#i need to be edgy and cringe or ill explode

[vithcy]

12:20 AM violent thoughts

[webcricket]

Looking Glass

Chapter 5 - An Olive Branch

Pairing: CastielXAU!Reader

Word Count: 3088

Summary: Impromptu peace talks commence between the reader and Castiel just in time for the return of the Winchesters.

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Sat at the kitchen bench with a mug of room temperature black brew on the table before him – untouched, but within reach of his fingertips where he first placed it upon sitting – Castiel stares without seeing at the local section of a Lebanon Times newspaper he found in the library so old the color of the paper borders on the pale yellow of ripening corn.

There’s a scout troop featured; a motley crew of pre-teens forever frozen in photograph form cleaning up a park on a sunny spring Sunday to celebrate Earth Day. The same jaundiced pig-tailed child – designated as Cindy M. of Kansas City, Brownie Troop 271 in byline – has been fishing with outstretched fingers for a castoff Styrofoam cup beneath a hedge for the past two hours. The report doesn’t indicate that the piece of litter ever made the short jaunt into the garbage bag clutched in her other hand that she drags behind where she poses in stooped smiling perpetuity for the picture – another of life’s unanswered mysteries; not that Cas is currently pondering said mystery.

The angel’s ears perk to the sound of your barefoot heels plodding in the hallway in gradual but steady approach. Evidently you’ve finished your investigation of the premises or, determining an escape attempt is impossible, given up. In either case, he hopes you didn’t find something more lethally effective than kitchen stuffs, brute bare-handed force, or unbarred emotion coincidentally thrumming an inner nerve of truth to wound him with; every such angelically injurious object he is aware of in the bunker is under lock and key excepting his personal blade.

There’s a chance he overlooked an unknown item in a dusty storage bin that you succeeded in unearthing in your explorations; it would be consistent with his luck – good fortune demarcated by a fundamental lack thereof. It would also be consistent with his epically bad week – an already rough run of ill fate since his expulsion from the Empty exacerbated by Lucifer’s continued liberty, the resurrection, rescue, and subsequent high-tailing from commitment to creation of his brother Gabriel, an unnerving run-in with Naomi, the angel agent of much of his enduring grief, and then learning that Heaven is one or two celestial lights gone dark removed from permanent and catastrophic foreclosure; and, of course, there’s the latest complication of you.

In an effort to appear unruffled given your imminent arrival, he readjusts his posture; straightening his sloping spine and, for reasons of unacknowledged self-conscious impulsivity, the skewed knot of his tie, he redoubles his blind examination of the newspaper. The resulting effect lends itself to one of a spring coiled to maximum tension ready to fly off at the slightest disturbance. He flips the page with an exaggerated rustle to prove his utter indifference to your presence when you halt at the entryway and hesitate to crossover the door jamb to descend the two steps into the space he occupies.

Hyperaware, you freeze in suspense of animation to observe the scene like a bird cornered after tumbling down a chimney and emerging indoors without the familiar freedom of the sky in sight. His similarly caged reaction fascinates you considering you’re the one trapped in an underground maze with locked exits and disorientated by the kidnapping slash plummet down a rabbit hole into an alternate universe; that is, if he’s to be believed – and it’s still a big if according to your muddled wits. At least the lark about being in a bunker appears to hold up under thorough examination.

In a preening motion, you brush the pad of your thumb over the glossy slip of a photo you discovered and hid in the roll of the oversized sweatshirt sleeve encasing your right wrist; you’ll soon see if his story stands up to closer scrutiny. You allow the angel has every reason to be edgy; you’ve physically assailed him – granted without any lasting consequences – twice. For all he knows, the third time’s the charm. You decide his increasing unease with each confrontation does lend a linear sense of credibility to the reality of the situation.

