Some SPN girls I have drawn.
Euclase has this way about using lighting that somehow manages to illuminate personality as well — just look at Ellen above, hidden in shadow, haunted just as she was in life; or Mary, the lighting bright and sunny and apple pie, and maybe almost TOO bright.
My favorite in the bunch though is Jody, and not just because she’s my favorite character. She’s just captured so beautifully here, from the folds of her jacket to the set of her cheeks. But I especially love the lighting on the side of her face: golden, like that from a fire, which, if you know anything about Jody Mills, probably tells you everything you need to know about why she looks so strong and sad.
(via bakasara)
Don’t step on that fish, Castiel. Big plans for that fish.
IT’S GOING TO MAKE A SHITTY FISH FILET, CASTIEL, YOU MIGHT AS WELL JUST LEAVE IT ALONE.
Have you ever stopped to think about why Cas would’ve been stepping on a fish in the first place?
Put yourself in Cas’s shoes. You’re Cas now. So for you to step on something, that something must rest on terra firma. Meaning that at some point in your eons stationed on Earth, you must have come across that fish, flopping about on the shores of some ocean or river, out of its element, out of its home.
Think about it. If you saw a fish out of water, you’d likely assume it was suffocating to death. After all, fish breathe water, not air.
First you’d consider throwing it back.
But then as you look at the fish, you notice that it’s mangled. Mutated. Misshapen. Like its basic structure was too deformed for it to exist in anything other than excruciating pain with every breath it takes. Whether by design or chance, it’s a broken fish.
So then you decide to put the fish out of its misery. With nothing but tenderness and mercy in your heart, you lift your foot, and prepare to bring it down swiftly, cleanly, compassionately, because as your brethren say, you always did have too much heart.
But then your brother shows up from nowhere and lays a hand on your shoulder.
“Don’t step on that fish, Castiel,” he chides.
“But Michael,” you say. “I can see inside the fish. Every breath is agony. We should give it peace.”
And your brother shakes his head.
“No, Castiel,” he says, inscrutable as always. “Big plans for that fish.”
And it’s only later that you learn those mangled bits were legs, and that the fish hadn’t flopped out of the water, it had crawled out, and that this was the fish that would lead all the other fishes to land.
But none of that erases the image of the fish gasping and gaping, unable to breathe, because it hadn’t yet evolved lungs instead of gills, and to this day part of you still wishes you’d raised your shoe a little faster, or instead that you’d had a little more courage and a little less heart.
(via sassygaydean)
more “Meanwhile in Purgatory” - final version
Dean had always been a magpie of memories: What others discarded he held close, and carried with him wherever he went. Trenchcoats. Flasks. Lynyrd Skynyrd mix tapes. It didn’t matter so much the object or its use, only that it had once been important. After all, Dean knew what it was to be left behind, and he also knew, better than anyone, that these things could still have power—even if only what he alone gave them.
But in Purgatory, sentiment was no luxury. What you carried with you was often your greatest weakness. Even Dean understood that here, there were only two objects worth a damn: Your knife and your coat. How to kill, and how to hide.
And apparently Cas had left both behind.
“Cas,” Dean shouted. His voice came out high and reedy, but he didn’t care. “Cas! Where are you, man? Cas?”
But the angel did not answer. The only sound was the tie on his stuck blade, flapping like a half-mast flag.
Dean yanked the angel blade from its purchase and peered between the trees, looking for a flash of skin, a flutter of white. But the underbrush offered nothing—only fog, vast and thick, and studded with fireflies.
“Dammit.” He heaved a ragged sigh and picked up the trenchcoat, because he didn’t know what else to do, because some habits were hard to break, because he’d only just returned it, after all, and wasn’t that rude, to leave such a recent gift behind?
Part of me always believed you’d come back. The words rattled around in his mind like something caught in Baby’s engine. As soon as he’d said outside the hospital, Dean knew he’d jinxed it. Good luck never lasted. Good luck was always just a curse in disguise. And right now he couldn’t help but remember what else he’d thought that night but hadn’t said: Part of me always knew you’d leave for good.
“Dammit,” Dean muttered again and drew the machete from his coat. He stared down the trail, searching, but a diffuse light from somewhere high above made the path before him hazy and hard to follow. His fist clenched in the trenchcoat. He tried not to scream.
The fireflies didn’t seem to care about his panic, however, and nor did the fog. It moved closer, curling around him – it even seemed to sway, and dance. It seemed alive.
Dean frowned down at the vaporous glow for a long moment. Then, in a rush, it dawned on him.
