~Day 04 of my Winter Advent series~

look at how happy Clyde is, UGH

Dick Roman / Leviathans

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Benny Lafitte / Vampire

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Somehow I missed the previous ten cards. But boy am I glad I saw this one :)

The deck turned out SO. AWESOME. EEEEE!

Ice Cream Destiel

Before they storm the Sucrocorp headquarters and gank Dick once and for all, Dean takes Cas on one last errand: to get ice cream.

“Shut up,” he offers by way of explanation.

Dean devours his ice cream so quickly that Cas wonders if perhaps he isn’t part Leviathan. Cas, however, can’t find the same enjoyment. He just stares at his cone, trying not to think of this as a last meal, or as making up for lost time, or as a goodbye.  

He’s motionless for so long that the ice cream begins to melt, the sticky-sweet milk fats running over and between his fingers like blood. Cas chuckles. The raw sound draws Dean’s attention, but Cas doesn’t care, because he’s cold. Unbelievable. Him. Cold.

For thousands of years, Castiel did not experience the earth’s elements. Protected by God’s love and holy purpose, he was of the universe, but not among it; he walked through the world unfazed, untouched. But now, he feels all the time, constantly bombarded by a cacophony of sensations. Rain droplets tickling his skin. Wind ruffling his hair. Dust grating in his eyes and throat. Cold is a new one, though. He wonders when that nonsense started.

Probably, Cas realizes as he looks up and catches Dean’s gaze, right around the same time he started feeling warmth.

“Dude,” says Dean. “Eat up, before it all melts.”

But Cas can’t. He can’t move, he can’t tear his eyes away, because Dean has 47 freckles dotted along his nose and cheeks, and seven on his right ear, and a half-inch long scar hidden by his left eyebrow. Cas knows all this because he rebuilt Dean with his own two hands, this marvel of divine engineering, this creature who feels so much, who can not only withstand the earth’s elements, but enjoy them, even the cold. Truly, the last perfect handiwork of God.

“You forget how to eat or something,” Dean adds, oddly short of breath. 

Swallowing around a tight throat, Cas forces himself to look down at the cone in his hands, away from Dean’s freckles and the majesty of his Father. “This is laden with Leviathan additive,” he says.

Dean lets out a strangled laugh. “What are you, on a diet?”  

“Consuming this will dull my senses and weaken my reflexes.” Cas frowns down at the cone. “Especially in these quantities.”

Dean snorts, and Cas looks back up at him just in time to see Dean roll his eyes. Grabbing Cas’s wrist, he tugs the angel closer. Cas lets him. Never dropping his gaze, Dean takes a long, deliberate lick of the ice cream. “Some things,” he says, his voice suddenly low and rough, “are worth the risk.”

Cas can’t tell if the sudden heat on his cheeks is from the summer sun or something else, but whatever the reason, he offers up a silent prayer of thanks to an absent Father for giving him the chance to feel it now.

for nature-based-being who wanted a chibi Abe Sapien :)

SO CUTE, with his widdle pinky and his toes and the gills and AUGH

2014!TFW

"I'll just wait here then," he says.

But who waits for whom?

The clock ticks. A rose blooms. This moment dies and is replaced by another, and another. You can’t stop it. None of us can. The future spirals ever closer, like a force of nature; like gravity; like the sight of a dead man’s fist clutching an empty revolver.

He waits for you. But who is he – and who are you?

I suppose the details don’t matter. They never did. It’s like your father always said: You can stop the car any time you like, but the road still goes on, with or without you. The most you can do is delay for a time.

He will always wait for us here, in this garden just past the horizon, only a few more sunsets away. Back where it all began, at the end of all things. With tenderness and love in his heart, he waits. They all do. They call us home. 

Whatever happens, just know this: We chose it, you and I. We made this happen. Win or lose, our future is a choice we made while trying to avoid it; it is a gong we banged and banged and couldn’t stop banging.

And when it’s time to go out in a blaze of glory, I will have no regrets. I will turn to you, my friend, my soul, and say, it took everything to get us here, and you will finally laugh at the joke. 

Until then, well, I guess – I’ll just wait here then.

im laughing because vintage Busty Asians issue

ravenno's tags: # are those the writers' names on the chalkboard screen left? #who are they? #I want to know more! #my problem where I read all legible text on screen and wonder about them and forget to look elsewhere

Turns out that most of them aren't writers, but crew members. J Michaels (Jim Michaels, co executive producers) and R Thompson (Robbie Thompson, executive story producer and co-producer) are the obvious ones, but we also have:

What I find weird is that there are three people on here from Season 3, who, as far as I can tell, didn't work on the show past that. The only two episodes all three have in common are "The Magnificent Seven" (the one with the Seven Deadly Sins) and "Born Under A Bad Sign" (the one where Meg possesses Sam).

Maybe they're still chummy with the cast. And maybe the names that don't show up in the credits are wives and husbands, boyfriends and girlfriends, kids, best friends, that sort of thing.

How sweet of them to honor their crew like this! Now I wonder how many other nods to crew members there are scattered throughout the seasons.

WIP—

doing cleanup on this one today, re: [x]

Okay, so I know I shouldn't reblog WIPs but OMFG

WANT

I just wanted to draw a happy image for the new year with Dean, Cas, Benny, and some pecan pie. 

