Let Me Meet You Where You Are

Dean: [walks out of the shower, dripping wet and with a towel wrapped around his waist]

Cas: [stares and licks lips] Your navel’s like a goblet

But like, consider…

Cas: Like a lily among the thorns is my darling among the maidens

Cas: Behold, you are wonderful, my beloved. Truly delightful. Our couch is green!

Cas: No! Children of Jerusalem, I charge you…by the gazelles and by the does of the field: do not arouse or awaken love until it so desires!

Dean: [wakes up in a fury]

Dean: [backs away slowly]

Cas: Who is this that appears like the dawn, fair as the moon, bright as the sun, majestic as the stars in procession?! I would compare you to the horses of Pharaoh, pulling his chariot!

Michael/Adam: Don’t look at us. Unless you think we should lock them in a cage for a few millennia

Balthazar: Worked out for you guys though

Michael/Adam: [nod, considering] 

Charlie: First of all, no. And oh god, please, don’t tell me this falls on me just ‘cause Dean once walked me through flirting with guys

Sam: WhO dId wHaT nOw?

Gabriel: Cas! [takes pity and waves a dejected-looking Castiel over] Come here, little brother. [throws an arm over Cas’s shoulders] Look, sometimes, you uh…gotta be more direct. Maybe just tell Dean plainly what you want?

Group: [nods in agreement]

Cas: [nods sagely] I understand

Dean: [enters room]

Cas: Dean, [clenches fists] I want to uncover your feet and gaze upon them

Michael: [faints, leaving a confused Adam in charge]

Dean: [points at Cas] HELL NO THESE SHOES ARE STAYING ON

Gabriel: [dies laughing]

Balthazar: Oh my, Cassie! I didn’t know you had it in you!

[Later]

Dean, anxiously: Hey Cas uh… [stammering] y-you still wanna see my uh [checks notes on hand] feet?

Dean: he’s…trying what???

Entire bunker: [facepalms]

Everyone: YES!!!

Dean: I…this changes things

Dean: Hey Cas!

Cas: [smiles] Hello, Dean.

Dean: I just thought you should know that your nose is like a Christmas tree.

Cas: I…what?

Dean: yeah and the nostrils are the ornaments. And your hair is like, uh, really burnt curly fries. And your legs…they’re like trees with your ankles beneath them like boulders!

Dean: Um, Cas, I just thought you should know your butt is like a zebra. And, uh…

Dean(thinking): dammit, Dean think. Oh! He said something about feet. Maybe they’re important..

Dean: and your your big toe looks just like a mouse!

Cas: [puts two fingers to Dean’s head]

Dean: Ummm…whatcha doin’?

@waywardangel-13 I’m not sure if you’re just thinking out loud in these tags or if you’d really like to know, but since i’ve actually been asked about this one a few times…

This actually comes from Song of Solomon/Songs 1:16. And I’ve seen that particular Hebrew translated 30 different ways and looked at about 20 different commentaries on it that all said different things, but what the gist of most of them seems to boil down to is that…their bed is nice. Nice as in pleasant and luxurious. But also nice as in they’ve made a nice place for themselves to love each other and be together. Like, it’s not just some back alley hookup. It’s purposeful and pleasant and romantic and domestic and…

it’s soft. Cas is telling him that he really likes it here with Dean, that they have a place here, and that there’s nowhere else he’d rather be.

…

Of course, Dean absolutely doesn’t catch all that so when he at least figures out that all this is Cas flirting, he later comes back with…

Dean: Hey Cas!

Cas: [looking up from a book]

Dean: [grinning] Our love seat is purple. [waggles eyebrows]

Cas: [concerned] Sam, I think we need to get Dean’s eyes checked…

…

Cas: [arrives back at the bunker after being gone all night}

Dean: And where have you been?

Cas: [sighs] Following a lead. Sorry if I worried you. 

Dean: [watches Cas walk through, trying to work up the courage to say something before Cas leaves the room]

Dean: All night long on my bed I looked for the one my heart loves; I looked for him but did not find him

Cas: [freezes] Is that so? [turns back, looking at Dean cautiously] Does this love of yours have a habit of being in your bed?

Dean: [gives Cas a small half-smile] Well, not in a while. He used to watch over me sometimes though. Was kind of creepy to be honest.

Cas: [snorts] He sounds very strange indeed.

Dean: He’s kind of a nerdy guy but he’s actually pretty awesome.

Cas: Is that so? [raises an eyebrow]

Dean: [huffs] Yeah…[steps closer] He’s, uh, mighty among the warriors. His enemies tremble before him. I, uh, do too.

Cas: For the same reasons?

Dean: Nah. Don’t get me wrong. The guy can be scary as fuck when he wants, but also, his voice is like the deep waters - though his eyes have claimed the blue. His hair is wavy and black as a raven, and his mouth…those lips are sweetness itself.

Cas: Hmmm. He sounds altogether lovely.

Dean: He is.

Cas, very seriously: I should tell you that I doubt he holds a candle to my own beloved.

Dean: Oh? Do tell.

Cas: My beloved is radiant and ruddy, outstanding among ten thousand. His mind and soul are of the purest gold, set about with emeralds. [raises a hand to Dean’s cheek] I have existed for thousands of years and never known another like him.

Dean: Not to be rude but I still think my guy sounds better.

Cas: [scowls] So tell me then, if you find this love of yours, do you ever plan to do something about it?

Dean: When I find the one my heart loves? If he’ll have me, I would hold him and not let go.

