuck in the coattails of that martial movement forward. Castiel's refusal to be cowed by it, even as The Thing With Dean's Face never relents against each new set of words rebuffed. And it only makes it more. Cruel. Callous. Crude. There's pain under it. Amorphous, barely manned, leaking through the cracks of his (/her) face, his (/her) words. Cas never was a spectacular liar, but he tries, and she sees how much the demon can see through the faltering attempt, how much it loves tasting the first drops of blood in the water and lunging for more.
Did you fall in love with me as soon as
you slapped that handprint on my shoulder,
or was it more of a slow build?
Castiel's awareness around her is crashing like someone slammed a bell too hard,
and it's coming free from whatever the hell it is that holds them up, and it's coming down hard,
all that weight into the construct below, crashing and crunching, taking out every column
but then he belts it in with—
but I'd never love you.
The demon vanishes and the memory with it, and suddenly Cas is in front of her, but it's almost like he's too bright. There's the feeling of wanting to puke, mixed with the stolen shiver down Cas' spine and the ghost sensation of stubble scratched along her jawline, lips nearly against her ear. The smug euphoria of triumphant decimation in those dark eyes the second before he vanished left splashed across her vision like the colored spots after looking at a too-bright light.
While Cas stares at her and she can read every inch of his shame and sorrow and fear and desperation on what her reaction will be now too and her brain in still shouting too many things too fast for her mouth to know what to do—I didn't know (how sick you actually are; how you felt) and and no, he's wrong, Dean loves you (but not if he's in— and how the fuck is she supposed to hold—have-it's feels like it's still inside her; Cas' feelings, desolation, shame, panic, confusion, refusal, desperation, shattering) and I'm sorry (I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry) and swearing, so much wearing, and vertigo, like gravity's hold on her feet and time's control on seconds moving hasn't quite remastered itself.
But none of them stays, as her eyes keep shifting back and forth,
replaying something that happened both too fast and too slow, all of it wrong. ]
no subject
an ugly, angry, self-loathing core of him demanded he be transparent with her. a piece so convinced of dean's disgusted drawl it seeks to drag this wound into exposure, present it for judgment and reinforce the conclusion he's already come to.
it needs to see the protest in her eyes, hear the rebuke of this supernatural creature greedily creeping across the boundary line. punishment, he realizes. that's what he's sought out, that's what he's miserably asking. a new wave of guilt and sickened shame washes over him, clogs his throat and lungs and drowns him. if there's nothing else of certainty or soothing he can find within himself, cas wanted someone to tell him no, don't, stop - it's not yours. jo deserves so much better than this. how utterly selfish, broken, vicious of him. a violent whirlpool sprung from a sudden typhoon at sea that rocks him far past anything he's ever known how to control. castiel can't contain it — he can't contain himself.
cas never considered what emotion-adjacent feelings he carries as concentrated or overwhelming as genuine human sentiment (certainly not as monumental and all-encompassing as dean's). jo panics beneath his skin through the memory, and he can't comprehend how his rough approximation of soul could be an anchor lashed to her ankles, dragging her down. it's too late to cut her free from him. ]
I— [ a gasp, like slamming back into his body from an objective distance only to observe the ruin of a devastating explosion at his feet. bare feet sizzling against the smoking, smoldering remains of pompeii, sulfur fumes and carbon choking him. look what you have wrought. ] I'm so sorry, Jo, I shouldn't have pushed that on you.
[ no room to backpedal now, when "it was nothing, don't worry about it" would be such a grossly transparent lie, after she lived through the gut-punch dean floored him with. she saw every moment of it, every prickle, stab, poisoned stinging searing cut in 3D, IMAX, technicolor surround sound and there's no amount of waving his arms and lathering up bullshit that can distract from it now. ]
This isn't yours to carry. [ eradicate it? impossible. weather it, perhaps. he's acclimated to eternity, evolved to be a sentry on the wall of time. what more is this? ] I can bury it.