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WHAT THE HELL PEOPLE

HOW IN ANY RATIONAL WAY COULD ANYONE CONSTRUE RAVENNO'S TEAM PURGAPECAN PICTURE AS A SLIGHT ON SAM

WHAT THE HELL

WHAT.

THE.

HELL.

Index of the winter advent images and associated ficlets: [Day 01]

[Day 02] [fic] [Day 03] [Day 04] [Day 05] [fic] [Day 06] [fic]

[Day 07] [Day 08] [fic] [Day 09] [Day 10] [Day 11] [fic] [fic]

[Day 12] [Day 13] [Day 14] [fic] [Day 15] [Day 16]

[Day 17] [Day 18] [Day 19] [Day 20] [fic] [Day 21]

Ravenno's Winter Advent series has been one of the delights of my holiday season. I wish I could've had the time to write fics for all of these, and that the ones I wrote were better, because all of these are just divine. If you missed any, put down your eggnog and your gingerbread, and go check 'em out right now. (I'm particularly fond of Day 15!)

Day Twenty-One, Winter Solstice!

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Beautiful, just beautiful :)

Day Twenty, Solstice Eve~

On January 24, 1978, the 5,022,008th Marlowe Collection coat rolled off the line at the plant in Corpus Christi, Texas: A tan, double-breasted trench.

There weren’t any ceremonies or speeches. The lieutenant governor did not show up. And three days later, the plant was shut down, its production outsourced to Mexico. Nobody gave two craps about the coat. But they should have, because this simple, 42” trench would turn out to be the most important coat – no, the most important armor – in pretty much the whole of existence.

The trench made it into the plant’s final shipment to J.C. Penny, where it was purchased by one James Novak, an atheist with a Carl Sagan haircut and a brain tumor the size of his fist. On weekends, he’d take Junior out back to show him the stars and the planets, the “stuff you’re really made of”. Castiel knows about this, because he's visited James’s Heaven. And he still does, from time to time.

After James died, the trench ended up in the back of his son’s closet, in a dusty box of forgotten things. Until one day the movers came, and young Jimmy saw the belt sticking clasp-end out of the flap, as if waving hello. On impulse, Jimmy shrugged on the old thing. His new wife rubbed her belly and said that he “looked like Bogie”. From that day on, Jimmy never took it off.

I guess that’s where this story ends.

And here’s where it begins.

The trench, of course, has all the things other coats have… and a few holes they don’t.

But none of that stuff’s important.

This is the stuff that’s important. The Barbie shoe in the left pocket: When Cas sits, it still sometimes jabs into his stomach. A faded, water-stained Kodak of two boys right on the cusp of manhood: All Cas has to do is stick his hand in the pocket and immediately, his fingers find their lopsided smiles. Even when Dean fished the trench out of the reservoir, he made sure all these little things stayed, because he knows better than anyone that it’s not just the cotton that makes a coat warm.

Raphael, Dick Roman, Crowley… they don’t know or care what’s in the trench’s pockets, or even that there’s a trench in the first place. All they know is that the flash of tan makes Cas easier to find.

In between apocalypses, Cas would sometimes take a day for himself, sometimes a week. Sometimes longer, if the Winchesters didn’t need him around. He’d pass the time seeing the world and its splendors, too numerous to describe. He’d doggie-paddle with puffins, trade dirty jokes with bonobos. Meditate with Tibetan monks. Buy sugar dates in Marrakesh. He’d pay his respects to the forgotten Incan queens, their mountain-top graves still undisturbed. He’d read poetry with Korean schoolchildren.

And when it was clear, sometimes he’d find a cornfield and look up at the night sky, his fists in his pockets, and watch the stars for hours, the corners of his mouth tugging upward of their own accord.

It never occurred to Cas that, sure, maybe he didn’t have his own body or a circulatory system, but he was never, in fact, heartless.  

Smiles are hard. Any rookie wearing his first human prom dress can squeeze out a halfway decent frown, but true smiles? They’re impossible.  You try to crook your lips at just the right angle, show just the right amount of teeth… but you never can. The humans can always tell. And since it’s a smile, it’s supposed to communicate something. It’s all supposed to add up to some greater punchline bigger than your words.

I’m telling you, smiles are a raging pain in the ass.

This is the last time Cas will put on the trench for a long time. And for the record, at this point next week, there will be a new apocalypse brewing, this time on the south-side of Shanghai.

Cas won’t be there.

Cas didn’t want Dean to save him. Every part of him, every fiber he’s got, wants to protect and to serve. But he’s not going to do that either. Because he made a promise. And now it’s time to keep it.

So what’s the secret to a good smile? It’s hard to say. But me, I’d say it’s in the lines around your mouth, the wrinkles around your eyes. Your dimples, like little pockets. And I think Cas does alright.

Up against good, evil, demons, angels, Leviathan, and destiny itself, Cas made his own choices. He wore his own trench. And, well, isn’t that kind of the point? 

No doubt, smiles are hard. But hearts are harder, for a heart is a heavy burden.

But not as heavy as a coat.

Day Fifteen, ♫ I Use Antlers In All Of My Decorating~ ♫

OMFG SHUT THE FRONT DOOR

THIS IS THE GREATEST THING

THE GREATEST THING

#BRB LOSING MY GODDAMN MIND