You know that playback thing, they do in movies? Something horrible is happening, or the main character is freaking the fuck out and they show you something they showed you earlier in the movie. A big flashing sign pointing to why someone goes wild, loses their shit, kills everyone in the room. Or starts shaking, curls up in a ball and just weeps their damn eyes out.
Trauma.
Dean’s been trained to review those flash situations in his head. But it was always like rewinding the tape and updating the playbook. Defense tactics: Trying to find out what he did wrong so he won’t get blindly attacked on the right side unexpectedly by a lefty. Offensive tactics: So he remembers exactly when a vamp drops his fangs and manages to lash forward first.
Dad trained them to do it. Never considered overexposure or repeated trauma a problem – lack of analysis was.
He had them sweep a house and ‘killed’ Sam from a corner he never checked so many times that Sam cried in frustration. And then Dad replayed every moment of his attack on Sam. Showed him how bloody and splayed and useless he would be. Showed him how getting dead would only mean Dean had nobody to cover his six and he’d be dead, too.
He explained it in gory detail. He made it horrific. He scared Sam into understanding.
Just like he’d done to Dean, when Dean started coming on hunts.
And afterward, you count your bullets. How many you have left. It teaches you to be conservative. Teaches you to aim better and need fewer shots.
Afterward, you buy a slim knife to conceal in your boot because you were just in a last-resort fight and if it weren’t for a solid iron nail wielded in a broken table leg, you wouldn’t be alive.
Afterward, you see all the deep red and purple in your face, all the blood pounded to the surface, and you learn to block better on that side.
You replay the fight, the trauma, the horror, and you learn.
That didn’t stop after Stull. He replayed Sam falling backwards, down, down, down, down again, and he didn’t learn shit. But he kept replaying it. Kept imagining a version of the day where he wasn’t so beat down. Where he could have crawled to the side of the hole and grabbed Sam’s leg.
Where he could have tripped to the side of that gaping chasm and thrown himself in, too.
He didn’t learn shit from that. But you keep replaying and changing your moves because you don’t want to be predictable and you don’t want to get rusty and you want to know when your senses or your reflexes start failing you, at this age.
Dean’s got no idea why Cas is letting him do this.
He’s using a damp washcloth to clean the wounds on his ear and his cheek and his nose. He’s letting Dean pull little crystals of glass out of his hair.
If he gave Cas six seconds alone, he’d turn around and find him fully recovered. Cas could fix himself in a blink.
But he’s sitting on the motel bed, letting Dean do this. His hands work as he blindly replays the explosion and the fight and reviews all the angles. Cas lets him do this mindlessly and without complaint.
1300 words of Dr. Skirth bonding with the blue symbiote. Mega thanks to @roguewen for looking it over.
The scanners are off in the room where Drake leaves her to die. It is their only advantage.
The first question Dora asks the symbiote is, “Do you want to survive this?”
She feels its attention focus, its grip constrict. It has not been long enough in her mind to acquire the language, but yes, it wants. How it wants. A form of life, at any rate.
“Possum,” she says, and it takes the meaning from the image in her mind.
Harry Potter, being one of the juggernaut fandoms in a sprawling universe with countless characters and endless possibilities, really has some of the finest fanfic available, and sometimes in permutations of characters that surprise you with how moving and true and necessary they feel once you’ve finally read them. I’ve always thought I’d read almost (almost!) any pairing in the Harry Potter fandom as long as the story sounded good, and in this way, I have had the pleasure of getting to know characters I’d never thought of twice but whose full lives and personalities have so much more to them than we could ever have gotten from canon. This is, at its heart, the very reason we are in fandom.
A Slant-Told Tale is the story of Minerva McGonagall, a pureblood girl born in a time and place where a woman had no choices in her own destiny, finding a way to make her life her own. It is also the story of Alastor Moody, who must learn that you can’t hold too tight to the things you love.
At 174,000 words, it’s a good, long read for a cozy night in with your favorite warm beverage.
[image description: a tweet from RoAnna Sylver (@RoAnna Syvler) reading “This June, please rememeber that there are more LGBT books than the ones you see everywhere put out by the Big 5, ad indies are amazing/worthy.” The next reblog is a tweet from Heather Rose Jones (@heatherrosejones) reading: “Making a list of queer SFF for Pride Month? Remember to look outside the mainstream presses. Don’t shut queer publishers out of queer lit.”]
Here’s a bunch of Goodreads lists that might help!
explicit | steve rogers/bucky barnes | 22,500 words | completed
warnings: no major archive warnings. canon typical violence.
The Army owed him leave and 5 million dollars, so Steve Rogers takes the time to get therapy for PTSD and studying law at Georgetown University. When a Supreme Court Justice is assassinated on the street in late January of 2014, Steve follows a hunch that the Justice was killed not for the sake of politics but for greed. Following a a trail of near-extinct butterflies and corrupt real-estate developers, Steve arrives at the Justice’s holiday cabin in Lake Tahoe, Nevada.
