Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

First up, just letting our guys meet. This is not insignificant but not of course where they fall in love or anything - it doesn’t work at first sight. But Cas unsettles Dean to the core, in a way that is long foretold, aka not in the writers’ intent, but in the character set up, that *if* such a character as Cas were to come along, it would fuck Dean up six ways to Sunday, and the writing of season 4 kindly honours this set up. 

DEAN
Get the hell out of here. There’s no such thing.

CASTIEL
This is your problem, Dean. You have no faith.

These lines echo back through Dean’s history right back to the very start, the earliest days of his character development to do with faith and believing in his own damn self. Last summer wrote these posts about early hints of this character development which would pay off within the first few episodes of meeting an angel.

In 1x07 Sam nudges Dean to pray when they are attending the funeral of the hook-man'd boyfriend. 

The reverend asks everyone to pray and Sam bows his head right away and Dean sits there facing forward and needs a nudge from Sam to bow his head as well. At this point in canon it just looks like him being unaware or just kind of… casually not inclined to pray, but… Argh, this is a wonderful 1 second introduction to Sam and Dean vs faith. They get asked to pray and Sam just does it unquestioningly without even really knowing anything about the guy they’re praying for. And we know this is foreshadowing for Dean’s ongoing issues with the whole thing.

100 points for blink and you miss it characterisation that holds true for the entire extended emotional arcs of these characters. Bravo.

We’re still only really halfway to Faith, which sets out this whole thing plain on the page, but I love the staging of this. That Sam is the one who at the very least with no context you could assume gets the social nuance of what you’re supposed to do here (and the previous episode was Skin, where we found out for the first time in plain words that Dean feels like a “freak” specifically to regular society and whether Sam fits this bracket too or not he can at least pretend and pass for ~normal~)…

I like as well that you could assume if you were going into this blind that Dean as the apparently more loyal connected-to-the-family-business son (in the words the show likes to use about them ignoring deeper fandom analysis) in a job where they have already been shown utilising religious exorcisms and holy water to fight a demon, Dean might also be the more religious (which might also be more surprising reversal of expectations because he plays bad but Sam seems the goody two shoes and there is that association)… But nope. 4x05 confirms Sam is Van Helsing :P (I have no idea why my brain jumped there. Favourite episode skewing my thought process >.>) Guess he was the one who did the exorcism in 1x04 as well, but Dean was annoyed Sam didn’t think he knew “Christo”, like, duh of course he studied this sort of thing. Anyway, turns out Dean is just a hunter who utilises all the tools, but doesn’t hold any stock in the power behind them.

And Sam telling Dean what to do here, and early example of him policing Dean to behave more politely. Maybe not to blow their cover, but maybe just because Sam thinks you should be respectful even when it’s a grabby jock who they know saw Lori as a conquest and wasn’t exactly sweetly in love with her - I think they could guess how things were going/would have gone between a frat boy and preacher’s daughter exactly as they did in the cold open :P Depending what types of make out spot murder lore they already know about, the idea of punishment might already be on their minds at least low key…

My favourite thing about this layered moment is just the Destiel thing. Dean’s issues with faith getting their first nod on the screen here showing so so early on that Dean doesn’t particularly like praying. Then Faith cracks it all open and sets up emotional threads which echo all the way through the show. That and Houses of the Holy work together to basically create the entire Destiel framework in a way (and it’s because of 2x13 I’ve been using “angels are watching over you” for my Mary & TFW interactions tag all year).

There’s a sort of semi-conspiracy thought (I’ve never seen a source for it but ~everyone knows~ that Dean’s original love interest was meant to be an angel or whatever (I don’t believe this)) but definitely from the very very start and certainly long before their faiths were actually tested by real angels showing up, Dean had a relationship with the divine directly setting him up with the irony of it being real, while for Sam it would be the irony that it would be cruel to him. And the building blocks are all in place by season 4, easily, for Sam to have his thing with Ruby and Dean to basically have Cas as his equivalent character, their respective mentors for Heaven and Hell, through the season. I think they were pretty much always meant to come down on these sides if the show ever made it to Heaven vs Hell escalation, even if it was something a bit easier to grapple with in a version of the show that never brought in angels. Dean’s reluctance and lack of faith are integral to the irony that makes Cas such an immensely fascinating character to introduce *for* Dean and then to be strongly associated with him through the rest of the show, whether you ship them or not.

(And since I do ship them, welp, for me this is literally, 7 episodes in, where I start counting what will retroactively be excellent Destiel subtext and the beginning of any portrayal of their onscreen relationship. Because they are SO much more than 2 dudes staring at each other.)

Here’s bullet point no.2 on season 1 Destiel and how Cas comes at it from two completely different but vital angles and basically was fated utterly to be a character to change Dean forever and to be so firmly embedded in his life and character that losing him is like cutting off a limb within a couple of years of knowing each other…

This time it’s 1x11, Scarecrow, and Sam and Dean’s big blow up fight:

DEAN: Dad doesn’t want our help.
SAM: I don’t care.
DEAN: He’s given us an order.
SAM: (firmly) I don’t care. We don’t always have to do what he says.
DEAN: Sam, Dad is asking us to work jobs, to save lives, it’s important.

[…]

DEAN: Dad said it wasn’t safe. For any of us. I mean, he obviously knows something that we don’t, so if he says to stay away, we stay away.
SAM: I don’t understand the blind faith you have in the man. I mean, it’s like you don’t even question him.
DEAN: Yeah, it’s called being a good son!

And later in the episode, when they’re sort of making a peace with the way things are, and that these are way too firmly embedded character traits to pry them out of Dean in one argument and lesson learned about not trusting people who won’t let Dean have any of their magic apple pie…

DEAN: Sam. You were right. You gotta do your own thing. You gotta live your own life.
SAM: Are you serious?
DEAN: You’ve always known what you want. And you go after it. You stand up to Dad. And you always have. Hell, I wish I—

Anyway, John goes and dies not even without giving Dean any real closure (the bastard) but despite Dean standing up a little to his treatment in 1x21, he ends up just getting another massive burden put on him, which spirals him out all the way to season 3 and -

DEAN
My father was an obsessed bastard!
All that crap he dumped on me, about protecting Sam! That was his crap. He’s the one who couldn’t protect his family. He-
He’s the one who let Mom die.
– who wasn’t there for Sam. I always was! He wasn’t fair! I didn’t deserve what he put on me.
And I don’t deserve to go to Hell!

But it’s too late, he can’t confront John properly. Now on one front this episode also has the first time Bobby is addressed as being a literal father figure to them and Dean especially (Sam getting separated out while Dean has a more intense bonding moment with Bobby when they go into his head, never mind the parallels between them this episode.) Having a positive father figure eases the pain a great deal, I think, and Bobby works as the fatherly counterpoint to Cas.

So in season 4, Cas shows up and for a couple of episodes he seems like an absolute authority figures, giving orders and in this way seems like he might be a potential John mirror, speaking for Heaven, where God is paralleled even more directly to John. But as soon as Cas starts getting a chance to be a fleshed out character, he swaps instead to being a direct Dean mirror, and it’s on exactly the same order questioning thing that Dean got a free pass out of confronting because John died before he could make any real progress. Instead of confronting an authority figure and rejecting John in a mirror character, Dean ends up with a character going through his exact footsteps where, like Sam feels in 1x10 that Dean is acting like his boss, it turns out he’s only following orders too, and this all comes about in one episode, with this last line serving as a great way to link it all as well -

DEAN:
Of course you have a choice. I mean, come on, what? You’ve never questioned a crap order, huh? What are you both, just a couple of hammers?
CASTIEL:
Look, even if you can’t understand it, have faith. The plan is just.
SAM:
How can you even say that?
CASTIEL:
Because it comes from heaven, that makes it just.
DEAN:
Oh, it must be nice, to be so sure of yourselves.
CASTIEL:
Tell me something, Dean, when your father gave you an order, didn’t you obey?

Quietly revealing that Cas has this reliance on Heaven being just, but then at the end of the episode, and I really don’t think Cas was allowed to do this but he did it anyway…

CASTIEL:
Our orders –
DEAN:
Yeah, you know, I’ve had about enough of these orders of yours –
CASTIEL:
Our orders were not to stop the summoning of Samhain, they were to do whatever you told us to do.

