The Man Who Used to be a Hunter
[So I felt like making myself sad. Some implied Destiel.]
The man who walked down the street had lost everything.
Anyone who watched him closely could see this. They could see it in how he walked. They could see how his body bent beneath the weight of the pain he carried like so many bricks slung over his tired shoulders. His feet shuffled through the sidewalk to the rhythm of a clock whose hands never quite reached twelve. His boots, worn nearly through the soles, scraped along the rough pavement like the match struck too slowly to light. And like that match, no matter how many times they struck the cement, he couldn’t quite light the tinder behind his eyes.
Anyone who watched him closely could see he had lost everything, but not from how he was dressed. His pants were dusted the color of an Old West hero, and the creases of his leather jacket were the worry lines of more men than he would ever know. The pitchy blackness of his shirt was lightened by dirt and darkened by bloodstains, made rough by scorch marks and soft by wear. His clothes had been worn for years by both life and death, but this would have been even if he hadn’t lost everything. These were so because he was a man who used to be a hunter.
No, anyone who watched him closely could see that he had lost everything by way he kept himself. His face, that had once been softened by angel feathers, was rough now with unshaven hairs. His hands, calloused as they were from his being a man who was once a hunter, hadn’t seen a rifle’s trigger or a knife’s hilt in years. And ever since those hands had fallen out of practice and purpose, they had also fallen out of keep, their nails ripped and broken over packed lines of grime. The skin of his fingers cracked, split, and brittle. The palms of his hands forgotten from those that had once needed their hold.
Anyone who watched him closely could see that he had lost everything by the way he had lost himself. Anyone who passed too closely by him was overwhelmed by the acrid stink of the alcohol that poisoned his breath. They could see the way his eyes reflected the lights of the world without either soaking them in or letting off any light of their own. Those earth-light green eyes that had been laid on men and monsters, that had travelled over towns and cities and prairies and fields and homes and houses and forests and lakes. Those earth-light green eyes that had finally found peace in crystal blue ones that shone of Heaven. Those earth-light green eyes that had served the man who used to be a hunter every time he dove into hellfire when there was another soul to be saved.
Anyone who watched him closely could see that he had lost everything, by the way he walked, by the way he kept himself, and by the way he had lost himself. But only those people who knew him well understood that he had lost everything. They saw the after, but never the before, and certainly not the synapse in between where everything that made up his helter skelter life had fallen away, leaving behind only the warped wood frame, all held up with rusted nails that stung of “just barely.” Because at his core, that whole life that he’d led was full of “just barely”s. He survived the blazed that had claimed his mother’s blood, but “just barely.” He’d slid back into the work of his fathers with the help of the brother that nearly made it out, but “just barely.” He’d been asked to death’s dinner table, but had missed his appointment by hairs but “just barely.” He’d bargained for the breath of the one person in the world whose own was more important to him that that which he breathed, signing his soul away for sacrifice but “just barely.” He’d pried his way through the gates that Hell burned and swelled beneath, breathing its silken black fumes through the cracks to light their fires in the homes of hearts, but “just barely.” He was ripped and shredded, torn and mangled beneath the surface until the pores of madness set into his skull and he climbed to the top of a mountain of bodies to better see the false light of day that could never really shine through the smoke of hellfire, but “just barely.” Miraculously, he was gripped tight and pulled from perdition’s grasp and back into the world of men, but “just barely.” He cracked open Hell itself, releasing the King to command his broken, infectious denizens, but then sealed him away again, back into his little backbone box, but “just barely.” He fought in the wars between Heaven and Hell, burying soldiers of either side, burning their landscapes and building new bridges. He slaughtered men, monsters, and grotesque creatures somewhere in between. He found hope on unlikely wings with pain on their undersides. He lived, he died, he killed, he saved, and most of all, he survived. He filled the shoes of his fathers before him, and met his quota of blood near tenfold, as a man who used to be a hunter should. But “just barely.”
Anyone who watched him closely could tell that he had lost everything. They saw a man who had lost the mother that had felt the warmth of her boys’ baby skin, but would never feel the rough, stiff cloth of a graduation gown, or the smooth silk of a wedding tux bowtie. They saw a man who had lost the father he worshipped like the god that he never could. They saw a man who had lost the father his own father had been afraid to be. They saw a man who had lost the brother whose blood ran as sure in his veins as that which pulsed through his own. They saw a man who had lost the angel-soft breath of his lover’s caress. They saw a man who had lost the purpose that had driven him to believe that what he did mattered. That believed that every life he saved was one he’d never have to lose. They saw a man who had lost love and hope and faith and peace. They saw a man who used to be a hunter.