While he’s searching the Justice’s papers, his best friend Bucky Barnes breaks into his kitchen, still alive and on the run from his handlers. His memories are dim, but he never forgot Steve…and when he was ordered to quietly snuff his friend’s life, he broke away, ready to come in from the cold.
But Bucky comes back into Steve’s life with HYDRA on his his heels. They want their asset back, and Steve’s not going to give him up without a fight…
(L O O K i know this is not even remotely a response to the prompt of ‘bruce wayne gets railed by huge demon dicks’ but also you are all terrible sinners and this is quite frankly a best-case scenario)
It was easy to follow the path of the ratty brown trenchcoat traveling through tuxedos and gowns.
“Wayne! What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
Bruce had been watching him stomp his way up the stairs, and had made no effort to meet him, standing and sipping at his champagne. “John!” he greeted, too cheerful to ever be genuine. “Glad to see you got your invitation.”
“Yes, I know I wasn’t — what?” Constantine stopped in his tracks with a frown. “What invitation?”
“Your invitation,” Bruce said, gesturing to all assembled. “To the party. Which I assume you accepted, since you’re here. I knew you’d have to show up to one of them, eventually.”
“I don’t…”
The facts were these:
Bruce Wayne had apparently invited John Constantine to a party despite having no reason to believe it was necessary or desired.
‘One of them, eventually’ suggested that he had invited John to many such parties.
A party was often the easiest time to find and corner Bruce Wayne, when he couldn’t go handcuffing anyone to anything with ridiculous bat-shaped handcuffs.
John never expected or waited for invitations to parties.
Bruce could not possibly have been monitoring John’s activities closely enough to know when he ought to invite him to a party.
Therefore:
Bruce Wayne had been sending John Constantine invitations to every party he had thrown in the last six years, for the express purpose of ensuring that John could never have the satisfaction of crashing a posh party uninvited.
The pull at the corner of Bruce’s mouth suggested that he knew that John knew what Bruce had done, and this knowledge of his knowledge pleased him inordinately. He sipped at his champagne.
“Do you know who it is that you were just flirting with?” Constantine asked, returning to his original reason for talking to the man at all.
Bruce’s eyebrow only barely moved higher than the other. “I don’t know that I would say that I was flirting, necessarily,” Bruce said.
“Oh, I know what you look like when you’re flirting,” John reminded him, and Bruce’s eyes flitted away back over the crowd. “You were flirting.” Bruce shrugged. “Did you even catch his name?”
The corners of Bruce’s mouth turned ever-so-slightly downward, a twitch in his brow that wasn’t a furrow. His champagne flute drifted away from his mouth. “I don’t think I did,” he said, and this admission of his oversight was said with the awestruck manner that most people reserved for a glimpse of the divine.
Appropriately enough.
“You’ve been flirting with the Devil,” Constantine informed him, in as blunt of terms as he could manage.
“I don’t see what that has to do with anything,” Bruce said. “I haven’t seen Talia in months.”
John huffed, grabbing Bruce by the arm and pulling him toward the railing overlooking the ballroom. “Not the metaphorical devil,” he said. “I mean Lucifer, the Fallen, Prince of Lies, the Dark Lord Satan. You have been flirting with the King of Hell.” He gestured with both arms toward the circle of besotted partygoers surrounding the man to whom Bruce had been speaking.
Bruce scoffed. The man in question looked up from the dance floor. His eyes were all the colors of a sunset, and cherubic golden curls formed a halo around his head. He saw Bruce, and he smiled.
Bruce almost smiled back. It was the beginnings of a smile, a beginning that spoke of an ignoble end, asymmetrical and soft and small.
He stopped. He turned his head away, and his face went a familiar blank shape. He glanced back toward the angelic figure out of the corner of his eye, as if to confirm the effect, before looking away again. He set his empty champagne flute down on the rail.
“That is the Devil,” he repeated for confirmation.
“Yes.”
“King of Hell.”
“Technically retired.”
“What?”
“He just sort of putters around these days,” Constantine admitted.
“He seemed nice,” said Bruce, who now seemed wary of looking toward the party.
“He does tend to.”
Bruce’s gaze drifted back toward Lucifer.
“Wayne. No.”
“Hm?”
“You’re thinking about it. I can tell you’re thinking about it. Theology or philosophy or Stones lyrics. Stop it.”
“I just wish I’d known sooner,” Bruce said. He was watching those blonde curls intently. “I might have had some questions.”
“No. No.” John took Bruce by the shoulders. “That’s how it starts, just an innocent conversation, and then what? Look. I know we’ve had this little rivalry, you and me, over who can stick their dick in the least advisable place, but that is literally, actually Satan. You cannot fuck him. I don’t just mean you shouldn’t, I mean physically, it’s not possible. And even if you could — God knows, if anyone could find a way — it’s still literal, actual Satan we’re talking about here. There are very few things in this world I’m willing to state are absolutely and categorically bad, and one of them is fucking literal, actual Satan.”
