all i need is to remember, what it was to feel alive
14.01 coda || sam hasn’t slept in well over a day, and castiel tries to change that (this is probably largely @transsammywinchester‘s fault ¯_(ツ)_/¯)
word count: 1k
“Sam… you need sleep.”
A hand rests on his shoulder. “Wha–?” Sam stops staring at table and blinks slowly, focusing on Cas, who’s standing next to him and looking down at him with a concerned squint. He hasn’t really moved since Cas went to check on Jack. “Oh. Is my mom making you do this?”
Castiel tilts his head to the side a little and smiles. “Well, I did pass her in the hall and she did ask me to convince you, yes. But I would have tried anyway.”
“Oh.” Sam holds up the now room temperature bottle of beer against his eye to avoid looking at Cas directly. “How about we try to take care of you first?”
“Sam. Going by your mother’s concern and the absolute exhaustion radiating off of you, you haven’t slept in well over a day.”
“And going off of the blood that is not only dried on your shirt but also your face, you look like shit and need to be cleaned up.” Castiel stares at him defiantly. “Look, you let me do that and then I’ll… try to sleep?“
Tag: spn coda
Aftermath (13.23 Coda)
Sam’s breath goes ragged and he crumples to his knees in the too-perfect silence.
“He’s gone,” is all he can say, and Jack kneels beside him, fluttering hands tracing the shape of Sam in the air but not touching.
His mouth opens twice before words come out. “We’ll find him, Sam. We’ll get Dean back.” (But Sam knows what it sounds like when you’re making promises to keep yourself alive.)
And God, Sam remembers. The relentless, overwhelming fire of possession, the flaying agony of fighting against it, the hold on himself so tenuous that it was everything he could do to just fall.
Dean standing with that inhuman stillness that not even breath intruded upon. Dean gone. He’s shaking, bad enough that his knees can’t hold him and he falls back onto his ass, but it doesn’t matter. His supporting hand smears at the rough, ashy warmth of an archangel’s death shadow seared into the floor. His body doesn’t know what to do with itself. A deep, deep part of him (centuries deep, and old) breathes for the first time since he fell, and it breathes free. The only thing in the world he truly learned to fear, other than his brother’s death, is gone. The rest of him is torn in every direction. Dean is gone. He’s possessed, and Michael is free, and—
Shit. “Oh, shit. Jack. You’re hurt.” Sam reaches out a shaking hand to press to Jack’s belly where his shirt has grown sticky with blood. He focuses past the hollow ringing in his ears, blinks in the semi-darkness of the church. “We’ve gotta—”
Jack puts a hand over his, and Sam feels the fine tremors of Jack’s fear, too. For some reason, it makes him want to cry. They’re afraid, but they’re together. There’s something in that, something powerful. “I’m fine. It’s shallow, Sam. It’ll heal. I’m…” His eyes flash a sick, dull yellow with whatever drops of his power remain inside him. “I’ll get better.”
The hollowness is in his skull, in his bones. Shock. Sam knows it too well. Jack does, too, he imagines. He forces his slowing mind to focus. “We need to treat it. In—infection. Can’t let it get infected.”
Lucifer is gone. It hits him with a force that steals the breath from his lungs, forces it out in a sob. He crumples forward onto his elbows, letting his hair hide his face. Never again will Lucifer’s hands be on him or the people he loves. Perhaps he can put ancient nightmares to rest.
Sam curls into himself, fighting for breath.
Fuck, he should be happy. He should be dancing. He has no excuse for how hard this is hitting him. He can’t be weak like this. They need to treat Jack, find Dean, figure out a way to get Bobby and his people back home—
But he has to know.
He sits upright, finally registering the weight of Jack’s hand on his shoulder and a litany of Sam, Sam, Sam.
“I’m okay,” he whispers, and for the first time there’s a part of it that rings true.
He follows the scorches from Lucifer’s wings with his fingers, relishing the places where sharp edges cut him and and dying embers singe his skin, because this is real, and the pain makes it so. He follows the scorch marks to the still-warm body the Archangel no longer lives in. He touches Lucifer’s cheek, watches his head tip to the side, lifeless and not yet gripped by rigor.
