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I'D CARRY HIM UP TO HEAVEN ON MY BACK. I'LL HOLD HER HAND ALL THE WAY DOWN TO HELL. MARK AND MARI DAI, AS WRITTEN INTO THE CW'S SUPERNATURAL (2005). EARLY SEASONS BASED, MAIN PORTRAYAL OF MARI CAN BE FOUND AT #GODSGUN. [...] rules (below). character overviews.

but not loved. not like here, not like this— cradled to the gentle wash of shampoo, hands smearing bubbles across her cheekbone, a worrying gaze drifting across the contours of her body. (she's all skin and bones, now. pale and drifting towards deterioration as if it's the last light in the sky. sunken to the pull of the drugs. sinking to his mouth against her skin. sucked dry. empty.)

"it wasn't supposed to get this far." — @pinkman, as jesse pinkman.

maybe it's the politics of it all. the hunter-to-hunter, man-to-man kind of thing that only certain viewpoints allow him to glean. mari seems blind to it, finding little to no problem despite how mark fights the urge to scoff and scowl at every other word that comes out of his mouth. or maybe, more accurately, it's the image of opposites. mark raises his right hand, dae-ho drops his left. mark goes for his gun, dae-ho goes for his knife. they're out of sync. more importantly, they're out of options, because man-to-man and hunter-to-hunter only gets them as far as this.

they're half-whispering in the exterior of the motel, heated tones raising above the awning and spitting off to the skies. mark's got plenty to say. turns out, so does dae-ho. and with mari seemingly off in the privacy of her own space, everything turns ugly.

"you weren't supposed to hear that." — @manenuf, as dae-ho kang.

mari's form is shadowed behind them. eavesdropping, surely, and looking smaller than usual. she's never liked when mark fights. she's never liked him angry, more than anything, and he's rarely as spiteful as he turns out to be now.

her duffle thuds as it's tossed to the side, slung off her shoulder and to be dealt with later. soldier boy — ben, — is halfway to her bad side, slinging out remarks and pushing at her buttons like it's an escape hatch to a more entertaining world. but she's nothing but gritted teeth and soldered jaw, vision tinged with the instinct to cut the shit and call his bluff like she'd do any other. play nice, mark had said. you know what? fuck that.

"i never said i was a good person." — @garglemyballsack, as soldier boy.

(for mari,) grantaire & enjolras. [les misérables] you love with a loyalty that borders on worship, even when it isn’t reciprocated. you throw yourself into others’ light, content to burn if it means being near them. you’re self-aware, cynical, but your heart is stubborn, it believes even when your mind doubts. your love story is about yearning, about staying when you shouldn’t, about finding meaning in someone who may never truly see you.

the hunt's nowhere near routine. some monster of a monster that became another monster over time, chasing after kids and animals and everything that its mouth can touch. mari doesn't stand for it. dean doesn't either. the difference is, is that courage sometimes looks like a death wish, and when he pulls her out of the ashes it nearly seems like suicide.

"what the fuck were you thinking?" — @m0tel, as dean winchester.

she's quite a view. cigarette burning, ash fluttering, the length of dark hair settling at her hips— belt buckle glinting in the moonlight. her gaze ate up by the abyss of the stars. currently, she's got smoke stuck between her teeth but only a whisper of an exhale sends it sailing. bursting bubbles and blazing hellfire all with the branded marlboro red to count. the pack still sticks out from her pocket. her lighter flips around in her palm.

dive bars and pool halls have seen her face a million times. enough to make an impression, enough to lose her in the crowd. tonight, as the interior shakes and the laughter booms, mari steps aside to watch a passing car rattle down the road like a jet-engine on speed. or, at least, she thinks it looks something like that, but she's a few drinks deep and nobody ever said she was reliable. she seems to think she's not.

a glossy gaze travels to the newcomer aside her, lighter continuing to shift between fingers and palm like modern day magic— as if she could conjure up flame just with a flick of her fingertips. a party. the thought is something of a laugh, these days. the only she had was one of a sibling, and he's long past any days with her. hopefully. ideally. even if it leaves her lonesome, in the end.