And like that Cas is close to an equal when it comes to just being the guy who follows orders and if he can’t think for himself, at least would like to and has opinions and feelings about it (all his arguing with Uriel specifically to contrast a harsher angel who doesn’t care)…

And that leaves Cas to question, and Dean to nurse him that final step of the way to rebelling in 4x22 - that conversation where Dean urges Cas to rebel acting as his way of working through some of the left over unaddressed issues.

I love that by season 5 he can joke about absent fathers with Cas and know that they’ve been through, by then, the exact same process and at that point have sort of reached a point where their feelings on it overlap perfectly. And I think Dean got something out of it as much as Cas got a hell of a lot out of Dean over season 4.

The point being, once again some lines in season 1 which seem perfectly innocuous on their own in shippy ways but when you hold them up to the whole story, Sam’s side of this arc goes off one way, and Dean’s a different, which ends up having Cas’s thread braided all around it almost immediately.

Like, again, when Cas says he and Dean have a more profound bond in season 6, it’s not just because they casually spent more time together - they emotionally mind meld over their first 2 years of knowing each other, and it’s this exact thing Dean dealt with and had left over as an open wound for 3 years until Cas.

(And thinking of open wounds - in 1x09, Missouri describing how evil could cause wounds which festered and attracted poltergeist - I think it’s a good metaphor for things like this too - open character arcs which don’t get resolution, build up and fester. It’s not like Dean *totally* gets over John because it takes years and years and again, to go back to 12x22 as I seriously can’t stop doing, I think Dean really sees HIM for the first time with clear eyes while telling Mary about it, and getting to deal with his parents (or at least one of them) face to face for *real*, no mirrors or any emotional catharsis trickery involved. But then it’s not like Cas actually feels any better about God, he just reached a place of being bitter and accepting than chasing after his approval - and I think 5x16 is Cas’s point similar to 3x10 where he can angrily reject seeking that approval.)
 

Some comparisons:

1x12 -

DEAN
You know what I’ve got faith in? Reality. Knowing what’s really going on.
SAM
How can you be a skeptic? With the things we see everyday?
DEAN
Exactly. We see them, we know they’re real.

4x01 -

CASTIEL
I’m an Angel of the Lord.
DEAN
Get the hell out of here. There’s no such thing.
CASTIEL
This is your problem, Dean. You have no faith.

1x12 -

SAM
But if you know evil’s out there, how can you not believe good’s out there, too?
DEAN
Because I’ve seen what evil does to good people.

4x01 -

DEAN
Right. And why would an angel rescue me from Hell?
CASTIEL
Good things do happen, Dean.
DEAN
Not in my experience.

1x12 -

YOUNG WOMAN
(Overhearing) Maybe God works in mysterious ways.
DEAN
(Checking her out and smiling) Maybe he does. I think you just turned me around on the subject.

4x02 -

CASTIEL
The Lord works…
DEAN
If you say “mysterious ways,” so help me, I will kick your ass.

(1x12 -
DEAN
(Looking after her) Well, I bet you she can work in some mysterious ways.)

1x12 -

ROY 
Dean. (nods to himself) I want-I want you to come up here with me.
DEAN
(shaking his head) No, it’s ok.
[…]
DEAN
(Hestiating again) Well, yeah, but ahh…(The crowd claps and makes encouraging noises.)… maybe you should just pick someone else. 
ROY
Oh, no. I didn’t pick you, Dean, the Lord did.

4x02 -

DEAN
I mean, I’ve saved some people, okay? I figured that made up for the stealing and the ditching chicks. But why do I deserve to get saved? I’m just a regular guy.
SAM
Apparently, you’re a regular guy that’s important to the man upstairs.
DEAN
Well, that creeps me out. I mean, I don’t like getting singled out at birthday parties, much less by… God.

1x12 -

DEAN
Look, no disrespect, but ahh, I’m not exactly a believer.
ROY
(smiling) You will be, son. You will be.

4x18 -

DEAN
Well, I feel stupid doing this. But… I am fresh out of options. So please. I need some help. I’m praying, okay? Come on. Please.
CASTIEL
Prayer is a sign of faith. This is a good thing, Dean.

(& if that one isn’t good enough for you, 5x14, Dean @ the sky AFTER leaving Cas downstairs -

DEAN
Please…I can’t…I need some help. Please?)

1x12 -

DEAN
Can I ask you one last question?
ROY
Of course you can.
DEAN
Why? Why me? Out of all the sick people, why save me?

4x02 -

SAM
Okay, look. I know you’re not all choirboy about this stuff, but this is becoming less and less about faith and more and more about proof.
DEAN
Proof? 
SAM
Yes.
DEAN
Proof that there’s a God out there that actually gives a crap about me personally? I’m sorry, but I’m not buying it.
SAM
Why not?
DEAN
Because why me? If there is a God out there, why would he give a crap about me?

1x12 -

ROY
Well, like I said before, the Lord guides me. I looked into your heart, and you just stood out from all the rest.
DEAN
What did you see in my heart?
ROY
A young man with an important purpose. A job to do. And it isn’t finished.

4x01 -

DEAN
Why’d you do it?
CASTIEL
Because God commanded it. Because we have work for you.

1x12 -

DEAN
I’m sorry.
LAYLA
It’s okay.
MRS. ROURKE
No. It isn’t. (To DEAN.) Why do you deserve to live more than my daughter?

[…]

LAYLA
I wish you luck. I really do.
DEAN
(Voice cracking) Same to you.
Layla turns to walk away again.
DEAN
(under his breath) You deserve it a lot more than me.

[…]

DEAN
You know if Roy woulda picked Layla instead of me she’d be here right now. And if she’s not healed tonight she’s gunna die in a coupla months.

4x01 -

CASTIEL
What’s the matter? You don’t think you deserve to be saved?

2x13:

Chapter Text

(From Home of the Nutty)

This scene is technically covered in pt.1 because I listed the argument Dean has emphatically trying to deny what Cas was. But his reaction to seeing official fanart of himself in one of Bobby’s books always warms my heart. 
 
It’s his first gesture of acceptance of what Cas may be, and what he has done for him, and in this context Bobby and Sam are still assuming the angels are good, and this divine intervention is a positive thing. Dean needs some persuading, but I adore this moment he takes to touch the handprint Cas left on him with reverence and maybe a little wonderment. And a lot of fear. 

Through this episode he grapples with the philosophical question that Cas's very existence has caused in him, but a lot of it is directed straight past Cas in a "I want to speak to the manager" way, per the episode's title. Cas is an embodiment of the shaking of his faith but of course this is a moment in the story for Dean that is about challenging his personal beliefs and foundations and revving him up to handle the wider mytharc of the season. Cas very early on in the first episodes of season 4 is still more of a narrative tool than a fully realised character and he comes with both the burdens of expectation of Christianity and explaining how the angel mythos will happen in the show, and Dean's own personal arc that as we've seen up to this point has left him struggling to have personal faith or wider belief in Heaven or God or angels. 

Amongst all that, this moment of his shoulder touch means a lot to me in that it's a small, personal, physical gesture, prompted by this image which resembles Dean and Cas so strongly that it's obvious the art department was practically having a joke when designing the 'medieval' document. As the story continues, through to present day, Dean and Cas frequently physically communicate in shoulder touches, pushing and pulling each other around or patting each other on the shoulders in comfort or warning. It's something that I think remembering this moment helps never to really forget that it all came from Cas pulling him from Hell and the personal significance of their very unique bond later on. At the moment, Dean might be spooked, and touching his shoulder in "that's what he did to me" with all his uncertainty and distaste for the powers above. But it's the beginning of a very different personal connection arc too, and this gives us the emotional profundity rather than from 4x01 the teasing of "well it didn't touch me there" etc from the innuendo and banter laid on the handprint when they still didn't even know what Cas was.