“He’s gone,” he says. “He… you can’t imagine.” For the longest time, Sam has run on fear. It ran through his dreams and woke him gasping. It kept him alive and moving. He doesn’t know what he’ll do when it goes away. If it does. (Part of it, he imagines, will linger like a phantom limb, glimpsed shadows.) His bones remember the sharp edges of a knife and clawed fingers scooping out marrow, his body opened like a raw, red feast—
Jack’s hand falls on his shoulders and he flinches away just as quickly, apologizing and backing up across the floor on his knees, hands outstretched in surrender or supplication. “I didn’t mean to…. I’m sorry, Sam. He said…”
When Sam turns, he sees that dull glow fading from Jack’s wide eyes, and he realizes what must have happened. “Oh God, Jack.”
Jack shakes his head, looking pale and sick. “No. I—” He takes a deep breath. “He can’t hurt you anymore. Can’t hurt any of us.” He crawls back over the ashy evidence of his birth father’s death until he gets to Sam’s side. He puts both hands on Sam’s shoulder and turns him away from the corpse in front of him, and he nestles in against Sam’s side. The warm weight of him calms the trembling in Sam’s body, and he feels Jack calming, too. They breathe.
Sam inhabits his body again, slowly. The ringing fades.
“We’ll get him back, Jack.” A promise given and returned. Mutual. He wraps both arms around the boy beside him. Jack is far too young to know this sort of pain. He holds on tight, like he can make any of it better. “We’ll get Dean back.”
Sigh No More
By TheRiverScribe
Summary:
It’s been three days since Dean and Castiel had left for the nightmare apocalypse world.
Three days of research Sam had no way of sharing across dimensions.
Three days of existing off black coffee and dry cereal.
Three days of clutching a phone that never rang.
Sam didn’t like waiting alone—he wasn’t used to it.
But you’re not alone, his mind whispered.
Word Count: 8,657
Characters: Sam, Gabriel, Castiel, Dean
Pairings: Hints of Sabriel and Destiel (can be read as not)
Warnings: Past Torture, Anxiety Attacks
***SPOILERS FOR 13×13***Read on AO3, or continue below!!
Waah omg this is AWESOME and amazing and speechless read this now for patented flungst (fluff and angst) do it NOW
13.12 coda
Continuing my catch-up coda spam, here’s the next one! Written without any knowledge of 13.13.
PSA: quite a few of my taglist subscribers suddenly aren’t able to be tagged anymore. If you’d like to be added to or removed from the taglist, or your url has changed, please send me a note so I can update! Thank you!
It was kind of nice.
Not mind control. Mind control is never nice. Having his feelings messed with always leaves a roiling pit like Charybdis in the bottom of Dean’s stomach, a sort of disgust that won’t ever manifest as anything other than shame.
But it was kind of nice to just enjoy being in love for a minute.
Blur [Coda s13e13]
Rating: T
Ship: Sabriel if you squint
Words: 1757
Notes: Would anyone be interested in a companion fic to this?
He was never going to die. Never going to stop feeling sharp hunger pains in his stomach, never not going to feel his own blood sliding down his skin. Never going to get rid of wires sealing his lips shut so he couldn’t even scream out his agony. It was a fact he was slowly resigning himself to.
Then his cell door opened.
His cell door never opened, not even when they fed him. They just shoved the food through a slot in the door. It usually didn’t land anywhere near him, forcing him to crawl forward as far as his chains would let him and eat off the floor like a dog. (He hadn’t eaten in a while. The wire got in the way.) Even when they tortured him, they knocked him out with magic so they could move him to the room with all the weapons without letting him learn the layout of the place and possibly plan his escape.
“Gabriel?”
Gabriel raised his head, muscles screaming in protest, and squinted through the blood in his eyes. Whoever it was was so tall and broad they blocked most of the light that came through the open door. God, he couldn’t even see their soul. He almost wept.
The person approached Gabriel and he didn’t even bother to flinch, just let his head drop forward and closed his eyes. The person didn’t draw on his skin with a knife or sow wires into his skin, though. They were doing something with his chains – taking them off? Were they going to move him somewhere? The chains clattered against the stone bench Gabriel sat on. The person squatted down to take off the chains around his ankles.
