He’s a star, and you’re his satellite. He’s lost, somewhere out in the vastness of the universe, and you’re sending signals to find him, never knowing if they’ll reach him. They are prayers and they are desperate.
Your hands bleed from wringing them, and from clawing at the Earth to demand he comes back to the home he never knew he had. The one with you. The one where you erase the last few chapters, and when he tells you he loves you, you say it back. When they wrote your story, you always knew it would be a tragedy, but you’d hoped they’d spare him the same.
You remember huskin’ corn down in Indiana. Dad was gone a lot that year. Job didn’t pay for shit, but helped you get by when the money was tight. And money was always tight.
You spent fifty cents tryin’ to win your pops a watch out of one of those claw machines. You don’t say ‘I love you’ in families like yours. Practical gifts are permitted. A bottle of beer, a candy bar from the grocery store, given’ your kid brother the last bowl of Lucky Charms.
You didn’t win the watch. You won a medallion instead with an angel on it. Said ‘angels are watching over you’, same thing your mom used to say before she died. You tossed the coin in the river. Used it to make a wish. The angel hears you, but it’s not your time yet. The world isn’t ready for you.
The gospels of John Winchester, and rule number 24,601 playing on repeat in Dean’s head, telling him how he should act and who he should be. First problem: he doesn’t want to be that man anymore, wants to be his own. His own, and maybe Cas’s too.
Second problem: he can’t tell if it’s sweat or if they are tears falling down his cheeks. He is nestled beneath Cas, and they’ve taken to lazily rutting against each other, both spent at day’s end. Lips tenderly seek out lips, almost desperate as if to say please don’t go . If ‘never let them see you sweat’ means never to be vulnerable, he’d thrown that one out the window the second he’d laid eyes on the love of his life.
His eyes make a rival of the color blue. They shame the summer skies, make him think of the smell of fresh cut grass and lazy Saturdays. They recall to Dean’s memory billowy clouds and their shapes, naming each one passing overhead like it were its own constellation.
In Castiel’s eyes, he can almost taste seawater, blue and turquoise swirled, salty and thick; can hear the sound that they say is the ocean, held to one’s ear in form of a conch shell. They’re prettier than travel brochures laid out at the dime a dozen highway motels. His eyes are not a tourist trap, but they’ve captured Dean within them. They make him think of summer, of warmth. It’s the closest thing to homehe’s ever had.
They look at him in passing as though he is a ghost haunting their holy place: their church, their sacred pews, lined with Bibles and faith. They whisper words in harsh judgment. He doesn’t look the praying type, he knows that. It’s just that there’s so little left of him to care about who he was before purgatory.
So he’s learned to pray. Pray, as everyone does, to something that they hope exists. They pray for an answer, pray for a sign, pray for God. Dean Winchester prays for Castiel, although the church is not the first place that he’s looked. He’s kissed the pillow where Castiel had laid beside him, has fitted his fingers into the dulled scar against his arm. He has shed tears, and shed whatever is left of his soul upon every place that was sacred to he and the angel. None of them have brought him back. And so he prays with everyone else. The faithless with the faithful, the one with the many. Cas…Castiel… can you hear me? Can you hear me?
There are seagulls overhead, singing their off-key melodies. The ocean swells and reaches its crest, white foamed and infinite. Bare toes wiggle and sink into sand, and Dean discovers only as he bounds toward infinity that he cannot run. The sand is different here than in the desert, moist and thick, teeming with life.
He finally catches up to Cas, wraps his arms him as lukewarm water rushes to greet him. It’s up to their ankles now, and like all things, it comes and goes in turn. Dean chuckles, planting a soft kiss against the back of the angel’s nape, “What was the point of me goin’ through all that effort to roll up your pants and make you take your shoes off,” another kiss, “if you were gonna forget to take off the coat.”
If one could see this tender moment from further upshore, they would glimpse silhouettes melting into the sunset, both figures turning to embrace, and then… simply being .
for@profoundnet‘s 100 word challenge Content Warnings: Deals with the aftermath of 15x18 and Dean’s grief after losing Castiel.
Without Castiel, the world gives off a black and white vibe. It’s that old-fashioned Mayberry kind of ordeal. The world is righted of its injustices, it keeps spinning. Dean’s been given the chance to live the life he’s always wanted. Retirementwith a white picket fence and an apple pie in the window: it’s always been his end goal. Right?
Except now, he realizes that within his heart, that ending also bore ocean-blue eyes, and an old ratty trenchcoat. More than the comfort of a white picket fence, maybe it had always been about the idea of two arms around him at his worst. ‘I love you’ was a prelude. How can he live a life in gray when he’s beheld a spectrum of color that he only just learned bore the name ‘love’?
Just realised that if Donald Trump wins the presidential elections, it’ll be 5 years before we can even think about a canon Destiel.. Dammit America, what are you doing!
Guys , if you feel like dying a little more , watch this, you will regret it.
Credit goes to this wonderful lady on twitter who removed the background music, I did some work on the colors, increased the sound, and here we are , 2:20 min of pain, pray for me
“the ship that’s responsible for the entire omegaverse went canon after 20 seasons on the third day of the presidential election. also putin’s stepping down”
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