Tʜᴇʀᴇ's ɢᴏɴɴᴀ ʙᴇ ᴀ ʜᴇᴀʀᴛᴀᴄʜᴇ ᴛᴏɴɪɢʜᴛ

[righteously]

Who: Dean Winchester, Sam Winchester, Jo Harvelle, Castiel, Ciri, Geralt, Jaskier, Sam Wilson, probably others that I'm forgetting
When: Last week and a half of May
Where: Cadens, the bad lands, and the Winchester-Harvelle house
What: Demon Dean triggers his master plan to snatch Ciri and take her to the singularity to portal him off-world. The gang catches up and things get violent before Dean is eventually subdued and cured.
Warnings: Demons trying to be as demonic as possible, with all the gross violence and mean language that entails. Also, needles.

𝑆𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑏𝑜𝑑𝑦 𝑖𝑠 𝑔𝑜𝑛𝑛𝑎 ℎ𝑢𝑟𝑡 𝑠𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑜𝑛𝑒
𝐵𝑒𝑓𝑜𝑟𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑛𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡 𝑖𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑟𝑜𝑢𝑔ℎ
𝑆𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑏𝑜𝑑𝑦 𝑖𝑠 𝑔𝑜𝑛𝑛𝑎 𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑒 𝑢𝑛𝑑𝑜𝑛𝑒
𝐼𝑡'𝑠 𝑛𝑜𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛' 𝑤𝑒 𝑐𝑎𝑛 𝑑𝑜
𝐸𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑦𝑏𝑜𝑑𝑦 𝑤𝑎𝑛𝑡𝑠 𝑡𝑜 𝑡𝑜𝑢𝑐ℎ 𝑠𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑏𝑜𝑑𝑦
𝐼𝑓 𝑖𝑡 𝑡𝑎𝑘𝑒𝑠 𝑎𝑙𝑙 𝑛𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡
𝐸𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑦𝑏𝑜𝑑𝑦 𝑤𝑎𝑛𝑡𝑠 𝑡𝑜 𝑡𝑎𝑘𝑒 𝑎 𝑙𝑖𝑡𝑡𝑙𝑒 𝑐ℎ𝑎𝑛𝑐𝑒
𝑀𝑎𝑘𝑒 𝑖𝑡 𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑒 𝑜𝑢𝑡 𝑟𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡
𝑇ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒'𝑠 𝑔𝑜𝑛𝑛𝑎 𝑏𝑒 𝑎 ℎ𝑒𝑎𝑟𝑡𝑎𝑐ℎ𝑒 𝑡𝑜𝑛𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡
𝐴 ℎ𝑒𝑎𝑟𝑡𝑎𝑐ℎ𝑒 𝑡𝑜𝑛𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡 𝐼 𝑘𝑛𝑜𝑤
𝑇ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒'𝑠 𝑔𝑜𝑛𝑛𝑎 𝑏𝑒 𝑎 ℎ𝑒𝑎𝑟𝑡𝑎𝑐ℎ𝑒 𝑡𝑜𝑛𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡
𝐴 ℎ𝑒𝑎𝑟𝑡𝑎𝑐ℎ𝑒 𝑡𝑜𝑛𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡 𝐼 𝑘𝑛𝑜𝑤
𝐿𝑜𝑟𝑑 𝐼 𝑘𝑛𝑜𝑤

Comments

[tobeclosetohim]

Jo's brow crinkles a little but doesn't say her only thought. That having something worth waiting for doesn't always make it worth it. Sometimes it scours you from the inside out. She hates waiting, and she's proven to be interminably good at it, which only makes her hate it more. Like something was scouring her skin slowly, minute by minute, hour by hour, insult by insult, shot by shot.

The second question makes her face shift, tightening a little, and relaxing, gaze darting to that door and the wall around it, like she could see through it somehow. Check on him. Know whether she needed to be in there as ballast to this unbroken storm.