“You’re a wavelength,” he breathed, “of celestial intent.”
A swirl of fog suddenly somersaulted, sweeping high up to the treetops, and Dean’s shoulders sagged. He turned away to hide his relieved smile.
“Cas, you jackass.” He sighed and rolled his eyes. “You could’ve warned me, you know.”
The fog swirled again, all colors and none. Then it parted, revealing a muddy trail that disappeared into the dark gloom of trees. Dean smirked.
“Apology accepted,” he said, sliding the angel blade into his jacket and balling up the trenchcoat. “Even if I’m still stuck carrying your shit.”
a thing I owe Erica (:
Trying out some speed writing here. Takes place in S5 sometime? Whatevs, I don’t even know.
Things flutter before they fall apart, and it’s as easy as this: a shudder in his shoulders, a moan caught in his throat. You try to hold him together. You ache to repair. But your long fingers find no purchase against sandpaper stubble; already you are called away.
“Stay with me,” he begs. “Please. I need you.”
“That is a lie,” you answer, because it is.
“Then—fine,” his voice is barely a growl, “I want you. Okay? I want you.”
Squeezing his eyes shut, he noiselessly scrapes the shape of your name against your own mouth. Deep within your borrowed chest, your grace hums. It unfurls.
So you return the favor. You catch his breath and release it back against his lips, giving it your grace, your desire, everything that matters. And you want to believe that you are doing him kindness. You want to believe this is something holy and sure.
But you know as well as I how the apocalypse begins. Not with a bang, but a flutter.
“I want,” you say, but the rest of your words are lost in the firm snap of wings. You hover for a moment, hanging as if balanced, lost in his breath, and you let yourself wonder: In the space between your lips, what rough beast shudders off sleep and slouches toward daybreak?
“I want,” you repeat, and it’s the only thing that’s true.
(via jaimelannisterror)
well, you know me. always happy to bleed for a winchester.
i actually can’t tell if i should be embarrassed about this
When you push all day, every day against the same boulder, eventually you get to know the shape of it: its crags, its pits; that smooth patch where the wind abraded the quartz down to glass. Your hands learn its jagged edges and anticipate them, like the end to some familiar story. In turn, you are polished. You erode. Eventually you forget that there was ever anything other than you and this boulder, and this hill; and this moment. You push, and you push, and you know only the feel of the boulder pushing back.
Until one day, your foot slips, your strength fails, and all that resistance you spent so long exerting comes back on you in an instant, crushing you feet first, then hands, then ribs, where your heart still thuds against its cage, still pushing, always pushing, always straining towards its goal.
But as all lovers know, the tragedy of Sisyphus was never the hill, but the gravity. The boulder comes, and we do not dodge. For we have forgotten how.
(via octopifer)
;_;
With apologies to spicyshimmy, for stealing her opening line—but goddamn that line was just such a great one that I wanted to play around with it a bit myself.
Those creases in the brow. That stubborn jaw, dusted with just enough stubble to seem dangerous. And of course those bright baby blues, the kind Dean used to think only existed in songs by The Who. It’s a face a guy could fall for, Dean thinks, if he weren’t careful.
But Dean is – careful, that is – because he knows you can’t trust a face like that, not really. It wasn’t made for you; it wasn’t made to fall for. Exact opposite, in fact. And despite whatever apocalypse currently rages within Dean or without, all a face like that offers him is that there’s something larger than himself that actually cares about his bullshit—and Dean knows there’s no thought less trustworthy than that.
Even if those eyes once burned with the same hurt and loss Dean had felt the first time he watched the tail-lights of John’s truck disappear in Baby’s rear-view mirror. Even if they now survey the bees with the same fondness Dean had felt watching Sam fumble his way through a middle-school production of “Our Town”.
Even if they still catch his, from time to time, and set his heart once more drumming, tip-tapping out the same 7/4 time signature as railed against his ribs that night in the barn.
Something within Dean had ignited like hell-fire that night, and he’d tried everything short of pouring holy water on a knife and nailing Cas to a devil’s trap to extinguish the flame. But none of it had worked. He still had to face facts: Sometimes demons were angels in disguise. Sometimes even he could be part of a bigger plan.
But every demon, Dean knew better than most, eventually came back home, leaving behind only a wet and junked-up meatsuit—still breathing, maybe, if you were lucky. (What Dean didn’t know that night—couldn’t know—was that angels did the same.)