the thing about mark is that the way in which he copes / deals with his trauma is through ways that don't allow him longstanding or even depth-filled connections. he keeps everyone at an arm's length, shoves himself into a box, and doesn't let himself come out of there. his one singular longstanding connection that he did have took years of his life to develop, and then consequently died. with that in mind, along with his childhood, a lot of his dependence and his focus is geared towards mari. she is the center of his life, and even his prose reflects this. he's often thinking about her even when mari is, in stand-alone threads, not thinking about him, and whilst she's a consistent thought in his mind, she's often just doing her own thing as an individual.

part of that is him being an older sibling who had no choice but to center mari for the majority of his life, but another part of it is that mari is part of mark's identity. mark is torn between the life of a hunter (something he doesn't even really enjoy, in all truth), the life of a brother (which comes along with being a hunter, and vice versa), and the life he'd had so so briefly in his years apart from mari. his identity, for a large majority of his life, was laid on the foundation of the first two— so, outside of that, he didn't have a lot of time to develop into an individual in the years he was separated from his sister. and when grief comes into the picture, he fractures. he collapses into the labels he understands, and doesn't try to develop himself more.

this isn't to say that mark is a one-note character whose sole purpose is to be mari's brother, but it's more to say that mark has devoted himself to that identity in the fear of searching for his own. the core piece of mark that is a through-line between this verse and his main verse is that mark is a coward. emotionally, he has a tendency to run from anything that incites fear in him. in his main verse, this presents as him running from mari, herself, because he fears what has happened to her in the years that they'd been separated and can't bring himself to face the music. in this verse, because of how they separated and the differences in how he'd left, it presents as him being unwilling to explore himself and unwilling to confront, really, anything inside of him. mark intentionally flattens himself. he intentionally puts himself inside a box. it's safe, it's predictable, and he knows how to function inside of it. he has very, very little want to explore what it means to be anything else.

however, on the topic of sustainable and more depth-filled connections, mark would need someone who is not only willing to see through his behavior and internal workings, but someone who is willing to call and confront him on it to an extent that he cannot avoid. that's the whole reason that mark and his [now deceased] boyfriend connected to begin with— he had someone who was willing to call him on his shit and not allow him to run from it. he regressed in the aftermath, as a lot of people grieving do, and he kept regressing, but that doesn't mean that he has to stay there. it doesn't mean that there aren't opportunities for mark to grow.

mari's never thought of prayer as addicting, but then again— that was before castiel. nowadays, all it takes is half a shot and some courage for her to speak his name. it — all of it — takes a shape in her mouth she can't understand. it doesn't pin-prick the sides of her cheeks like needles, doesn't spit sour into the sink after they kiss. instead, it's tender. warm. like hot chocolate on sunday mornings, peppermint tea right before bedtime ... like something made to soothe. like some reminder of going home.

not that she's ever had a home. the most it's been is long stretches of drives, starry-eyed at stop signs and signal lights and aching for a gas station on the side of a highway. a motel room that blinks vacancy is the closest thing to a welcome mat she's gotten. the p.o box somewhere in south carolina is the only kind of address she has.

still, castiel makes things feel different. consistent. like she can click her proverbial heels, say the magic words, and she'd be back in metaphorical kansas as if there's never been a place like home. it unnerves her. but an addict is an addict, whether it's a back end of a bottle or wings wrapped around her torso, and she's never known how to stop before she hits rock bottom. and god, sometimes, that bottom likes to hit her back ... but not him.

she smells like salt-rims and the lime straight after tequila, but the real problem lies in the afterwards. she gets friendly like this, all mouth and teeth and crescent mooned smiles that tip her right over the edge of welcoming, inviting strangers through her vicinity that normally don't get past the door. sue her, she's lonely. after mark left — after she made him leave — everything emptied out. the world became nothing more than a vast land of nothingness, full of ghost-towns and vacant buildings and haunts she knows like the back of her hand. (salt. burn. repeat. salt. burn. repeat.) it all goes the same way. shotgun shells and protective elements and combat boots that lace too tight at her ankles. nothing new around here.

maybe that's why she ends up talking to strangers. ignoring warning bells in lieu of spouting off nonsense. saying incantations in the form of sentences, spelling out her own needs like it's some war-crested spell that might turn true if she drinks. truth is, she's never been magic. truth is, she's always been alone. salt, burn, repeat— she slams another shot down, and wipes the corner of her mouth with her thumb.