I don’t think their actual interactions in this episode are particularly romantic - very charged and with a strong sexual subtext in the sense that they have an immediate chemistry and follow many of the basic known Destiel tropes such as the staring, the getting into each others' spaces, the fiery back and forth... I think it is a baseline establishing conversation, of Cas showing up relaying orders or Heaven’s thoughts on things, and Dean reacting prickly and not wanting to be bossed around; their back and forth is electric, but wild sexual tension does not a romance make, and I want to focus less on “here’s every reason you should ship them” and more on the sense of love between them. In that sense, I don't think the final conversation actually has any narrative or emotional beats which are suggestive of their love story, and especially for the opening stretch of this series of posts, there's a lot of instances which I may skip over which are still favourites but don't really seem to build up very much in their personal story.

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I love this moment at the end of 4x03, and Cas’s conflicted soft faces and harsh words in the following scene, an immeasurable amount. I said about how in 4x02 Dean showed some first sign of softness towards Cas, now Cas shows some serious softness towards Dean, almost as if having guided Dean through that “lesson” and “mission” in 1973, Cas himself got a lesson in Dean, and was finally able to see Dean’s humanity. He got to see Dean as something other than Heaven’s Weapon or whatever he’d been told Dean’s great important purpose was as the reason for resurrecting him. 

He sees Dean witness a great family tragedy, but more than that - for the first time he is going against his programming. This was a recon mission for Heaven, to send Dean as their eyes on what happened in the past, something they seemed unable to snoop on without sending in their own agent. Whatever Azazel did to keep this all secret, finding out what he did to the Winchesters requires forcing Dean to go confront it himself and receive fresh trauma over a long-ago event. Heaven knows he is only a witness - something he struggles with even as far away as 11x14 when time travelling to the doomed submarine - and Cas was still sent with the motivating words of "you have to stop it" in order to get Dean to comply and be motivated enough to witness it all for them and to be on the scene. And at this point, when the game is over, Cas sees what this whole ploy has done to Dean, to have to witness such family tragedy at close quarters and his new understanding of just how much Azazel had messed with their family. And his helplessness that Heaven itself had come to him and told him to stop it and yet it still happened in front of his eyes.

But that is the first time we see, even in a microscopic way, Cas express any sort of doubt or anything other than an all-powerful and all-knowing front. Possibly one of the moments that saved Cas in Misha's performance of showing such compassion towards Dean and making Cas break from being completely indifferent. Showing that Cas had already begun to be invested, and that soon he will be confessing doubts in his next episode... It's one of those cracks that begin to show and which make both Cas and his relationship with Dean so compelling from the very very start.

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JAMIE
Wow

DEAN
What?

JAMIE
That must suck. I mean, you’re giving up your life for this terrible… I don’t know, responsibility.

DEAN
Last few years, I started thinking that way, and, uh, it started sort of weighing on me. Of course, that was before… A little while ago, I had this – let’s call it a near-death experience. Very near.
And, uh, when I came to… things were different. My life’s been different. I realize that I help people. Not just help them, though. I save them. I guess it’s – it’s awesome. It’s kind of like a gift… like a mission. Kind of like a… a mission from God. 

There is a very, very narrow window in season 4 where Dean has some god damn optimism about his purpose. Take a wild guess whose fault *that* is. And how fascinating I find it that in this brief moment in the story, Dean has been affected enormously by this connection he already shares with Cas. 

I wrote a lil about it here, mostly in relation to how different it sounds to Dean in 10x16 when musing on the potential end of his life and what he wants to do with his life and what he feels he has missed out on etc.

The way this resonates to me for the sake of this post is how Dean's faith has been questioned and explored over the last few episodes, but despite his interactions with Cas seeming hostile and him demanding straight answers and explanations from Cas, as well as seeming to doubt everything, after 4x03 his tune changes when he is now confronted with the scale of his story - both getting to witness the past but also learning what Sam has been doing with Ruby (partially anyway) and that being on Cas's word and warning. It makes Cas seem more trustworthy and in the blow up argument that follows in 4x04 Dean specifically calls Cas "Cas" for the first time while informing Sam that he was the one who snitched and sent Dean to see what he was up to, and that Cas represents Heaven as an Actual Angel who doesn't approve of what Sam is doing, and therefore God wants him to stop. It's fascinating to me in this respect therefore how Cas and Heaven and God and faith are all twisted together in Dean's mind and how we can go from his one angel he talks to face to face still being more of an abstract concept than Friend Shaped Cas as he will one day/soon become. Because for long into their friendship - season 6 and Cas's toppling from his pedestal maybe - Dean keeps some degree of this conflation of themes in his understanding of Cas, even at the same time beginning to anthropomorphise Cas as being human or "like one" in his understanding. Because this bubble of faith for Dean carries him through the opening of this season strongly, and the connection to Cas means it's important to understand Dean's faith through Cas just as much as it is to understand Cas through Dean's faith. Dean isn't used to having faith. Or using it for anything. And yet in 4x06 he will turn to it again in desperation:

@amwritingmeta wrote a lot about the 4x05 stuff here:

If we want to look at character psychology and how to build a love story between two characters we don’t need to look much further than this, as Dean is a perfect mirror for the biggest internal obstacle Cas has to deal with for his individual evolution: believing an outside force can define who you are and assign your purpose, when you have to do that for yourself through faith in your own abilities, stemming entirely from a deep and real sense of self-worth.

[…]

Dean then softly reminisces of being brought back, how things are different, his life is different, the good he does feels validated by an external force that has nothing to do with him, but that is giving him back his belief in what he does being the right thing - this is faith sprouting in Dean and this ties directly to the love story and how Cas has come to push Dean forward on this path of self-examination, because it will inevitably lead to faith for Dean, just not faith in a higher power, but faith in himself and his value outside of what he can bring to the fight (remind you of anyone?) (there’s a reason these two characters’ core traits and core issues mirror each other) (because that’s what the two main characters do in a love story)

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The first time Dean makes Cas laugh.

The comment itself is not exactly hilarious, but it still tickles Cas, perhaps because he’s starting to understand Dean’s sense of humour, more than because of the comment itself.

I love how through the episode they’re in conflict, Uriel isn’t helping, but we see Cas pushing against Uriel at least in private, where he is revealed to be by far the more peaceful angel, in contrast to Uriel who openly hates humans - the same pride that Lucifer had about them, so little surprise there he was easily corrupted. It’s setting up Cas’s love for humanity through the use of the playground. At the end of the episode Cas calls humanity works of art.  

Dean goes there at the end of the episode to watch and be relieved the kids are okay, perhaps completely unknowingly that Cas and Uriel had been there earlier while having their argument about following Dean.

And in this moment, Cas feels safe enough with Dean to open up for the first time and share things which make him different from the other angels - the one who CAN connect with Dean.

CASTIEL:
I’m not a… hammer as you say. I have questions, I have doubts. I don’t know what is right and what is wrong anymore, whether you passed or failed here. But in the coming months you will have more decisions to make. I don’t envy the weight that’s on your shoulders, Dean. I truly don’t.

Sometimes I wonder if this one speech saved Cas’s character for later, gave us the crack in his chassis that Edlund could exploit in 4x16 to show Cas coming into his own. In this moment, we see that only a few episodes of interaction with Dean, have swayed Cas’s trust and sense of justice from the angels who he disagrees with, to wanting to follow Dean’s orders. And to trusting him with dangerous personal weaknesses that can and will be used against him by Heaven. He’s not in love yet, but that laugh at Dean’s joke is probably step one of the process of *involuntary* attachment.

Chapter Text

This episode is a great way to set me off to talk for years about it, so let’s just make a note of Dean’s total sense of betrayal that Cas and Uriel are seeming to provide a united front on the whole Murder Anna side of things (personal enthusiasm for the subject aside), and snaps at Cas like this.

It rings of later in 6x06, where Dean accuses Cas of having once been human - or like one - when appealing to his better nature. Having seen he had one. At this point he’s been given only a few smiles and soulful looks to be going on, but it’s clear by this point he thought Cas could be reasoned with, and would be emotionally sympathetic to what Dean wanted, as well as doubting his orders, as he explained to Dean last time they talked.

Looking none too happy about what he’s doing, Cas agrees they’re heartless, but not meeting Dean’s eye as he says it, only to stare him down with the challenge at the end. I don’t think he entirely trusts himself to say it to Dean’s face. Too much heart, etc. And the reason I had *these* gifs pre-made was to compare to 12x10 and past!Cas flinching when Ishim went to kill Lily’s daughter. He’s never had a taste for these missions. And Dean has seen enough of Cas in just a handful of episodes to *know* it. And Cas knows it too, having already made himself vulnerable to this accusation in 4x07.

