Ficlet: Peace Attend Thee (Supernatural)

[anactoria]

Title: Peace Attend Thee
Characters/pairing: Cas, Dean, Sam, Hannah
Rating: G
Warnings/contains: Spoilers for 10.03; second-person POV.
Word count: 600
Summary: A year after Dean sends you away from the bunker to save Sam, Sam calls you back there to save Dean. There is a symmetry to this that suggests completion.




A year after Dean sends you away from the bunker to save Sam, Sam calls you back there to save Dean.

There is a symmetry to this that suggests completion.

You arrive newly full of grace; you left newly empty of it.

There is a symmetry to this that suggests homecoming.

If you ignore the flaws and the ragged edges; if you pretend to forget that there’s no such thing as a perfect mirror. This stolen grace will never mimic the shape of your own. (This time, at least, you didn’t steal it yourself—this time, but how little that means.) When you try to rest your eyes in the darkened library, it fingers light beneath their lids. The rage of murdered Adina, sharpening itself on your inner space, scratching at every safeguard you erect.

Or perhaps it’s just that you miss your human habits. That somehow, in among all the mess of mortal living, they began to bring you comfort.

Hannah looks startled when you invite her in. The cure is done and Dean is a version of himself you recognise again, faded and hiding. You no longer need to fear that he’ll attack you and she’ll try some ill-advised heroics.

(You don’t think too hard about how that scenario might have ended. You just know that it might have ended with you unable to forgive somebody.)

But she just raises her eyes to the night sky and says, “I’ll stay out here. You won’t?” The faint crease in her forehead conveys that she can’t understand why you choose to stay in the bunker, out of sight of the stars, with only a pair of unconscious humans for company.

(A pair of imperfect mirrors.)

----

Dean has been saying I’m tired, let me be done since you breathed life into him and laid him in his grave new-hatched from Hell. It is always Sam who says, Let’s fix this one last thing. (Then maybe, maybe, we’ll be done.)

Sam finds you in the library and you begin to tell him Let’s fix this one last thing before you realise he is saying I’m tired, let me be done. The quiet way he brushes you off leaves a guilty gnawing in your guts, and you go find Dean and tell him to rest in the hope of easing it.

He doesn’t fight you on it, but from your seat in the library, you hear him fight sleep. Skitter around the edges of it, arrange and rearrange the objects in his bedroom, leaf through the same stack of photographs again and again. You don’t ask what he is trying to see in them. You don’t ask what dreams he fears.

Sam sits at the table and drinks until his head hangs deadweight from his shoulders. You touch his good arm, cautiously, and he stirs and you almost miss the flash of panic on his face before his eyes focus in on you.

He gets to his feet then, shuffles in the direction of his bed and flops down on top of it fully clothed. You hear him snuffle and turn over in his sleep, a child reaching out for something.

You’d sleep too, if you could. You are beginning to understand why exhaustion is so essential a component of grief. Unconsciousness is a small comfort; the illusion of an ending.

Instead, you tip the dregs of Sam’s whiskey down the sink and you sit up until morning. It’s only the sound of an alarm, chirping once before a hand (Sam) slams it into silence, that alerts you to its arrival. There are no windows here, after all. You can’t see the dawn.

Comments

[kalliel]

I am overflowing with all the things that I want to say about this wonderful piece, but not space nor thoughtfulness to say them right now. Let this be a placeholder for my real comment in a few days!! <3333

[anactoria.livejournal.com]

I shall await it eagerly. ;) I'm glad you like it! :D

[kalliel]

So I've been trying to explain to myself, for about a week now, why I like this so much. The easiest answer: IT'S SO GOOD. But the effort to pinpoint the good beyond "IT'S EVERYTHING, ITS EVERYTHING IS JUST SO GOOD" has been thus far met with limited success. Because everything about this is just so good. The language of it, the cadence of the opening section, in all its parallels (or, as Castiel notes, imperfect parallels). The precision of its illuminations, and, as I mentioned earlier this week, that excellent, fluid way you join Castiel's conversation with Sam and his with Dean as sequential--and the latter, therefore, reactive to the first. It's not something that occurred to me as I watched, and not a way I've seen it really discussed by others, either; and I think maybe it's because in some way we're trained for parallels and contrasts and all those somewhat a temporal literary devices, and often we forget that time, indeed, does pass. There's reaction and causality--things that are at once perfectly obvious but also sorely underconsidered. But I digress. What I mean to say is, I thought that move was lovely and insightful and just a really good character moment for Castiel and for TFW.

I also love your evocation of what it feels like to wear stolen grace, and what of its original owner might remain. You always have such thoughtful sensory descriptions--and Castiel's grace here joins your description of Dean and his newfound demon eyes from one of the fics you wrote this summer as some of my favorite examples of this.

And Hannah, Hannah and her stars, her open sky! She has only the briefest presence here, but it's so full and unmistakable and latent with so much about Heaven and angels and she and Castiel. <333 And the way Hannah's decision to stay outside returns in the last paragraph, when Castiel is missing the dawn, I just love.

Also, this line: You are beginning to understand why exhaustion is so essential a component of grief. Unconsciousness is a small comfort; the illusion of an ending.

The sentences themselves are just so beautiful. And the idea they put forth is so true and so new--in spite of all our talk of death, and all our talk of tiring. This gets it in a way that most things never will, I feel like.

But as much as I love all of that--and love it I really, truly do--I think what captivates me most about this is... the position of the POV? I don't know if that's the appropriate word to use here. But Castiel's POV here occupies such an unusual space, neither particularly close (which I associate with humans and Winchesters, because it tends to be so bodily and intimate) nor wholly removed. It's just doing this interesting thing with an unusual proximity which I really like artistically, and which I really, really like on Castiel, newly graced but also remembering his brief humanity.

This is the kind of piece where I read it and think, this is so beautiful. This is so unmistakable. This is so together and insightful and elegant and controlled--this is something I would like to write like, one day. Like, I cannot overstate how great I find this. Thank you for sharing it! <3333

[anactoria.livejournal.com]

I was really happy when you pointed to my interpretation of that moment, honestly. :D I mean, I loved Sam's 'nope, not now, need to get drunk' more than words can express, really -- but most of the references to that moment I've seen have interpreted it as 'everyone's so mean to poor Sam'. And, you know, I'm not saying he doesn't frequently get the shitty end of the stick! But I guess I interpreted it more in terms of a) plot necessity; the writers letting us know they're not planning to drop the ball on the MoC; and b) what Cas is feeling at that moment in time, newly delivered from exhaustion -- which for him is a pathological state -- and perhaps having to be reminded that a human being who is, okay, not okay, but also not suffering from weird mystical consumption, can still be too tired to deal.

I think what captivates me most about this is... the position of the POV? I don't know if that's the appropriate word to use here. But Castiel's POV here occupies such an unusual space, neither particularly close (which I associate with humans and Winchesters, because it tends to be so bodily and intimate) nor wholly removed. It's just doing this interesting thing with an unusual proximity which I really like artistically, and which I really, really like on Castiel, newly graced but also remembering his brief humanity.

Also, this makes me really happy! The thing I really love about second-person (which I think is also at the root of why a lot of people hate it) is the way it kind of forces you as a reader to be aware of your distance from the text. That direct address is jarring and it makes it unavoidable that you are not actually the character being addressed, and I like how it makes those kinds of identifications uneasy.

Anyway, just... basically, a great big THANK YOU for all your kind words here (and for the rec!) I'm just going to take this comment and sit and cuddle with it for a while, I think. ;)