The bitter aroma of burned coffee tickles your nose. The coffee maker ceased percolating the beverage some time ago; left on, it has boiled down the liquid into pure caffeine concentrate. The heady result smells like welcome lucidity after your wanderings and ferries your feet of their own volition down the stairs and to the counter. You help yourself to a mug of the stuff. Gripping the heat radiant porcelain between your palms, lips pursed to blow a cooling breath across the russet shimmering surface, you recommence watching the wary angel.

Sensing your protracted silent stare, he makes a grand gesture of flicking to a new page and folding it in half with a noisier-than-necessary shake to examine with great interest through a narrowed gaze an advert at the bottom for a law firm boasting attorneys specializing in personal, automotive, and work-site injury related litigation – seems convincingly relevant given the prevailing impasse between you two.

You clear your throat just to be sure he knows you know you have his surreptitious attention despite the display to the contrary.

If it’s possible – and evidently it is possible – he stiffens further. Still, he maintains the charade of ignoring you.

You liked him better when he was playing considerate host to your starring role as ungrateful violence-prone guest. This – this total impassivity – lacks definition; it’s missing sharp edges for you to remonstrate bodily and emotionally against. It simply won’t do.

“So, I’m guessing it was you that healed me?” you ask the loaded question as though you’re two acquaintances making small talk. Bringing the mug’s rim to your mouth, you suck a small sip and swirl the acrid swill over your tongue; it wants sugar, but you’re simultaneously certain no amount of sweetness could save it.

“That depends,” he answers without tearing his squint from the faded newsprint in order to deliberately avoid fully engaging you in whatever verbal skirmish you’re trying to instigate.

“On?” Since he refuses to grace you with a gaze, you aim the query at the back of his head; his hair explodes from his scalp in an unruly collection of loose chestnut curls – not a Nazi-esque grease-tamed coif indicative of extreme control issues.

“On whether or not my answering affirmatively will aggravate you.” There it is – the steel of sharpened blade you want lashes out in the form of spoken sass; the gloves, so-to-speak, are off.

Recollecting the black leather gloved fingers of the other one of him, you cringe at the metaphor conjured by your mind and swallow the chafing memory along with a second sip of God-awful coffee. In comparison to the interactions with your arson-aficionado interrogator, this angelic iteration is positively charming. It’s the first time the two of them seem separate entities to you. There’s something distinctly softer about the seraph in front of you – the blunt of benevolence, rather than thorny malevolence, gilding his halo.

You round the table and drop onto the opposite bench into his lowered line of sight. Propping your elbows on the top, you extend a hand to rudely swat the paper out of his grasp. “Since when do angels care about how humans feel?”

He lifts his eyes to meet yours; a degree of doneness dulls the blue.

You can’t tell if he’s done specifically dealing with you, or just generally done.

The besieged intake of his breath is audible. He holds the lungful of air, mouth thin and tense, reluctant to offer any explanation for you to twist around as a weapon to stab into him in wordy retribution. Finally, mostly to dissuade your skeptical stare and his resultant discomfort, he grumbles, “I don’t want to quarrel with you. Your mind, it’s . . . in a very fragile state.”

“I feel fine,” you fib to armor your weakness. Abandoning your mug, inclining backward, you slide your arms to encircle your sides and shrug. Forget the fatigue – your brain feels like it’s being drawn and quartered through your ears with a winch. Any effrontery on your part at this point is a bluff, but you’ve learned the difference between life and death often relies on the lie.

“You’re not fine.” In a reverse of your retreating body language, he sets his elbows on the table and leans forward, tone scolding. “You nearly died. You need to take it easy. I can’t help you recover if you insist on acting so . . . combative. This may come as a stark surprise to you, but as long as you aren’t suffering physically in a manner I can mend, the persistence of your foul mood is the least pressing of my concerns. There are more important matters at hand.”

He’s not wrong; and if you’re not mistaken, he’s expressed a continued – impatient, yet nonetheless there – concern for your well-being despite his frustration. He’s unlike any angel you’ve ever encountered. You glower at him for a lengthy minute. Somewhere thirty seconds or so into the hushed trade of glares you decide to accept the roundabout articulated truce he offered. You give yourself a superfluous thirty additional seconds to change your mind, but it seems set on a conciliatory course for the moment. You reach out to retrieve your coffee and muse into the liquid before drinking a gulp. “You don’t talk like an angel.”

