keeriest

"i miss you all of the time"

I’ve been in constant mourning since I joined this fandom

Derek: What did you say it was?

short form writers look at people writing 100k+ fics as though this is some sort of talent given as part of a fae bargain, that the commitment required shows some sort of ungodly mental fortitude.

All right, I was forced to start up a tumblr just to post this thing. So, I watched the first five seasons of Supernatural while doing field research on the birds of northern Alaska, and when Castiel spread his wings for the first time my first thought was “Oh look, that angel’s in molt”.

For the whole rest of season 4 I kept thinking of him as “the molting angel.” I kept wondering what on earth had happened to him in Hell that left his wings so messed up, such that he had to do an out-of-season molt with both alulas broken. And I kept wondering whether his new feathers had come in all right! 

But mostly I became convinced that Castiel must have suffered some real injuries while rescuing Dean from Hell. Castiel never mentioned anything about this… but I like to think that there’s a pretty dramatic story there that he has never told.

What if, when we first saw Cas’s wings burned and wounded, what if that’s not burned by Hell fire or wounded by demons, but burned by how scalding hot Dean’s soul is. It physically would hurt Cas to touch Dean when he was in such pure soul form, let alone grabbing him and flying him out of Hell, he could get completely burned or even vaporized; all the other angels know that, so they stalled looking for him, didn’t try hard enough to reach Dean, but Cas didn’t mind. He saw how bright Dean’s soul is – bright and beautiful like the sun, hot like the sun, dangerous to him like the sun to Icarus – and how much he deserved to be saved, so Cas grabbed him without hesitation, ignoring the pain and wound his soul brought him, ignoring his wings burning and tearing from Dean’s soul’s heat – even then he was still fascinated by this human, by the Righteous man – until he finally got Dean out of Hell.

All this time, we assumed Cas’s handprint on Dean’s shoulder was because Cas had the higher body temperature and that it was Cas who burned Dean, but “burn” really could also happen the other way around, as long as the temperature difference is high enough. You can get severely burned by liquid nitrogen, because the human body is about 200 degrees Celsius higher. So it is equally likely that Dean’s soul was the higher temperature one among the two, and Cas was like the liquid nitrogen. And so Cas is the one getting severely burned by Dean (with the disarranged wings and feathers being the proof), and Dean got the frostbite burn of a handprint.

Sterek doodles

First is domestic morning Sterek

Second is clingy Sterek

"I will still be here

As long as you hold me

In your memory.