on the one hand dean’s Cosmic Purpose seems to be ‘becoming mindless weapon for someone else’. the Ultimate Killer, with all of the competence and none of the agency. this is reinforced when he’s john’s ‘blunt little instrument’, a ‘mindless obedient attack dog’; and when he becomes a student of alastair, another tool used in the tortures that sustain hell; in his role as the Michael Sword, nothing more than an occupied vessel in the apocalypse; when he becomes an extension of the mark and the blade and he gets pointed in whatever direction people need him to go; when god writes two different versions of a story in which he pulls the trigger on someone he loves.
on the other hand dean’s other Cosmic Purpose and designated role in the universe seems to be to Care about other people, to care about humanity, to give a damn because god certainly isn’t bothering to do it. it’s the role of the eternal caretaker, whose job is to provide love and emotional support to others on the smaller scale, and to keep the world from falling into disrepair on the larger scale. to save and to give love, and it’s to cry; the part of the person left behind to mourn and grieve in the wake of loss and devastation. to live their life in grief. your misery is the whole point
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Inexorable
Written for @deangenchallenge June 2022. Theme: ☀️ sunshine ☀️ Wordcount: 900+
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It’s a long, confusing period of chaos and pain - no, no no no pain, he gave up the pain there wouldn’t be any more pain - and then he wakes up opens his eyes and he’s breathing. He recognizes it in less than two seconds: that it’s real in a way nothing, not even the worst of hell ever was, and that it’s something he can still remember from a long, long, time ago. It's a very quiet realization: he’s breathing and alive. His breaths come quick and heaving, huge gulps now that he’s getting back used to the feeling of it.
It’s still dark.
He fumbles around and finds a lighter - holds it, with his hands - in his pocket - the pocket of his clothes, the ones he’s wearing - and flicks it on. The light makes it even realer, being able to see his very own hands. They look like his.
He’s in a box. He feels around- feels it, feels the wood of it- realizes this must be his coffin. “Help!”, he calls out a few times and nearly doesn’t recognize his own voice, he sounds so hoarse. Could be from fear or because his oxygen is already running low or because he’s spent the last forty years screaming and that somehow carried over to his real actual vocal cords.
It’s not that he’s beginning to panic: it’s that he’s been panicking since he opened his real eyes. He knows this is real, knows somehow that this isn’t a trick Hell is pulling on him - and why would it, why would it, it had him - but he’s still stuck here, a living corpse in a box in the earth everyone should have forgotten and stopped caring about decades ago. He slaps his palm against the coffin ceiling; then balls a fist and hits it. Dirt from his own grave rains down on his face.
He starts pounding the material relentlessly, putting as much force behind his fist as he is capable of in the small space. He breaks through it, slips his lighter back into his pocket and now re-engulfed in darkness widens the hole in the wood.
The earth above him comes spilling down on him, filling his coffin, and he beats it before it can bury him once more and climbs forward, up out of the box. He forces the earth out of the way, fear and adrenaline fueling him, and it’s like swimming through rock, like he’s hanging suspended in deep space. He keeps his mouth closed as to not swallow the dirt, can’t breathe and reminds himself that he hadn’t taken a breath in forty years, he can do it for a little while longer, as long as it takes him to climb six feet. It’s darker than demon black behind his closed eyelids, a dark that is more than the absence of light, and the ground is pressing at every part of him, pulling at him, but he pushes back against it, fights to make progress, refuses to let himself be obstructed now, this close back to life. To life.
His hand punches through the earth and he can feel the air on his skin, the sun - it’s daytime- and then he thrusts up his other hand. He grabs onto the ground, claws at it with his nails, and drags himself up, up, up. The gap becomes big enough for light to go through and then his head- and then he’s topside, inhaling desperately, gratefully. He braces his arms and hauls the rest of him out, crawls out of his grave like he's dug himself all the way out of hell. Then he turns so he’s laying in the grass and he breathes it in, truly, deeply breathes in the first real breaths of air he’s had in over a lifetime.
He can’t dwell on it- everything that happened in the Pit- more than that just yet. He’s holding it off for now, he’ll have to let it hit him later on.
He lies in the grass that had grown over his grave and breathes, for a few moments: lets himself take these few seconds of rest. The sun is burning high and hot in the sky, and it’s the single most welcome feeling he can imagine in the world. After so long where there was nothing to keep him warm but for the fires of Hell and the knife and the whispered, hissed praises-
The sensation of the sun shining down on him could make him start to cry. It is both alien and familiar, a reliving of a memory of long ago. The sun beats, inexorable, his heart alongside it. His eyes are tightly shut against its light, but it reassures him its there through the afterimage of yellow on the back of his eyelids. Reassures him if he opens them, he’ll open them to light. He focuses his senses on the genuine warmth of the sunshine on his skin, on his dirt-covered, sweaty face, seeping through the clothes he’s wearing, streaking through his hair, its enveloping embrace like nature herself is welcoming him back to life.
It won’t be long before the sun becomes too hot to be bearable and he’ll tie his shirt around his waist as he goes in search of civilization; it will be even less long til he stands up and gets presented with the ominous view of a ring of flattened trees with his grave marker at the center. But right now Dean has just done what he never thought was possible, has just come back, has just returned from the dead, has just gotten out; and he’s feeling the sunlight.
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