Mouth relaxing into soft pink pout, he assents to the cordial shift of atmosphere implied in the statement. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“It was an observation,” you correct, filtering another swig of brown sludge through your teeth. “What you said before, about me not being from this world – it’s true?”

“It’s true.” He bobs his chin once.

You admire the scruff of beard shadowing his strong jaw; he’s remarkably handsome when he isn’t a monster trying to massacre you from the inside out. Shy of the superficial attraction, you avert your eyes to the neglected newspaper at center of the table. “And Michael, he’s trying to destroy this world, too?”

“You heard my conversation with Dean.” It’s not as though he made any effort to cover it up standing directly outside the door you were barricaded behind.

Your pupils widen with a surge of fear when you look up at him. “You said it was safe here. Nowhere Michael wants to be is safe.”

A slouch curves his spine as he sinks back into the chair. “Then I suppose, strictly speaking, that makes it less safe here than I initially suggested.”

Hugging your arms to your chest to subdue a rising shiver, your fingertips touch the photograph you found. The angel passes your provisional litmus test thus far, but your curiosity remains unabated; and it’s a distraction from the shattered illusion of safety. You withdraw the photo from the confines of the sleeve’s fabric, place it on the table, and slide it toward him with your pointer finger. “That’s you, Bobby Singer, Ellen and Jo, and the other two men I don’t know.”

You met Bobby Singer once, and immediately you understood him to be a rightfully paranoid man who doesn’t surround himself with, as he likes to say, ‘Idjits!’ He’s supposed to be in Dayton where you were headed before this detour. And Ellen and Jo are no different; dauntless women, at least the last you heard of them, daring a bid to cross the wastelands of Texas to breach the wall south of the states with a band of survivors in search of elusive safety. If they associated with this angel – and they did according to the pictorial evidence – you want to know the reason.

Cas slants his neck to better peer at the picture although he knows the details well – it’s the black and white snapshot commemorating the night before the day he joined Bobby, Ellen, Jo, and the brothers to confront the devil to prevent this world’s apocalypse; the day he chose humanity’s cause over Heaven – over himself. He gathers you must have found the keepsake in the top drawer of his desk – one of only a few mementos he saves. Catching the corner of the photo, he spins it and glides it nearer. Unlike the mystery of Cindy M. of Kansas City and her discarded cup, there’s no guessing at the fate of the people frozen there in time; a minute wistful smile tugs at the corner of his mouth.

“How do you know them? Have you been to my world before? Who are the other men?” Biting your lower lip, you stop yourself at three successive rapid-fire questions; you have many more.

The smile fades from his expression; his blues, sheened with sadness, rise to regard you. “Many of the same entities, human and angel, inhabit both worlds. These two men you don’t know, they’re the brothers Sam and Dean Winchester. We know destiny didn’t deign for them to exist in your world. But in this one, they stopped the apocalypse from happening.”

“And Bobby, Ellen, and Jo?”

“I think of them as friends. I like to think they felt the same comradery. Brave and selfless souls all.” Eyes darting down, he taps each of their anxiously smiling faces in turn. “They played their parts, courageous to the last.”

“Played. So they’re-”

He looks up, cutting you off with the straightforward location of their mortal souls. “In Heaven.” He doesn’t add the, ‘For now, for as long as Heaven is able to hold itself together.’

In the requisite respectful interlude of a quiet few seconds to honor the memory of the dearly departed, it occurs to you that if there were more than one of all of them, then there may be another of you in this world; and if there’s a you, then perhaps there’s the family you lost in yours. With this nascent knowledge of the possibility you could see your loved ones again, you begin to comprehend why the angel and his friends so adamantly want to keep you contained here in the bunker; and also, why you must get out.