It’s all enough that by 4x16 Cas has been demoted. Because of, again, something that echoes all the way up to 12x10 and that other “human weakness” thing:

DEAN
Don’t normally see you off leash. Where’s your boss?

URIEL
Castiel? Oh, he, uh… He’s not here. See, he has this weakness. He likes you.

He’s rapidly losing objectivity about Dean as we build up to him not being killed off and securing a solid place on the show.

Cas struggling to look at Dean and Anna kissing at the end of the episode because uh. I think we all have a headcanon for that. 

By 5x03 we have it proven that Cas definitely did not have a past romance with her. Something which would go a ways towards explaining heterosexually any reading of jealousy that you might make in his eyes.

If you look at it like he’s ashamed/horrified on Anna’s behalf and not struggling with the whole “kissing Dean” concept, it’s a start to his struggle with Human Feelings of love vs what he’s supposed to feel as an angel. And him on the first step on this journey, unable to face it yet.

If you look at it as Anna throwing shade that Cas is in the wrong, and Dean is the morally correct one here, and Anna has the power - as a human - to forgive him, it’s still flaunting things in Cas’s face about the arc he will start soon, and in Cas’s next episode, Anna will be on his case about starting to do the right thing and think for himself.

In an episode with scant Cas characterisation, it’s impressive that he still has his doubts and emotional arc with Dean playing as the undercurrent in both his scenes, that the hook Dean has in him isn’t going anywhere fast.

And at the end of the episode, Dean acts on a panic and briefly overcomes his raw fear of Alastair to smack him with a pipe or something to save Cas. What a lot for an episode mostly structured around giving Dean time to hook up with Anna, and Cas being made to keep the hell away from Dean.

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This episode will keep you up at night, but trying to be brief, here’s a thing on Looks and Trust in the opening like 7 minutes of this Destiel Nightmare of an episode…

CASTIEL
This is too much to ask, I know. But we have to ask it.

DEAN watches CASTIEL for a moment, then turns back to URIEL.

DEAN
I want to talk to Cas alone. 

These are the lines around the looks from the gifs at the top. 

Dean can sense that Cas is more on his side, not just because he’s already SAID that he has his doubts about his orders and shown considerable empathy, but because Dean can see from the moment they all start talking back in the motel that something is up with Cas. Watch his eyes flick to Cas, and then back to Uriel as he sizes things up:

When they get to the meat processing plant, Dean continues the argument but this time Cas weighs in with a far less absolute order than Uriel’s, but one trying to show understanding of what Dean is facing. And Dean asks to talk to Cas alone, after assessing Cas’s look as once more being more sympathetic to him.

At the early stage of their relationship it’s all fascinating to me how these tiny things build into the big picture, as Dean is having to go on trust after trust. Cas is as betrayed in this episode as he is, though Dean will pay the price, Cas will start his journey because Heaven fucked him over with their lies and hurt Dean in the process.

Once Dean has Cas alone, he tries to rationalise with Cas again and find out why he is now the one who has to stand silently back, within 9 episodes and about 3-4 interactions, his role with Uriel has utterly switched from their introduction in 4x07.

Cas responds with one of the critical lines to show that the little hints building along the way are the spark the writers grabbed onto for continuing Cas as a character:

DEAN
What’s going on, Cas? Since when does Uriel put a leash on you?

CASTIEL
My superiors have begun to question my sympathies.

DEAN
Your sympathies?

CASTIEL
I was getting too close to the humans in my charge. You. They feel I’ve begun to express emotions. The doorways to doubt. This can impair my judgement.

The gifs are Cas saying some part of ~humans in my charge, which makes him look away almost as if in shame, but definitely ending with eye contact on “you”, and Dean’s reaction to it… I can’t think of how else to describe Dean but “floored” by hearing Cas’s matter-of-fact summary that he likes Dean too much to do his job effectively, and has been demoted for it. Yes he had been assessing that Cas might be a pushover compared to Uriel to escape from this situation, but hearing it said like this…

CASTIEL
Want it, no. But I have been told we need it.

DEAN
You ask me to open that door and walk through it, you will not like what walks back out.

CASTIEL
For what it’s worth, I would give anything not to have you do this.

I haaate that this is how Cas convinces Dean to go in to the room with Alastair. However, I’m always on high alert for the old “want vs need” thing, which much later in their story is going to be a critical part of their interpersonal arc from the crypt scene change to “I need you” and the subsequent trashing of the concept of being personally “needed” rather than “wanted”.

In this case I don’t think season 4 particularly had any theme about it, the main themes being way off in other directions, and Cas’s free will is the real subject here, as THAT is what his season turns on. So there’s a fairly direct dissection of “need” and “want” here, of Cas’s personal investment in Dean continuing to be made clear, but at this point his utter inability to act on it also clear. HEAVEN needs Dean to do this. Cas does not want him to do it, but is as helpless as Dean and Dean sees no choice if he can’t appeal to Cas here, because all Cas will say is “I hate it too but this is how it is.”

Obviously none of this is romantic except that it’s making it clear once more that Cas is currently utterly split and trapped and in actual danger from Heaven for having feelings, and that this is the underlying reasons for everything he does: he cares about Dean, against Heaven’s will, and though he is currently subject to it, it’s the fissure that’s going to split and crack until he has gained enough mastery of his own destiny to rebel and break the story…

Cas predictably struggles with what he’s been made to make Dean do, and Anna helpfully shows up as his conscience, and in unrelated but still vaguely relevant news depending on how you read it, part of a pretty convoluted love triangle between the 3 of them.

ANNA
The father you love. You think he wants this? You think he’d ask this of you? You think this is righteous?

ANNA
What you’re feeling? It’s called doubt.

ANNA
But you can do the right thing. You’re afraid, Cas. I was too. But together, we can still—

CASTIEL
Together? 

A lot of this leads into Cas having a personal arc of his own which ISN’T all about Dean, an essential survival skill on this show to be both deeply invested in him, but to have your own stuff going on the side. In this case, Cas is now struggling with his faith, those orders from an unknowable father, as Anna put it, and loops us nicely back around to all the stuff that Cas disrupted in Dean’s character by showing up challenging his assumptions and beliefs - now Dean has disrupted Cas’s assumptions and beliefs.

I love the telling of this episode a LOT and one of the wonderful things is that while Dean is having his own story - of which Cas is a part but Alastair is a much greater part, Cas is having his story over here where Dean is just an emotional motivator, the McGuffin that Anna is using to try and make Cas think for himself. Since a lot of this episode is about Cas and the angels and learning to go off-book and investigate this whole farce, with Dean only in the background for *why* and the fact it was all a massive farce which got Dean physically and emotionally mauled - as Sam points out to Cas at the hospital - and that’s the final motivator for Cas to go do some deep thinking, I think I’ll stop here with the events in the abandoned factory.

This whole scene is great because Cas, now thinking for himself, returns to Dean and tells him as much of the truth as he knows - including now admitting that he doesn’t actually know everything, and I think in this moment that comes with admitting that he’s been posturing about a great deal of his knowledge as if he knows more… Whether “because God commanded it” was what he was told and earnestly believed in 4x01 or what, after Anna and Uriel it’s clear that the angels are as lost and confused as anyone else, just trying to find their way while hoping there’s a higher purpose…

What is not immediately apparent here is that Cas’s “us” means, “you and me” rather than Heaven. Perhaps you take it on first look that Cas is still speaking for Heaven and Uriel was just a random bad angel. But Cas shows up in 4x18 to help Dean presumably off-book as there’s no seal to worry about and no work Heaven is assigning Dean. Still vague, as Cas helps Dean subtly (and spoiler alert that’s the next post) but in 4x20 (double spoiler alert, the one after that :P) Cas shows up with information probably about Heaven’s entire plan to start the apocalypse, having clearly been investigating it on his own and continuing to think for himself and follow the problem to the source.