And if Dean isn’t lucky now, he might just fall for a face like that. Give into those trusting and trustworthy baby blues, let them suck him right in while some hidden angel-blade carves him apart, piece by piece, as surely as Alastair’s knife ever did back in the Pit.
But, Dean thinks, when in his thirty-odd years has he ever been lucky? After all, aren’t the two of them stuck here on the wrong side of the Purgatory door?
The truth is, though, it took everything to get them here, luck and the lack of it, trust and the lack of that too, until now they fall toward each other like little planets, the space between them carved away, piece by piece, until nothing but skin and teeth and tongue are left. And the indescribable rage and mercy of Cas’s true face still lingers at the edges of Dean’s nightmares—and other, more pleasant dreams—lightning flashes like a heartbeat, calling his name, calling him home.
Anders/Vengeance
Dragon Age: Origins-Awakening
Dragon Age 2
Quick drawing before going to bed
Photoshop CS5
+/- 15 min
“That’s not what ‘e looked like,” said the girl.
The boy just licked his lips and kept scribbling. “Yu-hunh.”
“Nuh-unh.” She crossed her arms, so her brother would know she meant Serious Business. He didn’t bother to look. “He weren’t no blue,” she snapped. “And no light shootin’ outta his head like—like—”
“Some kinda demon.” The boy smiled fondly down at the paper. He rubbed absently at his shoulder, where there wasn’t even a scar.
“You shut yer hole,” shouted his sister, her face turning scarlet and blotchy. She stomped her foot, once, hard, and it squished in the Darktown muck. “He gone saved yer life and yer makin’ ‘im all scary-lookin’.”
“I’m makin’ ‘im awesome.” Frowning, the boy swatted at a splotch of muck that had landed on the corner of his drawing. But the stain had already set. “‘Sides, I’m the one who sawr ‘im up close. Doncha think I’d know?”
In a flash of inspiration, the boy picked up his drawing sticks—nubs at this point, really—and sketched around the stain, encircling it, turning it into a staff. The source of the Healer’s power. Yes, thought the boy. It worked. It even almost looked like it was always supposed to be that way. He smiled. His best work yet.
“I sawr ‘im too,” said the girl, her voice softening. “And he weren’t no demon. He were pretty.”
The boy looked up at his sister then, and grinned cruelly.
“Sounds like you got a crush,” he said, stretching out the last word.
The girl’s eyes narrowed. Her face felt tight, and hot.
“Well. I ain’t the one drawin’ no demons in the mud,” she snapped, and stormed off to beg for their evening supper.
The boy shrugged, suppressing a smile. The sketch even made his sister mad. Definitely his best work yet.
(via yamisnuffles)
Purgatory is a place of impossible shadows, where the light that pierces you – well, what’s left of you at least – feels like fire and water and all the conversations you never had. It hurts and it hurts, and it never stops hurting.
But worse than the light is the landscape: Purgatory isn’t made of matter, precisely, but rather the impression of matter – its left-behinds, like eroded canyon walls, or footprints in the mud.
It makes Cas nervous how comfortable he feels here; as if he were just another Purgatory beast all along, shaped by his Father to mimic the face of an angel. It doesn’t help that whenever Dean looks at him now, his eyes simply slide away, unable or unwilling to hold their gaze.
“Do I appear different to you?” he snaps.
Dean shades his eyes. “What?”
“You cannot bear to look at me.” Cas can hear the bitterness in his voice, but he does not care. “My vessel displeases you now.”
“Jesus, Cas.” Dean flushes an ugly shade of red. “Next you’ll ask if your ass looks big in those wings.”
They fall quiet. The sounds of Purgatory surround them like summer crickets.
“It hurts,”” Dean mumbles eventually. “You’re all shadows and light now. It’s—“
“—not natural,” Cas offers.
“No,” he says sharply. “No. It’s more like—looking at a bird flying in front of the sun.”
To Cas’s astonishment, Dean’s face softens.
“I get now why Pamela lost her eyes,” he says quietly. The corner of his mouth creeps upward. “She didn’t want to look away either.”
Some wounds are like interrupted dreams,
The blood stain half-remembered,
Grief like the crusted sleep you rub from the corners of your eyes.
Your fingertips slip-sliding across a soaking back;
Throat clenching against the honeyed smell of clean hair and entrails;
A yowl, primal and hoarse, toward the bad moon rising.
And we’d turn to each other and say, “Haven’t you had this one before?”
Your eyelashes would flutter against your silver-kissed cheek,
And I’d command, “Go back to sleep”.
You’d say “You first”,
As if it were that easy,
As if this time would be different,
Simply because we wanted it to be.