Noticing the intense interest of the angel’s eyes tracing the contemplative lines of your features, you deflect the thought lest he eavesdrop. “Why do you keep the photograph then? You’re an angel, you could see them anytime you like.”

He looks at his lap, self-conscious of the personal query – he never really considered the why of saving the photo; it seemed then and seems now natural to him to retain it. “I suppose you’d call it sentimentality,” he redirects, defaulting to the reason a human would hoard such an article.

Undeterred, captivated by an angel exhibiting flashes of actual emotion, especially genuine empathy for and affectionate attachment to humans, you reformulate. “And what would you call it?”

Weaving his fingers together, he snorts lightly through his nose – this time the small emergent smile is a disingenuous sardonic spasm of lip to mask manifest pain; you’ve touched upon another nerve, and one still raw judging by his reaction. “I’ve been told it’s an inherent weakness,” he mutters.

“Now you sound like an angel.” The statement is an impulse you instantly regret – an instinct to inflict pain upon this exposed and vulnerable piece of him like he hurt you. Only, it wasn’t this him.

“I am an angel.” His voice is an indignant rasped whisper; his wounded affect accentuated by a dim of hurt hazing his eyes. It’s a conflicting sentiment – an angel who appreciates not being likened to his kin in mannerism and yet nonetheless fiercely identifies as one of them.

The contradiction piques your curiosity. You want, no, need to know the honest reason a billion odd year old being hangs on to this specific sliver of his history. “You’re avoiding answering me,” you pry, “why do you keep it? You.”

His thick lashes shutter as he looks inward. He sighs, “Perhaps to remind me of the choice I made then.”

“What choice was that?”

“I chose the path of free will – to decide for myself what is right and not have destiny dictated to me by others.”

“And what did you decide is right?”

After a leaden pause, his eyes blink open and settle on you – they shine an impossibly vibrant blue to your mute color adjusted vision; you’re sure even the summer sky of your distant sweltering memories never shone so clear and endless. His reply is earnest – honest. “I’m still trying to determine the answer,” he confesses. It’s a deep-seated insecurity he has never told another soul – something he has been afraid to admit aloud, something he maybe didn’t fathom himself until you asked him why and pried the answer through the regret-reinforced ramparts shielding his heart.

You sense the significance of the admission and in return gift him the one thing about yourself that in revelation might hold equally substantial meaning for him. “Y/N.”

“What?”

“My name,” you repeat, “it’s Y/N.” It’s an apology, too, for your earlier antics.

The angel’s pensive expression floods with a lightness of realization. He gets it – you’re proposing a fresh start. You’ve met now on a common ground; laying bare a patchwork of jagged scars and bloody wounds alike, you’ve uncovered two drifters, equally lost in their respective worlds searching for something good in the bad. Hoping – still hoping it exists.

A subtle smile quirks his cheek. “My friends call me-”

“Cas!” Dean’s well-timed shout resounds from the kitchen threshold. He tilts his head politely toward you in toothy grinned greeting. “Hey sweetheart!” Wagging a finger between you and the angel, the grin broadens on his freckled face. “Well, isn’t this cozy. Nice civilized tea for two and not a meat cleaver in sight.” He winks a jewel of glinting green at Cas. “I told you apologies work wonders, didn’t I?”

Sam looms over Dean’s shoulder and furnishes you with a curt nod as he lumbers past his brother. “Glad to see you up and about. Cas was pretty worried there about whether or not you’d ever wake up at all. We all felt terrible having to leave you here alone – you find my notes?”

Dean mutters something unintelligible under his breath about stupid freaking notes and wanders over to the fridge, visibly relieved to find it stocked with beer.

You eye the anomalous angel – pretty worried, indeed.  A smile eases into the curves and creases of your mouth as he makes the formal introductions.

“Sam, Dean, this is Y/N.” His blues alight on your marveling gaze. “Y/N, these are the Winchesters.”