(Of all the off-screen Cas adventures, what he does between 4x16 and 4x20 is one of my biggest curiosities…)

In any case, back to this moment with hindsight, I really feel a vibe that this is the first subtle Cas and Dean against the world moment and that Cas has not *rebelled* yet, but having been prompted to think for himself, Heaven is an adversary to Cas for the rest of the season, whether it’s just their rules about interfering in 4x18, or the action they take against him in 4x20 and the hold he has to break through later. I love that in this scene, Cas has returned to Dean to be honest and open with him, and they share their fears and Cas isn’t dodging answering questions any more. They truly feel like they are on the same side, after the indecision and internal conflict Cas went through all through the episode.

Also there’s these #married lines:

CASTIEL
Are you all right?

DEAN
No thanks to you.

CASTIEL
You need to be more careful.

DEAN
You need to learn how to manage a damn devil’s trap.

Chapter Text

 

There are many important times Cas says “Dean”… This may be one of his most important and character defining.

Again this is an episode I have so many feelings about it’s impossible to be concise.

We have Dean breaking down and praying for help. And Cas choosing to answer though Dean was directing it at God. Cas isn’t required to help Dean by Heaven’s orders and he’s actually messing things up by showing in the first place.

He answers the prayer even though he KNOWS he can’t help Dean, but he wants to try… He may be far more aware than Dean is right now that they are resisting the will of Heaven together, but he has stumbled onto Dean desperate for help against the irresistible:

CASTIEL
It’s a prophecy. I can’t interfere.

DEAN
You have tested me and thrown me every which way. And I have never asked for anything. Not a damn thing. But now I’m asking. I need your help. Please.

CASTIEL
What you’re asking, it’s… not within my power to do.

Cas casts his eyes to Heaven, either worrying someone is listening or reminding us WHY he’s stuck. It’s all coming back down to his essential conflict of the season - liking and trusting Dean over Heaven.

Desperate to save Sam, Dean snaps at Cas - screw you it’s over, he will no longer be strung along by Heaven… Remember, though, that Dean hasn’t been asked to do a seal since 4x15, and in 4x16 Cas went off book and this isn’t an official mission. “Us” is him and Dean, and Cas is not actually doing things today FOR Heaven - he’s showing up to a prayer aimed at God, he’s diving in to stop Dean getting smote for bothering Chuck…

This, to Cas’s perspective, is a break up between him and Dean personally.

And off-screen, between 4x16 and 4x20 Cas is going to find out Heaven’s plan, and for all we know this is interrupting his quest for information, the eventual discovery that Heaven WANTS Lucifer free.

Cas is rejected by Dean - the side he has chosen - for trying to stay inside the lines while he investigates so that Dean won’t get hurt and used like 4x16 again, so Cas won’t be lied to like that again by his superiors, so he can find out how far the rot has gone (still BELIEVING in Heaven but critical and willing to take certain elements down from the inside, though I suspect if you asked him, still 100% behind the status quo once you stop the Lucifer problem).

He’s playing a dangerous game, but almost as soon as Dean rejects him and walks away, our master tactician knows what he can suggest to fix everything - to solve this problem and re-earn Dean’s trust (which at this point he wants only because he values Dean emotionally - this isn’t like season 6 and how weighted this word was in 6x20), and calls Dean back with his genius plan.

Cas stays inside the lines, and Dean breaks the story. And that look on his face, as it changes from pain at the rejection to understanding, to *confidence* and certainty and the raw charisma that he’s got the answer and can press it on Dean…

This whole scene from the vending machine to the raw magnetism of this last look, is one of those beautifully staged season 4 scenes where Cas and Dean walk back and forth, in and out of each other’s spaces as their investment in each other waxes and wanes, the urgency of their words increases. Dean walks away from Cas when he rejects him. And right back up into his space as he understands his plan, drawn back into the fold of this conspiracy they’re in together.

I honestly think this is the point they changed the future and won the apocalypse; this episode’s structure perfectly mirrors Swan Song, and I am guessing Chuck was plenty inspired by these events to start rooting for the underdogs. I think the whole thing was a test, and Cas, of course, shows up uninvited on Dean’s behalf, his plus one crashing the party.

Chapter Text

Trust. 

Trust in Dean over Heaven. 

Heaven is now the enemy as far as Cas is concerned - the only ones who would be watching the exchange are angels. The only ones who would ambush and attack him and send him back to Heaven are angels. Though it’s not the decisive action to fight alongside Dean to STOP the apocalypse, Cas is determined to tell Dean what he has learned about who is STARTING it. The things he couldn’t tell him in 4x16, the questions they had unanswered.

ANNA 
It’s Cas. He got sent back home. Well, more like dragged back. 

DEAN 
To heaven? That’s not a good thing? 

ANNA 
No. That’s a very bad thing. Painfully, awfully bad. He must have seriously pissed someone off. 

DEAN 
Cas said he had something to tell me. Something important. 

I think in a messed up way, of what we know about Heaven they would care less about what Cas did or didn’t tell Dean, and more about where Cas’s loyalties are, and how dare he break those loyalties. At the end of the episode it’s irrelevant to Cas about what he was going to tell Dean - this is not how they got to him.

DEAN 
Cas, hold up. What were you gonna tell me? 

CASTIEL 
I learned my lesson while I was away, Dean. I serve heaven, I don’t serve man, and I certainly don’t serve you. 

Cas’s loyalty to Dean is the most dangerous thing to Heaven. 

I think it may be a long way off in some reckonings to talk confidently about Cas being in love with Dean, knowing it, being affected by the self-aware knowledge of it. But while the first dominoes to fall were on Dean’s side, Cas knocks down about a dozen here and takes the lead just because his entire arc in this season is so profoundly affected by his reactions to Dean and how dramatically it changes his life course.

Chapter Text

This one seems like a quick one, but I’d like to re-welcome Bobby to this meta series.

Of course he’s being flippant about “pals” and by this point fairly critical of the angels and Dean is in agreement, but it’s this particular fairly short interjection into their argument about Sam that always catches my eye. Bobby and Dean argue back and forth and Bobby probably just asks this tactically in the sense that they were discussing broken seals and then Bobby wonders why the angels haven’t been doing anything about it - but making it Dean’s problem to answer for, as he has the much more obvious connection to an angel.

Dean’s response, however, harks back to Cas storming off at the end of 4x20 with the stark change in behaviour and warning that he doesn’t serve Dean.

It seems Dean hasn’t told Bobby this detail despite it being supposedly also tactically advantageous to keep him up to date with their problems and seems to me, if Dean doesn’t fully understand the extent angels can be brainwashed, to be taking Cas’s behaviour at least a little personally - as the scene with them in this episode will cover (spoilers for the next one :P) Dean starts that conversation laying into Cas about his behaviour. I described 4x18 as a “break up”, and I think 4x20 reads this way too for Dean.

Not that there’s any concept of them ~dating~ between them, but that Dean had by this point levelled a great deal of trust at Cas, and 4x18 had saved their relationship - from Dean’s side he now understands in ways he couldn’t see in 4x16 or other previous episodes, how Cas would break the rules for him. Somewhere along the way he has become personally attached to Cas - I would go back to 4x07 on his side as well for feeling a more comfortable connection, but wherever they got to before, this reaction to Bobby’s question is fascinating.

It’s probably worth a rewatch, but Dean’s tone changes, his voice gets far softer and more distressed, and he turns fully away from Bobby while answering, his hurt about his last encounter with Cas clear on his face, in his words, and he knows it to the point that he seems unable to face Bobby about it.

Bobby changes the subject at this point, to something even worse than this so not exactly trying to alleviate Dean’s feelings, but at least seeing that this line of enquiry is over, though he doesn’t know why.

This scene is another one of the core Destiel scenes. Cas is supposedly fully brainwashed and acting on Heaven’s orders, but as in the scene with Anna where he outright says he wishes she hadn’t come, his actions may be dictated but his heart and feelings are *not*. When Dean pushes, an equal part angry and concerned about Cas, Cas says this incredible line.

“Dean, I can’t. I’m sorry.”

Dean wants the sympathetic old Cas who could be talked around, who would agree with him, help him with a sexy raised eyebrow and smirk and tell him the secret code to get the hell out of this mess.