But we both know weakness, and doubt,
And we both dealt with demons once.
We have faith in nothing but our own scars.
For you I would make no bargains.
The host of hell would come to me instead,
Their phalanxes casting long shadows on the moon.
Howling, they would offer me anything, anything,
To prevent the apocalypse I’d unleash.
And I’d close my eyes and whisper,
“I’ve had this one before.”
And before, and before, and before.
Time to wake up.
Wake up.
A prophet once wrote, “We are all made of star stuff”
But the truth is far less noble—
For we are made of the stuff in between stars too:
Vast, empty spaces, lonely and unfathomable
From the quark’s point of view.
When I press my lips to your flesh,
I match my empty spaces to yours;
Rubbing void against void,
I am met with fire.
You who taught me to believe in the cosmos,
In energy from nothing, in the divinity of flesh—
Fall with me now.
Stretch your empty spaces toward mine.
For us the conservation of matter has no power.
Laws were made to be broken.
(via goonhands)
“I’ll keep you safe.”
“Close your eyes,” Cas commanded. “Don’t look.”
“But I—“ Then suddenly Dean could say no more, as a pair of strong arms grabbed him from behind. Dean froze, throat tightening. One of the hands clapped firmly over his eyes. The other settled on his shoulder. The angel’s breath fell hot and heavy on the back of his neck, causing the little hairs there to stand on end.
“I said,” Cas murmured, “don’t look.”
Dean could feel his treacherous hands began to shake.
“Okay,” Dean gasped.
For a brief moment, Cas let his chin fall against Dean’s shoulders, fitting there easily in the crook between neck and spine. Then suddenly all was warmth, and power, and screaming.
It took Dean several seconds to realize that the voices weren’t his; that he wasn’t back in the Pit, surrounded by damned souls begging for misery. That he remembered this too, this voice, holy and beautiful, and the song it sang; the paean that once brought him home.
Then, just as abruptly as the song began, it stilled. Silence fell. The warmth subsided.
Slowly, gently, Cas lifted his hand away, smearing wetness across Dean’s cheeks. Dean did not open his eyes for a long moment. When he did, he wheeled around, noticed the bodies around them, and shuddered.
“Are you hurt?” said Cas.
Yes, Dean wanted to scream.
“I’m awesome,” he said, dragging a hand over his tear-streaked face. “Hell of a kick your voice has. Ever thought about starting a metal band?”
To Dean’s surprise, Cas beamed at him.
“You didn’t experience any pain,” he said.
“No. I guess I didn’t.” Part of Dean wanted to recoil from the admission, to flee into the Purgatory underbrush and take his chances with the beasts he found there. Instead, he forced a smirk. “What do you think that means?”
“It means we can change,” said Cas in a voice that made Dean’s chest ache. “Even us. Even here.”
“Awesome,” Dean managed eventually.
Cas nodded. “It really is.”
I finally felt good enough to draw fan work for the show, then I tried drawing Castiel’s face.
In hindsight, I should have done a few practice sketches first instead of just diving in.
Not as smooth as I would like it to be, but I’m kind of tired.
“You,” said Dean tightly, lips quirking. “You have something. In. On. Your head. Region. There.”
“What is it? Owl? Hornet?” Cas swatted his hand wildly around his ears, which only made Dean turn away, hiding his face from sight. “Purgatory bee?”
“No.” Dean covered his mouth with the back of his hand. “It’s not a Purgatory bee.”
“Good. I don’t like them. They swear too much.” Using both his hands and wings in concert, Cas wiped his hair and cheeks as thoroughly as he could. Black feathers floated off and away; Dean froze when one drifted into his line of sight. “Is it gone now?”
Dean snuck a peak. “Nope. Still there.”
Cas dropped his hands to his sides. His wings drooped.
“Well,” he snapped, unable or unwiling to hide his annoyance any longer. “What is it?”
“It’s –“ Dean’s mouth opened and closed like a fish’s. “It’s a halo.”
Cas rolled his eyes. Just what they needed: A neon sign advertising their location to all of Purgatory. Lucky him. Lucky Dean.
“And it’s cock-eyed,” Dean murmured. Before Cas could stop him, Dean reached out, brushing his fingers against the circlet and nudging one side upward.
The touch felt intimate, holy. Cas tried not to recoil.
Dean suddenly jerked his hand down and away. He flexed it once, twice, as if shaking out pins and needles.
“It looks ridiculous,” Cas offered. For some reason, his throat now felt dry, tight. He wished Dean would look somewhere else, at his wings, at the ground, anywhere but at the halo.