Next: Ch. 6 - Healing Touch

[tinymixtapes]

Music Review: Taylor Swift - Reputation

Taylor Swift Reputation [Big Machine; 2017] Rating: 3/5 “Here’s something I’ve learned about people.” 1 We talk like there’s only one thing. We assume the inevitability of the world the way it is. We maintain that we are singulars existing linearly in line with a reality that is already dictated, long ago and unchangeably so. Things that have been remain forever as are echos of were; the bottom line is the bottom. Things are their reputations, more or less all over again and always: “Hold onto the memories/ They will hold onto you.” It sucks sometimes, this reliance on reputation. It helps sometimes, like when you have to drag legs out of bed to get on the road to get on the clock, to get goods and achieve and survive. Some confidence in an unmoving reality is a comfort. It helps, it hurts. We wind up wrenching dissatisfaction back into reassurance. I am my me, and this oh-well world is the way things are. I don’t feel good, but maybe just enough can really actually be enough. Except if you slip once or squint a little, there’s room to glitch and wiggle. Can you see you look two ways? Can you break2 your reputation’s reflection? There’s a lot more to you than there is to you. “We think we know someone, but the truth is that we only know the version of them they have chosen to show us.” We think we know the world, but we just know the version everyone’s told us is. If we could peel back some of the inevitables, we might get something better than just enough. Are you ready for it? “…Ready For It?” is track one on Taylor Swift’s sixth studio release, Reputation. It’s a scattered and fried slab of poached sounds: some trap drums that thrum, some liberally-dropped bass gristles. Taylor Swift waxes puns (“We’ll move to an island/ And he can be my jailer, Burton to this Taylor”) and lobs lust at the object of her attentions, “Younger than my exes, but he act like such a man, so.” The Joseph Kahn-helmed video, an unpinnable and unwinnable sci-fi slop, pits black-hooded maybe-replicant Taylor Swift against captive probably-real/sometimes-on-a-horse Taylor Swift. “…Ready For It?” is impossibly stupid, a wheeling stab at a pop snarl that’s mostly burnt marshmallows. Sometimes I’m really bored by it. Sometimes I feel like dancing. There are plenty of reasons to not listen to Reputation. It’s an assertion of privileged desires (the dreary and overstuffed “King Of My Heart”) and a defense of bad choices (“I Did Something Bad,” flatulating baroque dubstep) made by Taylor Swift, who doesn’t exist, not like we do in our days and jobs and loves and dog walks. Taylor Swift Co. broke after Kanye West Inc. won, and neither of those things are real people and there’s nothing to win or lose except time and patience and maybe hope in pop music. Reputation is the boring screaming gesture on behalf of a marketing fleet, an advertisement reaching out expecting your righteous empathy. Except if Taylor Swift could be a person (she is, somewhere), she could break a little; Reputation is what those shards might sound like, little slivers swept up and chipping into each other. Reputation applied to pop’s mythological (and imaginary) narrative is part marketing strategy and part public fanfic: Britney Spears, an American Dream rotted in incubus; Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, goddess fixture birthing futures; Mariah Carey, the renewed every new year train wreck. It’s nearly always our divas who we wall up and scrutinize. And that’s on us, a failure we’re still trying to right. Even in the phantasm field of pop music (supposedly dreams, supposedly forever), we’re all too content to script and restrict the narrative. “The point being, despite our need to simplify and generalize absolutely everyone and everything in this life, humans are intrinsically impossible to simplify.” The point being, there’s a next you for you to be, if you want it. Over the sirens and clomps of her broken Reputation, Taylor Swift sings, “This is why we can’t have nice things darling/ Because you break them, I had to take them away.” It’s the sound of an anxious and confident artist striving and trying to, like on her soundest victories, connect. But where past Taylor Swifts have sheened in cohesion, Reputation is all jagged edge. It’s not edgy, to be sure: the shapes of these songs (admirably co-fashioned by Jack Antonoff and Max Martin and Shellback) welcome accessibility and the abundant, and