#wanderingcas

This fic is going to be purely self-indulgence. It's all soft bois and feelings shit. Season 9 AU in which graceless!Cas, after being told he can't stay in the Bunker, uses his brain for 12 seconds instead of just being all sad and hurt, and proceeds to blow up Gadreel's whole spot.

Castiel got up and staggered to the stairs, ignoring Dean’s abrupt turn from soft apology to bitter shouting, saying it was just like Cas to have his head so far up his ass he couldn’t listen. He didn’t want Dean’s fucking money. He mounted the stairs and threw open the outer door to the bunker. A cold wind was whistling over the Kansas prairie and it shoved its clammy fingers under the stolen hoodie. Castiel was reminded once again that cold mattered to him, now, and a hoodie was not enough protection from the weather. Anger and shame pounded in him like a second heartbeat, making his ears roar and filling his face with hot blood, but the slap of the wind on his cheeks made him pause. If he had learned anything in the past two weeks, it was how fickle the feelings of being full and warm were. They would abandon one so quickly. He hesitated for mere seconds, but it was long enough for Dean’s clanging boots to catch up with him, and a firm hand to grip him by the elbow. “Cas, would you listen?” he shouted. “I was going to call Jody and ask if she could put you up for a while!” Castiel turned around and stared at him. “I’m just as much of a risk at Jody’s as I would be here,” he said. Dean pursed his lips, darted his eyes away. “Look, I…” “There’s something you’re not telling me, Dean,” Castiel said, suddenly realizing. Logic hadn’t suddenly deserted Dean—he was just keeping a secret. Castiel had let himself be blinded by his feelings, by the way they could grip his graceless body and toss it around just as effectively as the wind and rain could. He had failed to see it, but he saw it now. “Tell me the truth, Dean. Why can I be with other people you care about, but not with you?” Dean looked frightened. “Listen, Cas, don’t, please. Just. I’m sorry.” Castiel never liked to see Dean afraid, and there was a limited list of things that could scare him so much and cause such a change in him in a matter of hours. Castiel would go confront the only thing he could think of that might have caused this. Castiel hadn’t really had enough time to get used to how diminished he was; nor had Dean. When Castiel shoved past him and back down the stairs, it would have been easy for Dean to stop him, but neither of them really considered that. Castiel went marching back into the bunker shouting Sam’s name with Dean at his heels shouting his.

the game is to put your most recent ten fics and their first lines.

end in blood (2k)

May 2009 Dusty earth moves.

technically two lines but i think i can be forgiven due to the format.

handiwork (1k)

The World thrums.

can i say i like completely forgot i wrote that one. brain so melted.

there's my bloodhound (2k)

Lenore’s knees ache.

i think this is the only one on this list where the pov character is the subject of the first line. maybe one other?

surveil and punish (5k)

“I just wish I could… I need to make you understand.”

it's still kind of crazy to me that i finally finished and published this one after like four years sitting in my drafts. and i'm pretty happy with it, too!

miasma (5k)

Alex is already home.

tight skin (2k)

It is easy to untwist an angel.

one more thing you can do for me (400 words)

“Oh God, I’m Pattinson,” Dean says, looking away from him, and Cas doesn’t know what that means but there is so much anguish there, he just wants to reach out…

wow i've written a lot this year. it feels pretty unreal.

strings (3k)

You pick her because she’s got the look.

got distracted rereading this. i actually really like this one, i always forget. i wasn't expecting to necessarily like it when i wrote it because i'm not always happy with experiments. but i do like it.

lick (100 words)

He runs so hot.

fly fishing (600 words)

“Man, we could really go for another one of those crescent cookies,” the other one says as Mrs. Melina sniffles on your shoulder.

oh i forgot this one too.

anyway some really funny patterns popping up here. i'm addicted to starting my fics either in media res with dialogue or with like plain statements. my main character is only the subject (grammatical subject) in two out of these ten lol.

Song: Wasteland, Baby!

Author: @deaniewithalittleweanie

Artist: @deancodedcastielenby

Beta: @wanderingcas

Rating: Explicit

Word Count: 46,326

Pairing/s: Castiel/Dean Winchester, Aaron Bass/Dean Winchester

Warnings: Canon-Typical Violence, Drug Use

Additional Tags: Post-finale, Dean Winchester Saves Castiel from The Empty, Endverse (5x04: The End), Endverse!Castiel

Summary:

With his dying breath, Chuck releases the Croatoan virus onto the world the Winchesters just tried to save from him. Fueled by rage, Dean rescues Castiel from The Empty, but the angel comes back with a screw knocked loose and most of his grace depleted. To both of them, Castiel’s confession before his death is best left unspoken of. In a world of destruction, chaos, and death, Dean has resigned himself to being chained by reality for the rest of his days.

That is, until Sam finds a lead on restoring a very weak Jack’s powers. The mission has Dean, Castiel, Jack, and Charlie criss-crossing the continental United States on the hunt for power and a cure for the virus that has destroyed civilization as it once was, all the while trying to repair the broken bonds between all of them.

“I did it for you, y’know.”

Cas stops, and turns, confusion on his face.

“Did what?”

“Give up.” Dean says. 

Staring into his whiskey.

“Pull the trigger.”

He looks up from his glass. 

Looks Cas in the eye. 

Says, sounding so tired,

“To bring you back.”

Cas remembers what it was like when the Lance of Michael pierced his guts. The liquifying burn of it. 

“What?” he breathes.

This is worse. 

Cas stares at Dean, waiting for a tell, a clue, as to why Dean would say that, why he would lie. But Dean just watches him steadily. 

And with each passing second Cas feels himself fall to pieces.

With the weight. 

The responsibility. 

The blood that he didn’t know was on his hands. 