They stood up and picked him up like he was a rag doll. Their shirt was too rough on his skin and their hands were too tight on his wounds. Gabriel’s head lolled back and he tried to moan pitifully, but between the wires in his lips and the dried blood gluing them together, no noise came out.
Read the rest on AO3 (because it’s apparently too long for tumblr mobile to handle and I can’t post it from my laptop at the moment).
Chapter 2 is up!
DROPPING EVERYTHING TO READ NOOOOOW!!!!!
13.10 coda
YOOOOOO I’M BACK
THIS IS LATE
AND WRITTEN WITHOUT ANY KNOWLEDGE OF 13.11, 13.12, OR 13.13
HOPE YOU ENJOY ANYWAY(Quite a few of my taglist subscribers suddenly aren’t able to be tagged anymore. If you’d like to be added to or removed from the taglist or your url has changed, please send me a note so I can update! Thank you)
“You know,” Dean says, kicking away some dead leaves with the toe of his boot, “If we die in here, I’m going to be pretty pissed off.”
Sam parts a partition of ferns with his hands, and gets scratched in the cheek by a twig for his trouble. “Yeah?” he asks, breathlessly.
Perhaps when being chased by an unidentified monster in another dimension is not the best time to have a brotherly heart-to-heart, but Dean’s voice does center him a little. The conversation reminds him to breathe regularly and to calm his pulse as much as he’s able, high as it is careening through unfamiliar jungle. An iridescent beetle the size of his ear scuttles just out of reach as he catches himself on a tree trunk.
“Yeah,” Sam answers himself. “Me too.”
Dean huffs and launches himself past an overturned log. “I mean, dude. I never even – we never even said goodbye to Cas.”
Sam frowns. “Oh. Shit. He’s probably worried.”
Dean grunts as he smacks some foliage out of his face. “More like furious. You think he’d grab us from the Empty if we did bite it?”
Sam makes a considering sound. “He and the Empty do have a rapport.”
“Less than friendly though, I think.”
A tinny roar sounds in the distance, and Dean picks up his pace with a muffled swear. To Sam’s surprise, he quickly outruns him, speeding ahead.
“If you had some of that lizard protein earlier, you might be able to keep up!” Dean shouts over his shoulder.
Sam breathes deep through his nose and pushes himself further. Survive first. Talk later.
Welcome home Gabriel! (No that isn’t a title)
It had been six weeks since they’d found him. Six weeks since they’d dragged him back to the bunker, one arm over deans shoulders and one over Sam’s, with Cas ready to fight in front of them and Jack trailing behind asking questions and clutching a blade like a foreign object.
“Is this my uncle?”
“I guess so, yeah,” Sam grunted under the weight of Gabriel. It wasn’t that he was even particularly heavy, but the dead weight of his barely-conscious body, even shared with Dean, required effort that Sam had to muster up somehow from who-knows-where.
“Is Asmodeus going to find us?
“No,” Castiel replied possesively. Sam knew that Jack had become Castiel’s charge, almost his son, from the moment he and Kelly had gone on the run. He was glad the kid had someone to parent him. Sam was enjoying his role of honorary uncle.
So out they had dragged him and into the world, with Gabriel squinting like he hadn’t seen the sunlight in forever – and, of course, he hadn’t – and then they had packed into the impala, with the general consensus being that Jack was to sit in the front and stay away from the trauma that Gabriel radiated.
Six weeks on from watching Castiel hold Gabriel’s knee as the archangel cried pitifully, Gabriel hadn’t made much progress.
They had kitted him out with new clothes, a phone, a room and a whole lot of Winchester-style issues… well, actually, he had that last one covered on his own.
Even after they’d freed him from the physical and ritualistic bounds over his speech, he’d refused to say a word. He hadn’t eaten, drunk, slept- anything. He didn’t have to, but it was Gabriel- he used to want to.
He’d only used his phone twice- once, in a gleaming moment of hope, to ask for a sandwich, which when served to him he’d stared at for an hour then walked away in a daze, as though he hadn’t even seen it; and once to text Sam ‘Nightmare. Help.’.