And Cas… can’t. He’s not allowed to be what he once was to Dean. The very fact of the choice of phrase hits me. Not that he says anything to justify it or explain it. Just simply. I can’t. I can’t get into this, with concern, with personal talk. I can’t explain and I can’t *talk* to you. And he brushes off the personal conversation to try and get back to why he was sent.

This reads to me a lot like a metaphor of a high melodrama mind control version of the kid who’s banned by his conservative parents from seeing his boyfriend,   (as Heaven often represents to Cas - 12x10 has a strong example of angels liking humans being treated with bigotry analogies). He has to break up with Dean, deny who and what he is in order to even have access to his friend. No giving in to the irresistible draw of Dean’s heart that has pulled Cas in. 

And the only reason Heaven would still send Cas to Dean is because Dean would not hear out, wouldn’t fall for it from anyone else, wouldn’t trust a single other angel who came down here to twist Dean’s arm into this oath. And Cas knows this too, knows Dean’s attachment to him in turn is being exploited.

He turns and walks away, and when he speaks it’s entirely with purpose, directing the conversation back to Sam, just as in the previous scene in this series, Bobby pulled the conversation away from Dean’s feelings about Cas bubbling under the surface, and back to Sam.

One of my favourite bits of framing is when Dean and Cas stand in each other’s places in a scene. Cas moves here to shut off friendly conversation with Dean, and though his face continues to betray his resentment of doing this to Dean, he speaks entirely to purpose.

Dean then moves into the same spot with Cas looking over his shoulder - and because of the angel theme, *so* much of their interaction is told through shoulders, whether touches or “angel on the shoulder” imagery. In the first instance, Cas is denying Dean as his conscience. In the second, Dean is being influenced by Cas, signing “his” oath because if he does this, Sam doesn’t have to.

And, oh dear, that oath is coerced and a lie that is inflicted on both Dean and Cas - Dean to be tricked, and Cas to make the betrayal. 

I know we joke a lot about this crane shot as The Longest Destiel Stare but it’s all part of the heartbreak here:

Cas has to be firm and unyielding in his application of pressure on Dean. Dean is desperate, feels he’s losing everything, and doesn’t trust the angels, barely trusts Cas or Heaven’s purpose - all that early optimism evaporated. And he breaks and looks down in defeat, a mini metaphor within the scene showing in their interactions how Cas was forced to break Dean, and how Dean was broken.

Chapter Text

ZACHARIAH
Have faith.

DEAN
What, in you? Give me one good reason why I should.

ZACHARIAH
Because you swore your obedience. So obey.

To me one of the most striking moments in 4x22 as we build up to Cas’s rebellion is returning to the forced betrayal in 4x21. Here, Zach tells Dean that he’s trapped in this, that he’s sworn his obedience to Heaven’s terrible plan…

… And Dean’s eyes go to Cas, who has to look down and away in shame, knowing he was forced to do it. We see this as if Dean sees it, and we know in this moment that Cas does not endorse Heaven’s terrible plan. That he feels deep shame for tying Dean into it, for being sent to do it. That Zach is forcing him to be in the room to witness Dean being locked into this because of what Cas did.

This whole scene is a masterpiece of direction and cinematography but one little detail I love is how they’re over each others’ shoulders so much - I talked in the 4x21 post about the way they hover and represent shoulder angel or demon in the traditional imagery. Cas doesn’t speak in this scene, forced to be a silent witness to Zach’s grandstanding as part of his punishment for daring to care about Dean. But his presence is in the background throughout, so we know where Dean’s eyes are going before the camera gets there.

Bonus clap on the shoulder from Zach for the collection of shoulder imagery around them.

From iron to putty.

DEAN
Why are you here, Cas?

CASTIEL
We’ve been through much together, you and I. And I just wanted to say, I’m sorry it ended like this.

DEAN
“Sorry”?

[Gif 1 context]

It’s Armageddon, Cas. You need a bigger word than “sorry.”

CASTIEL
Try to understand – this is long foretold. This is your…

DEAN
Destiny? Don’t give me that “holy” crap. Destiny, God’s plan… It’s all a bunch of lies, you poor, stupid son of a bitch! It’s just a way for your bosses to keep me and keep you in line! You know what’s real? People, families – that’s real. And you’re gonna watch them all burn?

CASTIEL
What is so worth saving? I see nothing but pain here. I see inside you. I see your guilt, your anger, confusion. In paradise, all is forgiven. You’ll be at peace. Even with Sam.

DEAN
You can take your peace… and shove it up your lily-white ass. ‘Cause I’ll take the pain and the guilt. I’ll even take Sam as is. It’s a lot better than being some Stepford bitch in paradise. This is simple, Cas! No more crap about being a good soldier. There is a right and there is a wrong here, and you know it.
Look at me! 

[Gif 2 context]

You know it! You were gonna help me once, weren’t you? You were gonna warn me about all this, before they dragged you back to Bible camp. Help me – now. Please.

CASTIEL
What would you have me do?

DEAN
Get me to Sam. We can stop this before it’s too late.

CASTIEL
I do that, we will all be hunted. We’ll all be killed.

DEAN
If there is anything worth dying for… this is it. 
You spineless… soulless son of a bitch. What do you care about dying? You’re already dead. We’re done.

CASTIEL
Dean –

DEAN
We’re done!

What I love about this exchange aside from everything is how Cas is persuaded in the course of it, by Dean’s argument, by Dean himself reacting against Cas. We can see the difference in how he reacts to Dean - first impervious, but then allowing Dean to haul him around as Dean appeals to that part of Cas that is on his side and wants nothing more than to help him. 

Putting these two moments together, one from the start of the argument, one from the end, shows to me a visual demonstration - and this episode is full of those - about how Cas is changing. And how Dean himself has changed Cas.

And that too is a wider metaphor of how he has changed Cas over the course of this season.

There’s some peak DeanCas moments in this scene - that bit with Dean catching Cas’s eye, Cas’s attempts to justify what Heaven has lead him to believe is the ideal outcome vs Dean’s insistence throughout it’s better to be human, that humanity is better, that humanity deserves the chance, that you should die for humanity.

But at the end it’s a personal “we’re done” because when Cas breaks, as he has to, as Dean knew he could argue Cas around, Cas is caught in fear and still chained down by Heaven, convinced there is no resisting Heaven, and unable yet to shake off the words that persuade him to stay in line. That he’s been shaped by fear to gain his loyalty to Heaven, but Dean is swaying him with compassion, and love, and the promise of chaotic, painful but free humanity.

It’s just too much for Cas to grasp all at once, along with Dean’s reveal of what Zach told him about Heaven and its plans, to make the leap just off the inspiring speech. And so we have yet another rejection over principles, as in 4x18, but with much higher stakes. And this rejection requires Cas to dramatically leave, *personally* rejected by Dean for not being able to stand up for what Dean knows Cas believes.

And that’s the note that this is left on,that Cas leaves on. That they are done if Cas doesn’t act, while all the rest - Sam, humanity, everything that may get destroyed - is the build up to this persuasion.

We’re done.

Going off-book.

I have a rather hastily progressing set of events here, but it’s Cas’s rebellion in its essence - grabbing Dean to yank him once more off-balance, getting his silent understanding that Cas has decided to come help because he is ready to fight for it, banishing Zach, who has kept him shackled and probably enjoyed sending him to do all the dirty work in 4x21, and then straight to Chuck’s for the only intel they can get at this point, and Chuck, God, telling Cas that he’s disrupting the story, and Cas, in full attack mode, declaring they’re free. He’s free, and he’s writing his own story.

This is of course a wonderful meta statement on his character surviving beyond all expectations and breaking out of the small role he may have been lost to, to becoming such a powerful player.

But I think at the end of the season, let’s come full circle to Dean’s face at the end of it.

At this point it’s fairly obvious to add up Cas’s attachment to Dean, his later declarations that he’s doing this for Dean, that it was all for Dean. Let’s assume Cas has reached the understanding of his relationship with Dean that will persist until his return in season 7 when he’s forced to re-evaluate and begin his next character journey. The Cas who understands he has a profound bond with Dean, who has derailed the story, broken free of his loyalty to Heaven, and transferred it all to Dean.