Sam’s blood.

And Dean watches. Steady. 

“You don’t mean that,” Cas says. Desperate. 

“Do I look like I’m lying?”

Cas knows what Dean looks like when he lies. It’s not like this. 

He looks resigned. 

“No.” Cas steps forward. Shaking. Pleading. “No. Dean, you saved the world. Sam saved the world.”

The corner of Dean’s mouth curls up, as if he could actually laugh at this. 

“Sam thought… ‘Hey if we’re gonna off ourselves to save everyone, we should make sure Chuck brings Cas back too.’”

Dean takes a sip of whiskey.

“Make sure we get our money’s worth.” 

His eyes slide over Cas’ body. Something dark and dead in them. 

Cas’ coat is still hanging over the chair in the den. Without it he feels exposed. 

“The cherry on top.” 

Dean shakes his head, gulps his liquor.

“He didn’t know,” he says, whisky burning in his voice. “The world coulda stayed gone if you weren’t in it.”

Dean lifts his gaze to look Cas in the eye again.

Like he’s waiting for something. 

After days of getting nothing but distance, silence, and the occasional rebuke from Dean, there’s a part of Cas that thrills at the proof, the hard proof, that Dean cares about him. 

And it makes Cas sick. 

(this scene/conversation absolutely punched me in the gut and i'd love your commentary on it!!)

Regarding this meme:

Pick any passage of 500 words or less from any fanfic I’ve written, and stick that selection in my ask/fan mail. I will then give you the equivalent of a DVD commentary on that snippet: what I was thinking when I wrote it, why I wrote it in the first place, what’s going on in the character’s heads, why I chose certain words, what this moment means in the context of the rest of the fic, lots of awful puns, and anything else that you’d expect to find on a DVD commentary track.

About this fic: https://archiveofourown.org/works/38411026/chapters/95991652

Oooh, thank you for picking this one. Some of the heavy parts of this fic were, honestly, kind of upsetting/depressing to write, but some of them were fun, and this was one of the fun bits. It's the first of the tentpole scenes in the fic, that the rest of the story is strung out between.

It was really fun to just blindside Cas with this reveal. To take his whole self-sacrificing, steadfast approach to Dean and fuck with it. Stick him in the pear wiggler and torture him for a bit.

When I first started thinking about writing this fic, the first big question was: how would Cas react to finding out that Dean killed Sam to get him back? There's a spectrum of denial-guilt-gratification that Cas could land on. I thought about it for a long time, and messaged some people on tumblr, and this is what I landed on. That Cas' immediate reaction is to believe what Dean says, and be overwhelmed with guilt [Sidebar 1: Sometimes I feel like my fics are arguing against that faction of Cas-interpretations where his sense of self-worth is in the negatives, and you wonder how he manages to maintain relationships at all, because he's so convinced that no one can care about him, etc etc.] and then he slips into denial as a way to deal with that guilt, and to avoid upsetting the status quo of his worldview too much. And then there is a little bit of gratification there, just for spice. Because it's interesting. Because Cas is not a perfect person, and he can have base reactions to things too.

And of course Dean is being self-destructive. He's being cruel to Cas, but in a way that he's expecting that cruelty to reflect back and hurt him. By tanking their friendship, or incurring Cas' anger, or something else. And, like, as I write in the next chapter, he does get a certain sense of satisfaction out of hurting Cas this way. It's a satisfaction that comes from getting something over with, getting it off his chest. And a satisfaction that comes from tossing aside a goal and not having to worry about it anymore -- from (he thinks) destroying Cas' opinion of him. Like, the central thesis of this fic is that Dean is not a fundamentally destructive/abusive person. He does absolutely do things that are cruel and that hurt people, but that comes from his own self-defeating tendencies, and he has it in him to change. [Sidebar 2: This fic is also an argument against certain interpretations of Dean]

This scene is also a bit of a meta-textual answer to the people who were arguing on the post that inspired the fic that Dean did not offer to kill Sam to get Cas back, that the point was to bring back everyone else in the world. My answer to that is that in the offer, Dean's life was negotiable, Sam's life was negotiable, but Cas' life was not. And that's the whole point. That emotionally, Dean was there to get Cas back. And technically, he killed Sam to save the world. But Dean knows where he was at emotionally, and that's what haunts him. That he wanted Cas back most of all. And that he killed his brother and got something that he wanted in return. That might not have technically been the trade, but that's the emotional truth of it. And that's what's fucking Dean up.

There was a comment or two that expressed surprise that this scene happened so early in the fic. But the central tension for the first 3/4th of the fic isn't about Dean revealing this to Cas. It's about Dean making himself understood to Cas. And it's about Dean giving up on trying to punish himself in the way that he'd doing here. Like, Cas keeps wondering why Dean tells him this, is it to hurt him, is it to blame him, etc. And then in chapter 9, Dean confirms that he did this for Cas, and he adds the last piece of vital information, that he loves Cas.

I spent a lot of time thinking about line breaks, lol. The frequent line breaks and short sentences/incomplete sentences both slow the eye down, and creates a sense of fragmentation. Which is part of communicating the vibe of the moment.

Another thing that I am always thinking about is having physical touchpoints to ground the scene. Sometimes you read stuff (not just fic), and it's like the characters are actors delivering lines on a blackbox stage. That's something I'm always trying to avoid. And once you start thinking about what's going on physically in a scene that opens up so many more possibilities for using action to punctuate a scene, or to create symbolism, or to set the mood. In this scene, the physicality is all with Dean, drinking his whiskey. And Cas is just standing there, absorbing this information, and the fact that he doesn't have any action, I think, also helps to make him feel kind of ungrounded, which reflects where he's at emotionally. At least, that's how I think of it when I visualize the scene.