occasionally redundant hooks are like a shark’s dermal scales, interlocked rows of teeth that sink and hit in waves. You’ll all chomp the shouted chorus of “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things” when you’re waiting for that Black Friday night table at the hometown Denny’s; “Getaway Car” has at least five spots you’ll hum when you’re shopping for a partner’s bathrobe or a cat’s favorite holiday-shaped crunchies. You’ll be in Target. Like listening to Reputation, you’ll feel engaged and a little let down. But you might dance, too. That first single “Look What You Made Me Do” has a no-chorus that’s pretty dynamite. I swore there was nothing there until it wouldn’t go away. Taylor Swift’s care for craft remains, even if some of the flourishes are frantic. The good pop stuff (the kind that isn’t there until it won’t go away) looks like < >, a less-than/greater-than ballet: the artist has a single detail that gets blown up into a universal that resounds everywhere, only to re-narrow down to another individual. And for all the exhausting and eye-rolling album-roll out, the goddamn trucks, the perilously (and nearly damningly) apolitical hedging, Reputation is a testament to pop’s plastic doubling time. Taylor Swift broke some. Instead of Miley’s apologetic retreat into self-reducing nostalgia mode or Katy Perry’s cover band fart stab at #midtempo #weird, Taylor Swift and every single one of her problems doubles down on an exploratory pop mode, winked at on Red, exploded into on 1989. Taylor Swift broke some and didn’t apologize for breaking the reality we set for her. “Look what you just made me do.” And that pronoun might as well be about us. It’s Kanye and Kim, for sure and stupidly. But at its highest points, Reputation lobs pop responsibility back at the only party that matters: us. “All eyes on you, my magician/ All eyes on us/ You make everyone disappear, and/ Cut me into pieces.” Without a public willing to eviscerate and fandomize and tweet for, reputations vanish. “So it goes/ I’m yours to keep/ and I’m yours to lose.” Taylor Swift is willing to endure the idolatry and the idiocy; she’ll kill her one self dead in order to be the next new one in conversation with us (already immortal, never not cringe-worthy but also the most I’ve laughed in a pop song this year): “I’m sorry, the old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now. Why? Oh. Because she’s dead.” She’ll point us in a new direction, one different from how things look now. Like anything intrepid, it might be way off course of where we thought we were headed. But pop’s premise is plasticity, a precedent set when The Beatles and Stevie Wonder and Kate Bush promised with each next thing that the next next thing would be different and changed in some way. It would react to the world, but not without a vision to change it: “So call it what you want yeah, call it what you want to” It’s still icky. It’s important not to forget the icky stuff. Corporatizing forces will see how we like to dance and change and move forward, and they’ll sniff a buck. Part rumination on engaging with the pop icon and part deep end even after eating the meal, Reputation keeps the ball in the air, argues for moving forward, even if it’s herky jerky. It’s infuriating, how coached some of these flows are. It’s baffling how “End Game” spots guest verses from Future (!) and Ed Sheeran (!!) and manages to be a song fit snug in the part of our brains that makes us sway in the face of a world’s despairing. It’s joyous to barely see the invisible pulleys pulling my heart in on the hemi-clap of “Getaway Car;” those same pulleys almost undo the singer’s beating heart on “New Year’s Day.” Reputation is a bad idea, but it’s still an idea, the voice of a stranger I’d (want to) recognize anywhere. Reputation, almost utopia and frustrated icon splaying every direction, wishes the world in the new year will be a better place. Reputation has the ill-founded gall to actually envision what that world might look and sound like, even if it’s not this. 1. Bold text in this review is taken from Taylor Swift’s introduction to the Reputation, CD + Target Exclusive Magazine Vol. 2. (I bought this at the same Target where I bought my CD copy of Yeezus.) 2. Susan Sontag: “Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.” Reputation does not seem to be a statement about the world so much as pieces of it, refractions that shine some of our part in the pop story back on the artifact.” http://j.mp/2jMSMTN