Dean’s face, here, at the end, his last moments with Cas in season 4, is a moment of dawning understanding of just what he has achieved, what he has gained in an ally like Cas. What has changed in his personal circumstance. He started the season not believing in angels at all. Refusing to believe they existed even when one spoke to him. Had spent a lifetime not believing because Mary told him they were watching over him and what good did it ever do them?

And through actual hard emotional work, he has gained his own angel, one who will fight for him; NOW he understands that when Cas said “us” he meant “me and Dean” and not “Heaven”. Now he sees Cas’s open defiance of the story as his personal declaration (though he says “we”) to answer Dean’s disowning of him in their last scene - his show of being all in because Dean said so, because now I’m fighting for what we believe is right. That Dean was right about this.

All that maybe too much for Dean to really process, but within a very short space of time when next season starts, his view on Cas has also changed deeply, and though he may act sometimes snarky and uncomfortable around Cas, next season he will get to know him on a personal level, to move beyond seeing Cas as an agent of Heaven and more as his friend. As “human, or like one” by the end. And this last look from Dean is the one time in this whole rushed moment of showing him emotionally processing the change in his and Cas’s relationship.

And once again being fundamentally shaken by his actions.

I’m not sure exactly when you can start saying Dean is in love with Cas, because for sure the belated realisation of feelings already had and missed isn’t given a time to settle in until, like, season 7 and processing the betrayal and loss. But this isn’t half a bad start point for Cas being special to Dean like no one else has ever been in a very particular way that no one else he’s known and loved in other ways has quite hit him in such a way. This look is one of those moments you’d include when counting strikes against Dean before it’s inevitable.

Chapter Text

You know, I wasn’t going to use these gifs up top & save them for the post body. 

I was gonna use a soulful close up of Dean’s face. 

But then I remembered 12x23/13x01 and what Cas’s death did to Dean.

So I thought, you know what, we deserve to go back to the first time Dean confronted Cas’s death, and if it was of SO LITTLE concern to the story the best acting was in the background of Sam’s reaction then screw that we’re getting the blurry actual size corner of your screen reaction to Cas’s death from Dean. Because think about how far we’ve come.

If season 4 was mostly about Cas’s reaction to Dean in the end and about what Dean did for him, I think the DeanCas interactions in season 5 are majority weighted towards Dean and his reactions to Cas. We start, of course, when Cas is dead and can give no response, but I think it’s fair to broadly summarise almost the entire season as Dean’s POV when around Cas. 

While of course in these early days I’m still hesitant to label Dean’s feelings for Cas as love, in 4 episodes in a row he’s brought up short about what Cas means to him and how much Cas values him in turn, and there is a great deal of ongoing processing of Cas’s actions at the end of season 4 and what they mean.

To start with, he urgently wants to get back to Chuck’s and find out what happened to Cas:

DEAN
Well, whatever. It’s the least of our worries. We need to find Cas.

And then he shakes off ALARMING concerns about Sam to get back to Cas (I mentioned twice in 4x21 talk of his feelings for Cas being derailed into woriries about Sam)

DEAN
Your eyes went black?

SAM
I didn’t know.

DEAN
Where’s Cas?

CHUCK
He’s dead. Or gone. The archangel smote the crap out of him. I’m sorry.

DEAN
You’re sure? I mean, maybe he just vanished into the light or something.

Also there’s some world class denial…

This post is getting long, so I think I will save my favourite interaction here for another, now we’ve established Dean’s 1000 miles from season 13 but still pretty significant concern for Cas. And to me season openers are important as offering reflection and direction - both answering the previous season and laying down what is important for the next. In this case, it seems reflective on what Cas WAS to Dean in season 4 right up to the point Cas comes bursting back into his life - in which case it is the promise of their newly forged bond.

Hey, Dean’s happy to call them friends now! And to spite Zach, he uses the banishing and specifically references learning it from Cas to remind Zach of Cas’s rebellion, of what Cas gave for him. That Cas’s rebellion lives on in Dean and his refusal to bow to the angels, even if Cas isn’t there to do it himself.

I would like to point out that in the middle of their conversation where Zach is trying to convince Dean to work with him now they’re all supposedly back on the same side against Lucifer, that you should look at what he’s doing here:

He’s running his finger through the ikky Cas smear all around the room, purposefully pointing out Cas’s futile and wasted sacrifice by telling Dean well that was all for nothing, Lucifer is risen and we can get right back to how we were before all this nonsense if you please.

He’s rubbing Cas’s death in Dean’s face.

And though I think Dean would have responded with the banishing and snark any day of the week, this specific detail catches my eye as just something particularly nasty Zach does, and part of the undercurrent that this whole conversation is talking about Cas in a way - that this is the subtext of Zach’s mockery and Dean’s defiance. Cas died for this and Dean isn’t going to let that be a waste.

He then comes exploding back into their lives a few hours later, with much drama and threatening Zach and with all the branding ribs and not answering questions etc and we’re back to normal by the time the credits roll :P I think the only other thing I’ll say, looking to the future, is that 5x01 is the first time Cas kills angels I believe, and the way he swoops in and saves them is mirrored a great deal by one of the swooping in and savings in 6x20 - the “I was me again” moment. Mentioning now because I’ll probably forget by then, but again, establishing baselines for their relationship and how they fight and kill for each other, to show they’re on the same side, and this season establishes a LOT of generic good DeanCas relationship and interaction baselines, as it’s starting to show what Cas is to them on *their* side for the first time. Zach is used throughout (taking over from Uriel’s role from 4x07-16) to show Cas connected to Dean against Heaven and as I said in the last post, first episodes are all about laying out how things are and will be… The defining aspects of their relationship this season.

Chapter Text

There’s a power to things exchanging hands between them - the note in 4x20, the knife in 4x22 (the mixtape in 12x19)… This is among the most powerful of all these exchanges not just for the sheer intensity and time on it, but the enormous, nigh on cosmic meaning bearing down on them, much of which they won’t realise until the end of the season, or for another 6 years.

In the moment, Cas reappears driven with a new mission, and is clearly excited to get searching for God - whether he says it’s just strategic, finding the answer to where God is is the exact same path Dean took trying to find John back in season 1 (and again, something where their stories and emotional paths have overlapped from the start when it comes to their generic issues with absent fathers). Cas is going to go through some of the same awful steps of this struggle - which ultimately brings them closer together. 

It flares up an argument about God followed by Cas tearing into Dean with that speech that like many things Cas says, has an interpretation that reveals deeper feelings and motives which we don’t really need to prove any more later on in our knowledge of the show, but once upon a time was one of the most telling things he ever said about his relationship with Dean:

CASTIEL
I killed two angels this week. My brothers. I’m hunted. I rebelled. And I did it, all of it, for you, and you failed. You and your brother destroyed the world, and I lost everything, for nothing. So keep your opinions to yourself.

It betrays through anger where Cas’s loyalties and heart were in that moment, and as we need this line less and less to prove his heart towards Dean as it comes across more and more in later canon, the less I like this line…

Cas goes on to wrangle the amulet from Dean, and I think this is the first step of their hugely personal arc this season. This is the amulet that has become a part of the show’s language about Dean and what is important to his characterisation and history. In season 1 we see Dean angrily snatch back from a shifter, that in season 3 we get heavy emotional backstory for (linking it to his position being the stand-in parent for Sam, hence it getting called the “Samulet” as Sam gave it to him when he did what John couldn’t to parent Sam that day), and in season 4 once again we get Sam emotionally giving it back to Dean, after having worn it himself while Dean was dead, periodically reminding us it’s not just aesthetic for Dean. Now it becomes a thing shared between Dean and Cas, and returns to that symbolism of absent fathers, a thread that runs through their whole season as their emotional connection.

Like Dean had John’s journal to look for him, Cas has this amulet to search for his father - but the cruelty of the situation is deliberately elevated - and since it comes to a head in 5x16 I would say of the absolute opposite intent of making John look better in comparison, but to show Cas taking comparative emotional damage to Dean and this is the exposition on how bad it felt for Dean, as seen through Cas’s fresh experiences.

Dean takes a long moment to decide to give up his amulet to Cas - as we’ve had it deeply established how much it means to him, whatever behind the scenes reasons Jensen was fed up of wearing it, it’s too significant for Dean to just forget to put on one day, meaning a vastly important personal story reason was required. 