Cas: If he’s anything like me, he probably could not look away if he wanted to. I am my beloved’s; everything I am is his. [swallows] Perhaps the one your heart loves simply is not sure that you want him back.

Dean: [breaths shakily] Look there’s some line about coming into the garden and tasting the fruits but I can’t remember it so for the love of God, Cas, just kiss me.

Of course you do, they’re fantastic. They come in two models, one with tan head stripes and one with white head stripes. But the gene that controls stripe color also has a bunch of other effects! It’s a supergene!

To briefly sum up a grueling amount of fieldwork by people who were probably not getting paid nearly enough, basically the tan-stripes are nurturers and the white-stripes are fighters, across both males and females. White-stripes chase away intruders more, tan-stripes bring more food to the nest. Tan-stripe females bring more bugs to their chicks than white-stripes, white-stripe females are more aggressive and sing more.

There is a reason Jordan Peterson picked lobsters, not sparrows, to get all MRA about, because the sparrow ladies are ALL about the tan-striped males. Sexy nurturing tan-stripe males are immediately grabbed up by the more aggressive white-stripe females (who are also dead sexy if you’re a sparrow.) Then the remaining birds pair off, so you get tan and white couples reproducing in virtually all cases—nurturing male with aggressive female, hyper-aggressive male with hyper-nurturing female.*

And this is good!** Because it turns out that they can have a tough time if they don’t mate across stripes—white x white sparrows often come out undersized if they come out at all. There was some cool recent genetic sequencing and one particular chromosome is way funky, inverted, and scrambled in the white-stripes. So now every white-stripe has a funky chromosome and a normal one, and every tan-stripe has two normal ones.***

This is all really unique and means that white-throated sparrows effectively have four sexes, because they now only reproduce with a member of the opposite stripe and sex chromosome, and their offspring may be any one of the four sexes. The stripes have essentially become a second sex chromosome.

The geneticists involved think the funky chromosome probably showed up as a weird import from somebody gettin’ jiggy with another sparrow species. Presumably this created a hypersexy female whose white head stripes brought all the boys to the yard, and very unusually, that bred true.

Is that cool or what?!

*No word on whether there is a resulting sparrow tradwife media genre.

**Leaving aside the impact on the emotional health of the non-sexy sparrows.

First of all, look at it.

That’s a male ruff, specifically. You can see how they get their name. The females don’t have that fancy collar. They just look like sandpipers, which is what they are.

Like other sandpipers, these are wading birds, but they live in wet meadows and marshes instead of by the seashore. During the breeding season they gather together and the males hold territories, called leks, in which they display to attract females.

At least, some of them do.

Some male ruffs do not display in leks. They have plainer, often white, neck ruffs, and they sort of wander around the display grounds courting the females wherever. The interesting thing is that the territorial males tolerate this. Research suggests it’s because females are more interested in a display ground that has both kinds of males. The ladies like variety, it seems.

But it gets even more complicated. In 2006, a third male form was discovered. This form is extremely rare, and doesn’t have male display plumage at all. It looks just like a female ruff in the field. The other birds, however, can tell the difference, judging by their behavior. These female mimics travel with other males when the sexes split for the winter, and during homosexual mountings (which are common, as they are in many other animals), they often top.

What’s really interesting about these ‘cryptic males’, or faeders, is that they are apparently super sexy. Seriously. Females and males both prefer mating with them. And it’s believed that, like the satellite males, the presence of a faeder attracts more females to the area, which benefits all three forms.

My 3rd Destiel fanbook, “Found” is available for sale again. It contains much of my work from 2021 (including comics.) I managed to reprint 20 of them, and I will do my utmost to ship them out this weekend so that the ones ordered this week get there by Christmas. 

Holiday Card!

It’s available here. Stay safe out there, y’all :D

💙 Registration is open for A More Profound Con! 💚 

A More Profound Con is a fan-run convention focused on celebrating fanworks & creatives in the Dean/Cas fandom. We held our first convention back in March, and we’re thrilled to be back with an even bigger event this November! 

The convention will kick off on Friday November 4th with a live recording of the wonderful @mixtapebookclub podcast and a painting party with the fantastic @winchester-reload​, then last the whole weekend, with two days full of panels and workshops featuring numerous artists, authors, meta-writers, podcasters, creators, and thinkers in the Destiel fandom. Your ticket will admit you to you any and all of the panels, and you’re welcome to pick and choose which to attend based on your preferences. Recordings will be available for all the panels except for those limited to attendees over the age of 18.

Read on for more details, and be sure to share this post, and our announcement on Twitter! When? November 4 - 6, 2022 (check the schedule for time-zone friendly specifics) Where? Everywhere! The convention is virtual, running through Zoom Events (excepting a few 18+ panels, which will be hosted on Discord), so you can join in from wherever you’d like. 

How? Register here! Just make sure to set up a Zoom account first–the only way to access your ticket and join the con panels will be via a notification inside your Zoom account. This is not your granddaddy’s Zoom with plain ol’ links, so don’t forget! Additionally, if you’re planning to attend any of the 18+ panels, make sure you have a Discord account as well. We will be sharing a basic guide to Discord soon–if you are brand new to this platform, that’s okay. 

Is it free? It sure is! That said, we’d love to help raise funds for The Trevor Project, Random Acts, and True Colors United, and in the spirit of that we’re running another charity raffle. Every $1 donated equals 1 entry into the draw to win some amazing fandom-related prizes–details coming soon! If you want to enter, just make your charitable donation to one of the above organizations, then send a picture of your receipt (with any personal information blurred out) to ArgyleBestiary on Twitter.