Dean shook his head but did not look away. “Not the word I would’ve used.”
“What then?”
Dean’s smirk softened then, his eyes turning up at the corners. He let out a brief, small exhale. If Cas hadn’t been so close, or hadn’t been watching him so carefully, he might have missed it.
“Fitting,” he murmured. “Sometimes I forget, you know. But you really are—an angel.”
Dean looked like he was about to say something else, but he swallowed his words instead, throat bobbing deep down into his collar. Only then did he look away.
I really enjoy where Castiel likes to spend his time in heaven.
SpaceRocketBunny’s been putting up a lot of art up and I haven’t been doing any art lately so have some Castiel.
Dean found him like that, crouched, unmoving. Spread palms. Blank stare. He clutched a kite the color of dried-over blood. Around him, a few black feathers gently floated down to the earth.
Briefly, vividly, Dean wished he could no longer see those wings, that things could go back to the way they used to be. The way they ought to be.
But Purgatory only cared about what was, not what should never be.
“Where’d you get the suit?” said Dean, taking a step forward and carefully not looking at Cas’s untucked shirt, or how it hinted at the hip beneath.
“Dead vamp. He didn’t need it,” said the angel, “and mine wasn’t white any longer.”
Dean frowned. “But neither is that one.”
“No,” says Cas, a note of sadness in his voice. “It’s not.”
Dean frowned and sat next to the angel, who did not move, even when Dean accidentally brushed their knees together. Instead, Cas stared at the kite as if it were an angel blade, pulled out from his own flesh.
Dean picked up the kite string, and held it taut between two fingers. It was light, thin, and decorated with bows that did not match the color of Cas’s eyes. “And the kite?”
“I made it.” Cas’s jaw barely moved when he spoke.
“Why?”
“I was homesick.”
“Ah.” Dean dropped the string then, and it caught on his thigh, slung across the dirt between them like a bridge. It had never occurred to Dean that Cas might miss his garrison as much as he missed Sam. “I’m – sorry. I guess you probably feel just as lonely as I do right now.”
Cas turned his chin slightly, and a muscle in his jaw popped. Dean knew he’d said the wrong thing somehow, stepped in something too big and too sad for him to understand.
“Not lonely,” said Cas. “Just homesick.”
Something in the tense clip of Cas’s voice made Dean’s heart hammer once, briefly, against his ribcage.
“We’ll get back,” he murmured. He leaned against Cas, shoulder to shoulder. “I promise. We’ll find our way home.”
Cas’s fingers relaxed, and the kite slipped from his fingers.
“Home,” he repeated, and said nothing more.
Cas’ Death. The sigil is white because, well, he’s dead? And maybe it went stale or something? I actually don’t know. Maybe the brothers finally banished him, metaphorically, and the separation actually kills him? I had like five what-ifs going through my mind during this.
“Dean?”
Dean didn’t turn, didn’t look, just stared dumbly at the bare stairwell before him, the stair that went nowhere and ended in a grey, featureless wall. Something dripped slowly from his fingertips. White paint. A banishment sigil was smeared on the wall in front of him, messy, indistinct.
Cas stepped toward Dean. His shifting weight made the wooden stair beneath him creak. Dean twitched, but did not turn.
“Dean,” Cas repeated more firmly. “It’s me.”
Dean’s shoulders shook slightly, and he made a noise somewhere between a scoff and a sob.
“Come and get me already,” he spoke after a time. “If you’re gonna.”
Cas had never heard Dean’s voice sound so smooth, so small, like all his willfulness and struggle had simply drained away. He sounded almost angelic.
“What are you—“ Cas was close enough now to see the tight lines carved under Dean’s eyes, around his mouth. And yet Dean still did not turn toward him, his shining eyes instead fixed on something at his feet, something only he could see.
Cas placed a hand on Dean’s shoulder, fingers briefly touching where his seal once blazed, and finally, finally, the man moved—in fact, Dean flinched back so violently Cas was immediately worried he might slip on the stair and fall.
“Cas?” he whispered, voice ragged, raw.
Dean collapsed in on himself then, shoulders hunched, eyes wide, panicked. He clutched his paint-covered hand as if it were wounded. He stared at Cas, then the ground, then Cas again, finally at the white paint on his hands.
“You’re alive,” Dean choked.
“I am.” Cas did not try to touch Dean again.