"It's crazy," she says lightly, but her voice is so worn that disbelief doesn't touch it much. "This morning, he was dying." Her voice creeps softer. "He hadn't woken up for days, and I wasn't sure if he ever would." Not even when she crept into his room and prayed by his bed. Not when she left the note on his bed table this morning, saying they needed him. She did. "But then, there he was, in the desert. Blinding light and no part of him broken anymore."

Is there a whisper-sharp-edge to those words? Maybe.

Jo doesn't want to poke the strange edge of sadness. Envy. Abandonment.
Her feelings could wait for another day. Or week. Or year. Or never was good.

"He said he got all these memories of living through a long time back home, and he woke up better, aware of what had been done there and the very slim chance we might find a way to make it work here."

[gynvael]

He was what? Geralt's brows knit together. He'd spoken to Castiel not long ago, but they'd met in the Horizon. The angel must've hidden his condition if that were the case.

The timing is certainly convenient. Geralt isn't sure what to think. Not that he doesn't believe Jo or Castiel. Only that...sometimes it feels as though there is a force surrounding them. Call it Destiny or whatever the fuck. Memories that flood them through the Singularity. Memories, changes. Bringing with it curses and the power to heal.

He'd experienced it himself long ago. As far as he can tell, he was one of the first. He, Yennefer, Jaskier. For a time, he'd believed Ciri was connected to what happened.

"I hadn't realized he was dying," he states. It explains much. "I received the same unexplained memories once."

No physical changes, but...the recollections were real, not mere dreams. They match what Ciri knows, years into the future as she is. He wonders how much must've changed for Castiel. Living through all that time within a night is disorienting.

[tobeclosetohim]

Weirdly, Jo wouldn't be too surprised to hear the take on that. After reading all of the Carver Edlund books, there are a fuck ton of things that seems to just work out for Sam, Dean, and Cas, especially when it seems like there's no way to get out of it. Heaven and Hell and everything in between makes things somehow work out, maybe for what seemed worse, but surviving onward regardless.

Jo doesn't get to make the slight noncommittal noise that almost came up at the note about Castiel—she hadn't talked to anyone about it, none of them had; it was a family thing—but the words keep coming, and Jo's face tightens a little, curiosity and a weird touch of uncomfortable edge.

"Really?"

She hasn't thought hard about it today, aside from being glad Castiel isn't dead, but she still isn't sure she ever can have those. Or if she does, whether it'll be impossible to come back or wake up again. Still, she looks down at him, holding her hand out for the bottle again, curious about things she's never needed to ask about.

[gynvael]

A long silence follows. After over a year, the incident feels distant. Geralt remembers, though. How it felt. The way so fucking much changed in an instant.

"When I arrived on this sphere, I believed Cirilla was lost. That I was unable to save her. Then the memories came." He pauses. "I recall meeting her for the first time twice. Here, as a young woman. And there, as a child fleeing the war through the woods."

He's seldom spoken of the gap between him and Ciri, nor the fact that he didn't know her. Not at the start. He's not forgotten how eager Ciri had been to see him, and how thoroughly hurt she'd looked when he had not recognized her.

The bottle exchanges hands. He can't tell what's on Jo's mind, though he senses there's something. Perhaps this talk of a future, of a life lived in another world, reminds her she hasn't got one.

[tobeclosetohim]

How recently had she told Cas that her presence here only prolonged pain—just a weight that would wound later—and he's argued she wasn't the weight, she was the relief. At least before things that night had gotten ... complicated. A shared sentiment about life and death he didn't have to concern himself with anymore. Just her.

Jo's gaze flicked down and back to Geralt when the silence broke on his words, and it took her a brief second to reorient her focus to his voice, to the sudden shift in conversation, her brow wrinkling as what he was saying pieced itself into a picture she couldn't have guessed at. Even if she'd separated them for so long in her mind, they were fluid when together.

There was no gap in how they acted with or spoke of each other,
that matched the kind of crossed memories he mentioned.

Jo took the bottle and looked at it in her hand.

"That must have been confusing."

Painful is the word she means, but Jo Harvelle, no matter her mood and even locale, is the girl who ran her fingers along a bar top well older than her for decades and kept court with people's nightmares, broken lives, and shattered dreams with a care (and, even, yes, profanity, where and when it was needed) that only two other people ever mastered. "What'd you do?"