[ in his mind, it's the right thing, the responsible thing, to do. these feelings, there's no point to them, no productive gain, no possible happy ending he can fathom. only a wrench thrown into a beginnings of love dean could truly find peace in with jo. the antithesis of all he set out to do for this breathtakingly, beautiful soul he found mired and gleaming through the agony and weight of creation and damnation. it's a test, just another test to overcome, and like all the rest, he's stumbled and fucked up the execution royally. ]
no subject
[ Jo's words comport themselves as the kind of vocabulary befitting any normal harsh Jo snap back, but her voice is a clumsy foal, uncertain of how to stand, a wobbly weeze, more air than sound, like she'd been shouting for an hour, like she hadn't taken a breath at any point in the last—seconds? minutes?—but it does come with her taking threatening a step back, body leaning away from him, with a wary look toward the hand that just touched her.
Her copper eyes, sheened a little too moist herself now, are still a little too wide. The whole of her is too wired; her mind too moving, her body too still. Trying to process too many things. Continuing to come back to those words, those black eyes, Cas' tailspin. The soul-deep recognition of what it is to coat yourself, every atom and every bone, in shame for loving something you're not supposed to. If she never meets Kyle, the nacho priest, that will probably be best for him. Part of her, right now, even wants to punch Cas. Because it's a marrow-deep trained-impulse to being made helpless, to fight back even harder. To make whoever it is, whatever it is, thrown further off their game than she is.
Except he asked, and she accepted;
basically asked for it.
Without knowing. So much.
Maybe too much, but she probably will punch him if he tries it.
Which means she has to figure out something else to go the fuck here. ]
That was just— [ Where the fuck does she even start? Gravity is just not going to come back, is it? Not now. Not with all of that. The rasp of that voice in her ear. The bull of Castiel's feelings still stumbling around, slamming into her ribs and spine, over and over, like it can't break free of the small space of her. Like it's bigger than her. Bigger than he ever knew until—
Small. Small. Start somewhere. Pick something.
Anything. Find the ground. Move from there.
Jo makes herself focus on Cas face. The weight of his fingers in her hand; that she suddenly grips too tight, and can't make herself stop, even when the back of her head can only think that she shouldn't because he's—fuck he's really d—and she shakes her head. Because her emotions are a goddamn wash, and being in her body isn't helping, and her voice catches, and the only thing she can think, even if she can't tell where the fuck in the world she is anymore, is that what Cas just did?
With him? With giving it to her?
Was fucking brave.
And Jo doesn't know if she has that anywhere in her. Because Cas if goddamn dying, and just got his heart reamed straight through him, and then tattered and bleeding he shoved it into her hands—knowing she might be able to hurt him worse with it?—knowing that she'd have to—might (does it? should it?)—and he's still standing there, wildly vacillating, shame at dragging her into it, fear at what it might cost, and her eyes are too wet even if there aren't tears falling, but she shook her head again and say the one that's absolutely true. Regardless of all dominoes around it. ]
Dean would never, ever talk to you like that.
[ She's had those fights with him here. At the beginning.
He can be purposefully mean. Especially scared. But never ... like that. ]
no subject
but the curl of her fingers around his, affection inviting him back into her good graces, is comfort he doesn't feel he deserves. the sharp ache in him dulls with her compassion, pools a cooling, healing grace into the gushing, pried open wounds at his core. he's every inch the drowning man pulling his savior into the rip current with him, and jo's gracious enough to go along with him.
castiel's a bull in a china shop, unconscious of his size, his power, the delicate, porcelain, priceless things he tramples over, entirely and hopelessly out of his element. his being is clumsy and expansive, multidimensional, eons of life on a distance, detached level abruptly yanked down into a prison of heat and pulsing blood, color and life exploding behind his eyes and through the heart he never knew he had. he's as much a slave to emotion as any newborn, toddler or teenager, lost and out of control.
if he's ever going to find space to exist alongside jo without stampeding over, a herd of wild horses crushing her underfoot, he needs to find an anchor between them. a tether that binds them, tugs them in at soft fingertips slipping against the soft sides of his, locking into a tight weave, his thumb stroking against the back of her palm. they may be lost to the thrashing, hurricane winds of it all, but they can braid themselves together within the chaos.