Anyone who watched him closely could tell that he had lost everything. All they saw was a man who stumbled through what was left of his borrowed time listlessly. A man who was too lost to wander. Too broken to stand. Too hurt to try. Too tired to care. They saw a man who found more warmth at the bottom of a bottle than in any place he could curl up in for the night at an hourly rate just to ride on burning sails through his nightmares. They saw a man whose tears had dried up long ago, leaving only the cracked, dusty panes of the glass that were now too clouded to look through to his soul.
Anyone who watched him closely could see that Dean Winchester had lost everything. And to the random passerby on the street who saw him, he wasn’t even that. He was just a man. A man who had lost everything. A man who used to be a hunter.
The filthy bitch. Even then, in the moment of death, she couldn’t afford me the simple honesty of expressing her pain. Each time I drove the knife into her abdomen, it was like I was reaching up inside her toward that small glowing ball of light that usually shown so brightly in the moments before death. I pushed the blade all the way into her, to the hilt, and yet even as I scraped the inside of her I couldn’t even scratch the surface. It was always just out of my reach.
No one else had done that to me before. No one else had denied me that moment of intense purity. The moment when I could understand fully every fiber of emotion they felt, be it dizzying panic, mind numbing fear, roaring pain. The moment where there was no veil of decency or empty feeling to have to work through. The moment of loud and paralyzing honesty. The moment before death.
The filthy, lying cunt.
Mitsuki Yamamoto. I thought she was going to be easy. Not easy to kill. I mean, obviously she’d be easy to kill. They all were. But I thought she was going to be easy to make sing. I was sure that all I had to do was slice her open, and her screams would spill out of her like her insides. But no. No, instead she took her pain in silence.
And what is silence worth in a place like this? Nothing. It’s worth nothing. In here, silence is like the acrid stench that wafts up from a clogged drain. There’s nothing to do but turn your nose up at it, and yet you’ve forgotten it ten minutes later, because there are far worse smells than that to burn the hair inside your nostrils.
Then why the hell haven’t I forgotten about it yet?
I know why. Those last moments of agony before death are the most honest moments that a person has. Those pleas for mercy, those cries of agonizing pain, those precious sounds are the most honest words anyone has ever bothered to speak to me. And as such, denying those to me is like lying to my face. And I hate it when people lie to me.
That was it. She wasn’t standing up to me. She wasn’t exerting her one last free will on this earth. She wasn’t coating her dignity in a plated-gold casing impervious to the burn of humiliation and the rust of shame. She was lying to me. Like every other cowardly human being too weak to live without the comfort of decency. That was it. She was just a snake. A rat. Like every other person who sought to reach under my skin and spread the filth of lies and patronization just like my siblings had started all those years ago. She wasn’t defending herself. She was attacking me. That rotten, good for nothing slut.
That was fine. She wasn’t worth another thought. I have more important things to do, anyway. She was a filthy stinking rat and I never needed her lies.
No more lies. No more rats.
Perhaps… rabbits, instead.
So the second time I tried running from Kizami I went to the left to begin with (so I didn’t knock down the cabinet) and so when I looped around and approached the cabinet from the other side, it fell behind me, trapping Kizami there as I went to unlock the front door.
So I’m just sitting there like, “rad, I don’t even have to stress about this chase scene anymore, because he’s stuck there and shit” and then moved on with my life.
And then last night as I was lying in bed I remembered that Kizami can lift cabinets.
And it scared the fuck out of me.
I’ve spent all day watching Narnia movies and playing Clash of Heroes and Dishonored while eating cheez-its. I’d say that this is just me having a relaxing day after a stressful week, but this is just kind of my life so I’m just gonna say I need friends or something.
“Why shouldn’t I want the best?”
“Because you’re a girl from a poor family!”
So I guess deciding which law schools to apply to falls under the category of “times when Fiddler on the Roof explains my life.”
I write in words, but I see in pictures. I write in words because I can paint words, but I can’t paint pictures. I can sit in my room in the dark and create words, but no matter how many words I write I can never paint pictures. No matter how much I want to paint roses, all I can do is paint words that talk about roses. And what’s a description of a rose? It will never be as pink or as soft, and it isn’t still there when you close your eyes. I can write about how its velvet petals curl around each other in whisper caresses. I can write about how the light filters through their petals, creating a soft pink glow that warms the sheer white curtains, the veins of gold thread catching the light between the waves that breeze makes. I can write about how water droplets pool on the surface of the petals like precious pearls until broken into glitter that tumbles down the stem when rocked by the breath of spring. I can write about how the white ones glow at night, and how the red ones look like blots of ink that pale the surrounding world until it turns shades of cream, and how the yellow ones draw the innocence out of their trellises that stand with their twine, a labyrinth of rusted peels of metal, and how the purple ones rest atop their stems like petal cushions of royal powder, and how the pink ones hang loosely from the golden locks of flower girls in pink satin dresses. But I can never paint these things. I can never hang my words on the walls for eyes to admire and comment on. But maybe if I write my words well enough I can still paint my pictures in people’s minds. Maybe if I can write my words well enough my roses will bloom onto the canvases behind the eyes, the watercolors of their petals bleeding out to the edges of the paper and over, wrapping around the corners, crevices, and walls inside the mind. Maybe if I write well enough the ribbon tendrils of rose stems can wrap around the places in our minds where all the pictures we saw with our real eyes are stored, all hanging up in the galleries we build ourselves. And I guess the roses I paint are special because everyone can see them differently, and my roses become their roses, and no one else will ever know anyone else’s roses. So when I paint my roses they become secret personal roses that everyone can see in just the way they need them. I see in pictures, but I write in words.
