Not in the bestiaries (8/9)

(Part 1 on tumblr | I don’t know if I’ve put parts 5-7 on tumblr | AO3 here anyway)

Winter came, with its long cold claws.

Two children died. Old Joshua, after weeks of struggle with his failing lungs, finally set forth on his good journey. Castiel (and therefore Dean) spent almost every night in attendance, Castiel’s eyes stained with tiredness, Dean’s underbelly dry and dusty in the old reeds of the floor - palms the same when he lifted them with a bowl of water, an unbloodied cloth.

All in all, a better tally than most years.

The cold was still the cold, but food at least was a good deal easier to come by, with the sea on their side. Sam and Dean could hunt regardless of storms: spearing the bigger fish and dragging them back home, or driving shoals of smaller fry up the estuary into the nets and traps. Even those who had been wary among the village and the lay brothers knew better than to quibble with fortune like that. The monks were superstitious, with their eyes on the clouds and their lives lived by bells instead of the sun. Real people knew the value of being practical.

How do you actually know if you’re a sociopath? I mean, really. We hear that so many of the whole aspergers/autism symptoms are so hard to recognise in women because we have been, from so early, geared to hide it and learn to mimic normality even to ourselves. And if I am actually ace - well, that’s the same kind of thing, isn’t it? Just failing to feel what everyone else feels for all your life to such an extent that you never know what that feeling actually is and how much of your thoughts count as your feelings any more than you could know the difference between blue and green if you’d never seen green?

and you think

of course I love my little niece, my sisters, my family

I must, right? I mean, I care about them. Logically.

I don’t actually miss anybody when they’re away. I just wish that I had some actual emotional connection with somebody. Anybody. and I have no idea how people make that. 

All I know about what other people feel for empathy is 1) the actions that other (far more socially capable) people display towards each other, whether they be strangers or family, the way people engage in ways that I can’t, and 2) what I read in books, which are governed by both social and literary conventions and tend towards idealised superpassions anyway. How does anyone know if they’re ever going to be able to properly care about anyone else the way we’re meant to?