he's been more honest with her in the last handful of moments than he has with any single soul in billions of years, since the earth was volcanos and layers of churning lava. the interior of him reflects that state, his rapidly decaying body somewhere on another plane, on the outside, but what's here is just as chaotic and off kilter. cas doesn't know whether to push jo away for her own good, or selfishly drag her in close like a life raft. ]
Dean's too kind for those words. [ the real dean, the compassionate, loving, empathetic soul he's marveled at since uncovering him in hell, would never say those things to someone he sees as a brother, even with unrequited love waved like a neon sign in his face. it isn't in his nature. and yet, it can still be true to the emotions he harbors beneath that familial affection. it can still be a universal truth that he can pity him, but never love him. ] That doesn't make them untrue.
[ not since the beautiful room and dean challenging him about what's real, about what's worth saving. people, families, dean told him, but the thing he remembers most vividly is the fierce, electric, live wire spark in the green of his eyes, the burn of his soul as it flared around him like something holy, some ever-burning beacon at the end of the universe. ]
It doesn't matter. Even if it is true, it... [ it is true, the more he tries to deny it, the more it becomes clear as a spear sunken into his chest, ] It isn't important.
[ it's nothing he didn't already know, on some level. dean loves him, sure, as a brother, as family, and that's lightyears beyond anything cas could ever hope to ask for. an angel, an alien from another plane, to be accepted into a human family, invited into a home, afforded the dearest and fondest friend he's ever had. he couldn't ask for more. ]
What you have, Jo. [ he murmurs softly, dipping to find her eyes, knowing it's an unspoken line they've yet to cross. ] That is real.
no subject
Thumb brushing the back of her hand as he stares, stricken and unbelieving.
Jo knows the game Cas is playing when he starts talking. Jo has played that game—had to checkmate herself in every match; there's no one else there at the board, in the dark—for weeks and months now. Outrunning a brutal nightmare that wants its very human due, and what was Jo if not a continuation of life refusing to give into to the wants of people and things around her that demanded she fit some shape determined by anyone but her?
But when he gets to those last words, something sharpens too much, mixes, and replaces the implication, volatile and acid dripped, with the two of them. Faces flushed, lips slightly swollen, hands clutching each other, the flippant disregard for Cas, the guy, her absolute nonexistence to the list of anyone listed as in danger or worth of note, and something in Jo sizzles along the line of her spine. Annoyed. Smarting. Jealous. ]
No. [ This time it's more defiant. ] You don't get to say that.
You don't even get to think that any part of that was real. Do you hear me?
[ She levels him a hard look, even through the daze shatter of her own expression. She pulls out words that belong here and that she's refused to touch on with anyone, for any reason, since that week. There'd always been something else to do, someone else to care for, and she was needed for it. Convenient that. ] Unless you'd like to add to that, that somewhere in that head of yours, you think he actually wanted to hurt me, too.
Are you ready to add that to your plate? Because I don't think you are.
And I'm not going to agree that anything out of a demon's mouth gets our time.
[ He didn't. She'd known that unquestioningly, even so far over the edge of physical hysteria, it was a miracle she'd kept herself together. She'd seen how broken it'd left him. Worse to see it, hold him, near silently sobbing and shaking in her arms after it. The barest stretch of a breath before all of this. An eternity ago.
Jo doesn't know for the life of her if she has what he needs—that ache that's written all over his face, looking for an answer, looking for her to stop a plummeting fall in progress—but she knows that the mess of her heart, of the thing between her and Dean that even Sam won't touch, not even while staring at her with those big dark redwood tree too aware eyes, the one that exists only in blinding clarity and agony at the their worst of times, doesn't get to be the benedictive means of immolation for Cas' personal pyre. No one is dying today. (Not yet.) ]
That demon wanted to hurt you, and he did. [ So so much.
In a place and way, no one knew to be looking out for. She didn't.
(Fuck knowing if she knows how to handle it;
it's a scorchmark that she didn't know to protect it.
Him.) ] But he's not Dean, and he doesn't get to have any more of you than that.