Playing through Dishonored for the second time, and just following Lydia around the Hound Pits listening to every piece of her dialogue and just CRYING.
100rings:
parallaxnoir:
Whenever I play Persona 3: FES I just kind of want to rip Yukari’s face off. She’s over there like “ah mah god, I have so many better things to be doing with my liiiife. I don’t have time for thiiiis.”
And I’m just like “bitch, you literally have nothing but time. Stfu.”
And I really did love…
I hear this a lot, but there’s moments in The Journey that suggest to me this is how she’d react. Consider all the times she lashed out, either at Mitsuru, or even the Protagonist during the Social Link and major events where she’s dealing with what to think about her father. She was lost as the game began, and through the Protagonist entering her life, she thinks she finds some peace. She discovers the truth about her father, she has a guy who supports her emotionally and claims to love her. They overcome this huge ordeal because of him, she relied on him being there.
Now imagine after all that he’s suddenly just taken from her? The one person she could count on during the most stressful time of her life just ripped from her with no explanation, and on top of that, someone else is apparently closer to him, more important to him, than she was, and got to share his last moments, as well as his power. She’s lost again, just like she was at the start, and she doesn’t know how to cope so she lashes out. She wants to leave and never think of it again, because it’s the easier option than sorting it out in her head. When she can’t do that and is literally trapped with walking reminders of everything she doesn’t want to confront, it stirs her negative emotions and makes her angry.
I think things like her confrontation with Mitsuru do make it very clear that she reacts to these kinds of painful feelings in anger. She lashes out at those around her. And I feel like being thrown into this situation in FES stirs up so many emotions because of the similarities to the events of the Journey. I can only imagine the kind of pain she associates with her time in SEES, and how that would all be brought up by everything in the Answer.
But while the Journey makes it clear that she reacts to this sort of thing in anger, it also shows that once that anger cools, it hardnes int an unshakable resolve. But however you look at the cycle of her emotional responses, they are always just that; incredily emotional. She feels strongly, no matter what is is she is feeling. And for that reason, it have a hard time accepting that she would react to anything with the apathy and disregard that she shows in the Answer.
Whenever I play Persona 3: FES I just kind of want to rip Yukari’s face off. She’s over there like “ah mah god, I have so many better things to be doing with my liiiife. I don’t have time for thiiiis.”
And I’m just like “bitch, you literally have nothing but time. Stfu.”
And I really did love Yukari in the Journey. But I find it really hard to believe that between then and the Answer she just became a super bitch. She went from “I WILL save the world!” to giving like absolutely no fucks. I just felt like it was really out of character for her.
So I was staying in a hostel in Germany once and my friends and I found this on the laminated sheet in our room. I still have no idea what “Zivis” are, or what their “alternative services” might entail.
Like 98% of what happens when I watch Marble Hornets:
Jay: It seemed like I didn’t have any other choice. I would have to go back to <insert scary terrifying place here>.
Me: NO. JAY. YOU DO HAVE ANOTHER CHOICE. HOW ABOUT NOT GOING BACK. GOD. SERIOUSLY. OH MY FUCK.
theworstcat asked: MMM GURL WHATCHU DOIN WIT CHO SELF GURL YOU GOTS THIS BLOG AND ALL THAT BUT YOU AIN'T EVEN ON MSN GURL.
NAH GURL YOU LYIN AHM ALL UP IN HEYAH WE TALKIN N SHIT GURL WHATCHU SAYIN
Sometimes I wish I could see his wings. And then other times I’m afraid of them.
It was nearly four o’clock in the morning, and Dean had given up trying to sleep about an hour before. His beer went warm about half an hour after that, and he had started hearing the ticks of the clock only ten minutes back. Now the room resounded with the short, cacophonous clicks, too sharp for a heartbeat and too slow for the humming of crickets.