So when the text came through, Sam was shocked. He was up the table with Dean, drinking old scotch and talking strategies when he got it.
“Let me just check this- shit. Gabriel.”
That was all the explanation his brother had needed. Dean had called an unwritten truce on anything he’d had against Gabriel, as had Sam. In fact, Sam had found himself growing close to Gabriel, even with the barrier of trauma and mutism.
All Gabriel had text was ‘Lips.’
When Sam ran into Gabriel’s room, he saw him sat on the bed. He was not bound once more, like Sam had imagined, or bleeding. He was simply sitting, staring into space, like he always did.
When he saw Sam in his peripheral, however, his head swung round sharply and he stared at him.
“Hey, buddy. Can I sit down?”
Gabriel nodded.
“Lips, huh? They hurt? Memories?”
“No and… sort of.”
Gabriel just spoke. He spoke! Sam’s face breaks out into a grin.
“Rude… laughing at me when I’m- I’m- I’m- suffering,” Gabriel said, his words stilted but somehow carrying his old sarcastic tone regardless.
“This is… this is fantastic.”
“My lips, Sam. Remembering. They don’t… feel real.”
“Okay. Well, is there- is there anything I can do to help?”
“Yes.”
“What can I do, Gabriel.”
“Kiss me.”
“What?” Sam responded in shock, leaning instinctively away and then back again, staring at Gabriel in a new way now. He wanted him to kiss him and-
Oh god, this was a joke. There was the flirting the first time they met, and then Sam had forgotten it all. But now, nursing Gabriel, of course he’d picked up that Sam was crushing like a child. Of course he had.
“Kiss me.”
“Very funny.”
“I said-“
“I heard you. Okay. Hands up. You got me. But in this family, we don’t play with each other’s feelings.”
“Family?”
“Yes. You’re family now,” Sam said, the words becoming truer in his mind as he spoke them.
“Well… Cas and Dean do.”
“They don’t mean to. It’s complicated.”
“Sheesh.”
“But- and I know you’re the trickster, I get it- you can’t do that to me.”
“‘M serious, Samster. Give me a new memory for my lips.”
“I’m sure you’ve got plenty of those.”
“Thousands. But they’re old.”
“Gabriel, I’m not here for some one-sided, pity-party mess, okay? I care about you, yes. But I’m not going to kiss you just ‘cause.”
“‘Just ‘cause’? Asking you to help me out here, Sam!” Gabriel replied, his ever-growing voice showing indignation.
“Okay. I get that, but-“
“Always did think you were special,” Gabriel cuts him off. “Never knew you made me feel special, too. Not ‘til recently. But… I feel like some dumb human with you nursing me. But in a good way. Guess I have a nurse kink now!”
Sam couldn’t help but laugh at Gabriel’s joke, and his heart sped up as he processed the rest of what Gabriel had said fully.
“Let me kiss you, Sam.”
“Okay.”
So Gabriel leaned closer, looking the most engaged he had in months. He locked a hand into Sam’s hair and pulled slightly. Sam leaned into him and when their lips touched, the light flickered for just a second.
Not that Sam knew, because his eyes were shut tight as he melted into the kiss.
Neither knew how long it lasted, but it wasn’t stopping any time soon. No, they both needed this. They both wanted this.
When Gabriel’s lips parted slightly wider, allowing him to slip his tongue out, Sam’s body shuddered for a moment. He hadn’t been kissed properly, tenderly, in so, so long now. He’d forgotten what it felt like.
Eventually, inevitably, they both pulled back, seeming to know when it should end, when it was enough to keep it beautiful, magical, healing. But neither were ready to pull away, either. So they just sat there, foreheads leaning together. Sam’s hand had found itself caressing Gabriel’s cheek, and Gabriel’s grip on Sam’s hair had softened.
When they eventually pulled away completely, Sam opened his eyes, and Gabriel was smiling.——
Should I also write some smut for this? I really wanna but haven’t written smut in FOREVER so I just don’t know. Opinions?
——
Tags: @angelicdork @annie-thyme
Karate, SPN Demonic Octopus Guardian 