“But you—“ Dean gestured wildly at the bare floor before him. “No. You’re. I saw you—“
“It’s this place, Dean.” Cas held his voice steady for Dean’s sake. Somehow, knowing that was the reason made it easier to do. “It plays tricks on you. What you saw was an illusion, nothing more.”
“But your—wings.” Dean’s hand twitched, as if he wanted to lift his palm and brush it against Cas’s feathers for himself. Instead, he clenched it into a fist and pounded it once, lightly, against his thigh. “One was ripped right in half. I saw it. See it. Right there.”
Cas flexed his wings reassuringly. Battered, yes, and a little bloody, but still whole.
Dean peered at Cas’s wings, watching the feathers ruffle with naked suspicion. “Okay. So how do I know you’re the one that’s real, and he’s the illusion?”
Cas fought back a smirk. It was uncanny how familiar all this was. The years had aged them both, but Dean was still the same righteous man Cas met in the Pit; his clever mechanic’s hands stained with blood, his human soul burning as brilliant and beautiful as the sun.
Moving slowly so as not to startle him, Cas leaned in close. Once more he rested his hand on Dean’s shoulder. This time, Dean did not flinch away.
“Because part of you calls out to me, Dean.” Cas hand lay on Dean’s shoulder, not squeezing, not pushing. Just touching. Waiting. “It will always know me, the real me. It will always find the way.”
Dean let his fist unclench at last. Relaxing slightly, he began to lean into Cas’s palm, the barest resistance.
“Right,” said Dean, drawing a shaky breath. He gave the empty stairwell one last, haunted look. “Right.”
“Come,” said Cas, dropping his hand. Dean swayed a little, as if he’d lost his footing. “They’ll be here soon.”
“Wait.” Dean swallowed. “How do you know I’m not an illusion too?”
Cas allowed himself one small, secret smile.
“Don’t ask stupid questions, Dean,” he said as he walked away.
“They’re like falling leaves,” says Dean. He speaks without looking at Cas or his feathers, but that doesn’t mean he’s not right, about the shape and heft of them, or the way they fall, swaying slowly, gracelessly to the ground. Still, for some reason he can’t quite name, the comparison rankles Cas.
“I am not a tree,” he reminds Dean.
“And I’m not a bee,” Dean snaps. He fiddles with the safety on his gun, checks the side of the barrel for nicks, and still won’t meet Cas’s gaze. “Yet for some reason you still think I can pull miracles out of my ass.”
Cas shrugs, even though Dean can’t see it. Together they are silent for a long time, waiting out the Purgatory beasts, or maybe just each other. Cas watches the hollow in Dean’s throat bob up and down, as fascinated by the motion as he was the first time they met – in mortal bodies, that is, not in Hell.
“How come I can see them now?” The line of Dean’s jaw tightens and his shoulders hunch, as if he were the angel, not Cas, and he were drawing in his wings like a shield. “Your feathers, I mean.”
“Purgatory must be closing the gaps between our species,” says Cas. “The evolutionary impasse has been breached.”
“The fuck does that mean?” says Dean. Briefly his eyes dance toward Cas’s face—but they don’t quite make it, shuddering away at the last second to settle somewhere around Cas’s chest.
“It means either I’m becoming human or you’re becoming an angel,” says Cas. Another feather detaches and floats between them like a mote of dust. “Though I suppose we could be evolving into some new species of Purgatory beast instead.” Watching the feather for a moment, Cas makes a face. “I prefer that option the least.”
“So it doesn’t mean—“ Dean swallows again, throat bobbing, fascinating, like a bird wheeling against the sun.
“It doesn’t mean what?”
“It doesn’t mean you’re dying.” Dean’s voice is barely a whisper.
“Of course it does,” says Cas. Dean looks up then, finally, and Cas can’t help but inhale sharply at the intensity of that gaze, of those green eyes, human eyes, as beautiful as a forest. “Change is always a kind of death. But we do it anyway. The alternative is worse.”
Dean nods without blinking. “Does it mean I’m dying too?”
It’s Cas’s turn to swallow. “Maybe.”
“Well then. I think –“ Then Dean suddenly, impossibly, smirks, the corner of his broken lips curling in a way that makes Cas desperately homesick for Earth and the soft leather of the Impala. “I think we’ve been through worse.”
Cas smiles back, a soldier’s smile. “I think so too.”
A feather lands on Dean’s foot. He picks it up, holds it between his forefingers for a long moment, and lets it fly away. It vanishes somewhere into the endless, dimensionless night of Purgatory.
“Come on,” he says at last, walking in the direction the feather took. “We should go.”
Cas follows, fearless, as always.
