O, brave new world!

[whit_merule]

O, brave new world!
an epilogue to season 8

Alonso: Arise, and say how thou camest here.
Miranda: O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in’t!
Prospero: ‘Tis new to thee.
The Tempest, William Shakespeare (Act V, Scene 1).

Written: 18-22 May 2013.

Pairings: Dean/

Comments

[auroramama]

This is amazing, and how the hell did I miss it? No, I know how; I was reading Tumblr and ignoring LJ, and Tumblr has that stupid quality (especially while I'm still exploring stuff like tags) that what you miss isn't there. Will set tracking.

Dean couldn’t leave either of his men alone for five freaking minutes.

That line is right near the beginning, before we know some of the ways in which they are his men, but it made me beam anyway. Yes, Dean, because you're never the cause of concern for the people who love you. (But he thinks he is, sort of, because Dean putting his own life in peril doesn't count as a problem to him; he's making some progress toward grasping the extent to which Sam and Castiel disagree about that, but it's slow.) And his men do imperil either the universe or themselves about every five minutes. If a hen loves to fuss over her chicks, then Dean has picked the perfect people to worry about, people who will keep him unbelievably busy.

...I can’t feel the Earth’s magnetic field or where the equator is or this

[whit_merule]

Yes, tumblr is the land of ephemera. I tend to just track most people on AO3 nowadays. :)
and YES, Castiel is so lost and disoriented. Even right before Swan Song he was still an angel, just an angel with no power so he still had most of his senses intact, but now everything looks different and he can barely WALK and it is not fair and he needs cuddles.
hooray for sam being a sexy lumbering sheepish beast. :)
I'm pretty sure Crowley will be even more snarky now, as the only bit of self left to him (if indeed he is powerless, which he is effectively anyway now that he's chained up).

[whit_merule]

Excellent! Glad the dynamics worked for you - I had to rethink a lot of my standard Dean&Sam interactions, because I don't usually talk about them romantically. :)

[scarletscarlet]

Oh, man, I loved this. A lot. A WHOLE lot. The awesome scope of it with the angels falling everywhere, the eerie strangeness of the trueform angels the guys saw as they drove past, Castiel in another country (hurrah for not everything neatly contained on the one continent!), collecting angels along the way... and the gorgeousness of the connection between the three of them, bringing Castiel into that existing thing between Sam and Dean. Loved the entire thing, absolutely gorgeous.

[whit_merule]

Yes! I felt the need with this fic (since it DOES follow that season finale) to start a lot of rabbits that couldn't possibly be wound up in one small fic - the angels falling everywhere, the questions of what happens if they don't have vessels, Crowley's state, what the world is going to turn to now and what the humans are going to make of it - to gesture to the fact that this is world-changing and epic, even if all Dean wants to focus on right now is his family - his Sam and his Castiel - and making sure they're alright. Because then, once that's good, they can take on the rest of this world together.

[scarletscarlet]

Yes, awesomely done! All those open threads are great, leading one's imagination on after the words on the page have stopped, but the story solidifies that emotional core of the relationship, with it as this focus :). I recced this at rocksalt_recs - the story keeps sneaking back into my brain so I wanted to share :).

[dear_tiger]

Followed a rec here, and yay, this was so beautiful \o/ I love the little village in the mountains in Italy and the details that made the location so real, and I love that Nathaniel fell into a lake and that Cas was taking care of him after. And that the angels were in the church. And that they had to be taught sleep and dehydration. And of course, the getting back together when everything was well again was the best part. I was just so ridiculously happy for Dean that he got the good things in his life back and didn't care much about what happened to heaven. Such a beautiful story, thank you!

[whit_merule]

Thank you! I do love taking the boys out of America from time to time - sometimes they and everything supernatural ever are in danger of forgetting the rest of the world exists, so it's nice to confuse them occasionally! Besides, a shake-up from their usual routine can be very helpful in jolting them out of certain emotional habits as well...

[firesign10]

Not sure how I missed this when it was first posted, but glad I caught it now! Awesome! I always feel a Dean/Sam/Castiel trio has to be approached so carefully, with the danger of overriding Dean/Castiel and Sam off to the side. This was so well balanced! I loved how they all drew in together, each on their own ground. Very loving. Also liked the whole sense of the post-angel fall. Kudos!

[whit_merule]

Yes, I suppose in the end that's the challenge with any moresome - getting them all balanced out, so that you give each combination of characters the time they need! And with Wincestiel, as you say, and partly I think because we DO have such intense relationships between Sam/Dean and Dean/Castiel already, there's a tendency to take one of those relationships as read and put all your effort into the other. But I'm glad the balance in this one worked for you!