Sammy was fast asleep on one of Bobby’s couches. His brow, usually creased with the worry lines that the demons in his future stamped across his forehead during his waking hours, had smoothed to the comfortable rhythm of his sleep. As self-conscious as Dean felt about watching his brother sleep, he knew he wasn’t really watching Sam. He might have been seeing Sammy with his eyes, but his mind was thinking angel.
Not any angel. The only angel he would ever spend his sleepless hours thinking about; imagining what he might look like sleeping.
That’s so fucking creepy.
But no matter how many times he thought it to himself, he never felt creepy. Because when he closed his eyes and envisioned what he thought Cas’s face might look like in sleep, there was nothing creepy about it. He saw the soft line of his jaw, the sapphire of his eyes, the crushed wave of his hair… And he never thought creepy. All he thought was angel.
As often as Cas came and went on any given day, he never stayed the night. Sometimes Dean wondered if he even did sleep. Do angels sleep? Do they dream? And then Dean always wondered if they do dream… do they have nightmares? And then he wondered what would scare Cas when he slept. And what would comfort him and take that fear away.
After Dean felt he had watched his brother’s face for long enough, albeit as was seeing only his angel, he looked away again. He knew that if he looked away from Sammy’s face he’d start to try to imagine the rest of Cas as well, and he knew he couldn’t do that. If he did, he’d start to think of his wings.
Dean leaned back in his kitchen chair, and the dry creak of the warped wood clashed with the ticking of the clock. He tapped the side of his bottle against the table, adding another sound to the mix, as he tried to distract himself from images invading his mind.
At first he had been fascinated by trying to imagine his wings. By trying to see how they would curl around his body as he slept. Slept as he’d always imagined him. But then, once he started thinking about all of the things that Cas had endured…
All of the things that Cas had endured.
It probably wouldn’t be so bad. It wouldn’t be so bad if Dean could believe that none of it had been their fault. That there wasn’t a single moment of pain, despair, or suffering that would have written itself along the lines of his back, etched into his skin as sure as ink, that would have been so without Sam and Dean Winchester.
Because now, whenever he tried to conjure the once calming image of Cas, caressed by the ivory tresses of his satin wings, he imaged too all of the pain he’d marked them with. He saw those snowball feathers, soft as cotton and light as baby’s breath, ripped, torn, and shredded by every blow he’d taken. Blackened and burned by the scorch of lies and betrayal. Splintered and shattered by the weight of trying to protect two people who hardly deserved to be saved.
Sometimes I wish I could see his wings. And then other times I’m afraid of them.
It wasn’t really his wings he was afraid of. Not even the fabricated sight of them. It was the suffocating feeling that if he did see them, and that he did see the… the damage, that he would know it was because of him. And that there’d never be any way that he could drag Cas out of his Hell. That he could never save him in the way that his angel had once saved him.
As the bottle slipped from Dean’s fingertips, he closed his eyes. He heard the dull thud of glass on the kitchen floor as it broke the monotony of the clock ticks, and he felt the luke-warm liquid pool onto the floor beneath his bare feet. But it wasn’t until he heard Sammy stir on the couch and sit up that he opened his eyes again and wiped the pain from his face.
“Dude, what time is it?” His brother asked, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.
“I don’t know. Like four.” His voice was even and controlled. He even sounded tired.
“Have you slept?”
“’Course. Just got up for a beer.” Dean grinned and picked up the bottle, taking it over to the sink.
Sammy raised an eyebrow, incredulity coloring his features. “A beer? At four in the morning?”
“Yeah, Sam, a beer at four in the morning. What, I need a reason to have a beer at four in the morning?” Dean felt the defensiveness bleed into his tone, but he let it, hoping it would push out the images of those wings. Those wings, bent, battered, broken…
“Whatever, man.” Sam shook his head and lied back down onto the couch, nestling into the cushions.
Dean cleaned up the spilled beer and reclaimed his seat at the kitchen table, letting the staccato of the clock fade from his conscious thought once again. As he pulled over one of Bobby’s books, he let one last image of the sleeping angel cross his mind.
Sometimes I wish I could see his wings. And then other times I’m afraid of them.
[So I decided to write a Destiel drabble and then I MADE MYSELF CRY]
That moment when you see that someone you used to be close with unfriended you on facebook, and you’re like “bitch, I didn’t need you in my life anyway.”
But then you’re secretly sad and afraid to friend them again because you know you’ll hate yourself when they decline it, even though part of you knows it doesn’t even matter.
So I had lunch with my family at Golden Corral today. The people there are usually super sketch, but it was going pretty well at first. There was a family reunion with a huge Hawaiian family and a woman with assless chaps, but it was overall pretty casual.
Then the Amish came.