Bruce grabbed a champagne flute off the tray of a passing waiter. “Despite what you seem to think, Mr. Constantine,” he said, “I have not yet sunk so far as to need lectures on ethics from you of all people.”
“So that’s the literal, actual, Biblical Devil,” Flash asked.
“You know, I didn’t have you pegged for the slow one,” Constantine said, “but way to buck stereotypes.” He took another drag on his cigarette.
“I just mean, shouldn’t we… be fighting him?”
“You want to try fighting the Devil, you be my guest,” John said, “but I’ve met people who make that their full-time job, and I can’t say I usually get along with them.” He exhaled smoke out his nose. “‘Course, they usually aren’t real good at their jobs, either.”
“We fight bad guys,” Flash said, looking to Wonder Woman for support. “He’s the ultimate, baddest guy, right?”
“Within the Christian faith,” Wonder Woman said, “Satan is considered a personified shorthand for the philosophical concept of evil, yes?” She had a thoughtful hand on her chin.
“Yes,” Flash said.
“If you’re simple, sure,” Constantine said. Wonder Woman looked down at him. “Not that I’m saying you are,” he added. She looked pointedly at his cigarette. He put it out on the sole of his shoe.
“He seems… masculine,” Wonder Woman said.
“I’ve seen worse,” Constantine said.
“And pale.”
“Don’t tell me you’re surprised, love.”
She smiled. John smiled back. She didn’t rebuke him for the term of endearment. “I’m not,” she said. “I just wanted to be sure that everyone noticed.”
Lucifer Morningstar descended from the sky on wings of light. His suit wasn’t even rumpled. It was difficult to look directly at him; he smelled not of smoke but of heat, of lightning, of ozone.
“Consider the matter settled,” he said, his voice soft because he did not need to raise it. It was addressed to everyone, but his eyes were on Batman.
Even the Lightbringer couldn’t touch the impossible black of his cape. He was a figure of void in the light of a sun.
“Do not be so foolish as to think that you can depend on me in the future,” Lucifer added, stepping closer to the Dark Knight with feet that never touched the ground. “Your affairs are your own, and I prefer not to meddle — whatever else you may have been told.” His wings folded, dissipated. They remained as echoes, burnt into mortal vision. “This,” he said, standing too close to an unmoving and silent Batman, “was a rare exception.”
The Flash was by Superman’s side, where he had not been a half-second earlier. “Supes,” he said, speaking faster than ordinary ears could hear, “I need you to be totally honest with me right now.”
Superman had a very good poker face.
“Has Batman been a demon this whole time?”
“Thank you,” Batman said. “We appreciate it.”
“Hmm.” Lucifer cocked his head to the side, looked Batman over, as if there was anything to see through the impenetrable cape draped over the whole of him. “You know how to reach me,” he said finally, before turning on his heel. He didn’t fly away, or disappear; just walked away, hands in his pockets, whistling.
“Supes,” Flash said, “you’re not saying he’s not a demon.”
“I told you not to ask me about his secret identity,” Superman said.
“I feel like you could tell me he wasn’t a demon without it narrowing things down that much,” Flash said.
Zatanna sidled up to Batman. “Spoops.”
“Don’t call me that.”
She rested her elbow on his arm, leaning on him. “I have to ask.”
“No you don’t.”
“I need you to be completely honest with me.”
“No you don’t.”
“Did you lay down such high-quality pipe that the Devil himself felt like he owed you one?”
“I’m not dignifying that with a response.” At the edge of where his mask ended, he was turning faintly pink.
“Did he call you daddy? Did he say ‘oh my god’? Are those like the same thing for him?”
“Why would I answer that.”
“I get that a gentleman doesn’t kiss and tell, so if you’ve had infernal dick in your mouth in the last twenty-four hours, just stand there and look stoic.”
“I’m leaving now.”
“That’s not a no!” she called after him.
“Superman,” Flash said, trying to shake him by the shoulder. “Kal. Please. If Batman has been Zee’s demonic familiar this whole time, you have to tell me.”
“Batman,” Superman said, addressing the man in question, “Flash wants to know if you’re a demon.”
Flash squeaked as Batman glowered at him, stopping in the process of storming by to lean closer. “What do you think?”
Constantine shook his head. “And that works?” he asked Wonder Woman, gesturing to the scene.
“Usually,” she said.
“What a bunch of morons. Present company excluded.”
“What do you think my brother could do to me that he hasn’t already?” Michael asked.
But it was more of the problem of what Dean – liberated, master torturer of Hell, forever bloodthirsty with the Mark of Cain painting his world in black – could do to him. Especially when he was rather determined to test whether Heavenly Swords were really made beyond breaking.
kototyph 