She still can't even decide if she wants to know all Castiel's learned.
She knows she'll ask. But those are two facts that stand apart.

[gynvael]

"More so for her."

Or perhaps it was her pain he felt the most, as though it were his own. He'd arrived here without Ciri or any memory of her, had created her unbeknownst to him in the Horizon—a shadow of a girl he took in as his own, absent of any memories from his typical life—and then woken up with her gone.

Then she'd shown up. Here. In the flesh, several years into the future. A young woman whose desecription he knew but whose face he had never seen.

His gaze lingers on the door where Dean sits within. "I told her we would make new memories." And they had. "I remember her now. Raising her. But the gap remains. I suspect there are events in our future she will not tell me."

He doesn't know why he's admitting this to Jo, of all people. Maybe there's enough distance between them to say it out loud without any expectation of a response. He's all right with giving Ciri the space and time she needs. What happened to her in those years—he knows she still loves him, that she trusts him. That's enough.

[tobeclosetohim]

Jo's not entirely sure she believes that.

She believes he believes it.

But there is something in that weighted quiet of the words, in the fact Geralt is carrying it still. The weight of that complicated fuck up of being from different times so completely. In not knowing his own daughter when she was standing in front of him, potentially hurting her for the abject truth of it. Whether meant or not. Ciri holds the cards of the future, and he doesn't.

And maybe it's for the best. Jo can't say she's done the best by the having of her death.

Still, what she does is ask a question instead.
"Do you think it would change anything to know?"

[gynvael]

That's a question he's thought about before. The answer comes easily now. He shakes his head.

"Circumstances are different. What happened once need not be."

There's a reason he hasn't pressed Ciri for more. It's not accurate to say it isn't important; were she to tell him, he would listen. But as it stands, he sees no need to dig without purpose. What would it do to know?

They're here. In this world, with years crossed and memories flowing out of time. It's a strange state to exist in—a fucking headache, if he's being honest—but they are here. Carving a life that has nothing to do with the one that would've awaited them.

That goes for Jo, too. He doesn't quite say it, but he does watch her with a tilt to his head—considering. She is not the only one he knows who has only death in her future. Julie is the same. Others, no doubt. He's not sure he'd call it a second chance, but it's something.

[tobeclosetohim]

Jo considered that through another swig and held the bottle back toward him.

"How do you mean?"

There was a lot of 'being stuck with what happened outside of here' going on, the thought of which makes Jo's gaze shift back to the heavy door again. Dean on the other side of it. The way he'd remembered things from there and woke up with The Mark still on him here. Lost it there, lost it here. She didn't want things to change from the only threadbarest thread of hope she had.

That it was beaten out there, and he lived at least an entire decade on. That maybe they could still beat it in here. That they were goddamn lucky Geralt or Ciri had been willing to try after earlier today/

[gynvael]

"What lies ahead, it doesn't define our path. The only thing that matters is what we choose to do."

Even if he were to see well into the years, even if Ciri were to tell him, what then? Her memories hold his fate in their sphere. Not this one.

Perhaps that's why he'd searched for answers in the first place, long before the Mark overtook Dean. He'd thought—though there was no solution that would not release some calamity upon the earth back home, there could be one here.

He can't yet say if that holds true. A large part of him is wagering on the Singularity's magic infusing the Mark. The same way it infuses everything. Not the entity Lucifer spoke of. How else could Dean summon a blade that does not truly exist in this world? One that vanishes at will?

Something is already different about where they find themselves. It has been from the start. Dean's Mark came with his memories, and then the First Blade came shortly afterwards. It is not unlike Yennefer's lost Chaos. No fire consumed her to cause it, just as no exchange with Cain was ever made. The only catalyst was through the Singularity's visions.

Either way, they'll see.

Geralt returns the bottle to Jo a final time before he rises to leave. "I need to look in on Ciri."

He'll be back on the hour, as usual—but they both know that.