And so we see Dean returning the absolute trust to Cas, the decision that he can share a part of himself to help Cas on a familiar-sounding quest. And that Cas, who doesn’t HAVE to tell him how much he’s given because Dean KNOWS, because he was there, he saw it, Cas is someone that he can trust in turn as Cas trusted him. And so with this new knowledge of his amulet, Dean sees what it now means, what bond he now shares with Cas, not maybe in a fluffy emotional way, but his understanding of what Cas is going looking for, if on a hugely abstracted cosmic level…

And he hesitantly, perhaps deliberately protesting too much because he’s not good at the big emotional scenes in the sense that it’s easier to act prickly about Cas losing it than wishing him any heartfelt luck over it all, gives Cas his amulet.

When he says after that he feels naked without it, there is considerably more symbolic bearing of himself emotionally going on, than just the joke about him being down an article of essential clothing. This arc does essentially rely on having Dean and Cas emotionally “naked” to each other and their connection growing from this exposure.

It’s a level of something connecting their characters that genuinely shocked me the first time I ever watched this season, and though it’s probably not completely relevant, something about one fictional character sacrificing their iconic Character Thing to another fictional character has the strangest sense of a token bestowed on a knight by a lover, to wear into battle. A sense of Cas belonging to Dean now.

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There is a LOT to love about this scene, starting with the request for personal space and much alarmed checking out of Cas during one of the most intense, charged stares they ever share. But I think for the focus of this series, I love this moment the best, more than the weird Thelma and Louise don’t-think-about-kissing-Cas moment that passes through Dean’s head, more than any of the odd tension, lip-licking, general… wtf-ery this scene is renowned for.

Cas and Dean bluff and argue at each other, but when Dean snarks at Cas too hard, he breaks past the layers and Cas tells him in plain words WHY he wants Dean to accompany him. It boils down to emotional support rather than tactical (the same thing I think is obvious - to Dean in 5x02 when Cas comes in with misplaced anger and a resolve to find God for “strategic” reasons not emotional ones)…

Cas does all the legwork with the spell and summoning and knowing where to go and who to talk to, while the interview during the “involves talking to people” section is something we’ve seen Cas accomplish other times when he’s in a hurry (6x21 for example) and while he may not be socially adept, he can still get answers if he needs them. He *could* have found Raphael, but he wanted the back up. And this request for emotional support is I think what Dean hears, surprised for one thing that Cas is even being emotionally honest with him, when he (significantly) changes his answer from Dean being his “bullet shield”, to saying in a backhanded way that Dean is just required to show up and be there because he’s the only one who will.

Cas is by now no longer overtly blaming Dean for their situation, but while he’s still tense and angry left over from the mood he was in last episode, he’s softening up. And choosing to work with Dean, because he will help him, because he’s the only person on Cas’s side… Once again Cas comes in asking Dean for help and Dean gives in because it’s Cas asking, because he owes Cas this much even if it’s just for picking his side since while the narrative becomes “the Winchesters started the apocalypse”, the blame on Dean (such as it is - more his guilt) only goes as far as breaking the first seal. Cas’s brainwashing and struggle to overcome it was actually the critical timing factor which got Dean to Sam a few seconds too late, if anything is to be blamed for the final seal beyond Ruby’s manipulations.

But anyway. However it happened, it’s a high tension situation between all of them, and Dean is currently alone and separated from Sam, and recognises in Cas once again something familiar that surprises him, emotionally, and convinces him to help from an honest plea. A common loneliness which is his emotional subplot about having Cas around this episode, from here to the last scene in the car when Cas leaves and Dean is immediately hollow again, and left with no distraction about his fight with Sam and the burden he’d carried over him.

One of the things that really strikes me is that the camera lingers so long on Dean while Cas is talking, favouring his reaction and showing him listening, coming to this decision to help, over Cas’s delivery of the lines. This scene is very much from his POV and working as an establishing scene to show us how Dean feels about Cas… Uncomfortable in proximity? maybe some levels of personal self-esteem stuff that he’s really ready to have such an intense thing in his life as Cas’s laser focused gaze and declarations of loyalty a shade off what Cas gave to Heaven now handed to Dean…

Or establishing among the many different, important things like the seeds of Cas as his best friend and his attempts to have fun with Cas, *genuinely* having fun with Cas, Cas as someone who he can mutually lean on (literally leaning on him in the laughing in the alleyway scene, emotionally supporting him just as he is taking emotional comfort in having Cas around this episode), we have all that ridiculous sexual tension and accidentally-deliberate innuendo here too. And as this is the Bert & Ernie Are Gay episode as well, this isn’t even the only time that happens.

And I think this multi-faceted meaning Cas gives to Dean is established officially here, and played often for the humour beats in this episode, but is going to be the devastating emotional core of the next.  

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This is literally not a romantic moment but Robbie Thompson composed a love ballad based on it what the h*ck.

This episode shows Dean a wholly broken version of Cas but the framing of Cas around it is pretty much Peak Original Cas™. I like this stuff here because of the give and take between them - the last couple of sets in this series have been Cas asking for stuff, while now Dean makes demands of Cas like being allowed four hours to sleep. Cas allows him to have it, despite his hilariously displayed alien nature to the entire concept, as if it’s all some moral failing on Dean’s part for being too human.

At the end of the season Dean’s gonna point out Cas sleeping like a little angel in the back of the car - I think that may be a continued thing of Dean’s understanding of Cas - learning that Cas doesn’t even have a concept of sleep while working with him, and in this and the last episode getting a clear idea of what Cas is like immediately after rebelling but before he picks up a single human trait or any of the nuances of human behaviour. Obviously he’s gonna completely ruin the angel at some point between here and now because even before Cas gets turned fully human in season 9 and is permanently altered in many ways he’s learned to chill about a lot of things, all credited to observation of Dean and/or Sam.

What I like about this especially is because of this give and take attitude between Dean and Cas - that Cas is learning from Dean, that Dean is negotiating his own needs from Cas, as much as Cas is now working with him and asking things of Dean. It’s an honest to god healthy friendly equilibrium by this point, and we go from demands in 5x02 to saying the truth and “please” in 5x03 to now Dean asking for space from Cas and Cas having to make a concession to Dean’s humanity and allow him this.

The “Human things” phrase is one Cas echoes in 10x01 when talking about more profound things that are benefits of humanity - art, hope, dreams… love… - and it’s the same sort of phrasing of human “stuff” and “things”, the broad categories of the human experience. I love Cas coming up against this, learning it, understanding it for himself, and this is such early days he’s stumped at the thought that someone might need to sleep after a long day and non-stop work. (Granted, Dean does not offer the best example of normal human sleeping patterns for Cas to learn from…)

… Also yes I was joking about Robbie up there but he recontextualises this moment as one of Cas stating his peace and purpose with Dean, a comfort to help him and to wait for him if Dean needs to sleep. I think it’s kinda sweet, although it’s a heck of a lot more Destiel in the context of season 10 than it is here.

What they mean to each other.

The nods in the first 2 are what get me the most. End!Cas to Dean and Dean to End!Cas. Each time gesturing to End!Dean something about the other, but obviously, as our Dean is the only one who takes anything out of this encounter aside from us the audience, aisde from getting us caught in the middle of their domestic dispute, the purpose it serves is for the ongoing present day storyline. For telling us what the rest of the time, they mean to each other, using End!Dean as the proxy for telling us this.

(Which is my flimsy justification for taking a sick day on an episode I thought I’d get like 10 gifsets out of and making 2, and including then the result of this after.)

The first gif is telling us, beyond the surface level exploration of what this says about what Dean has become, re: torture, told through End!Cas snarking at End!Dean about how Past!Dean still has morals about it, that there exists a deep nostalgia this version of Cas has for the Dean he knew. And that considering the timeline branches from Dean not making up with Sam in the next, like 24 hours of this episode, it’s really showing that when Cas was once the Cas we know - the one Dean tells never to change - he is already fond of the Dean we have, and that this is showing us that if he was lost, then Cas would miss it. (It’s an interesting sentiment to compare to it being stated somewhat more directly in 10x22, in the speech about watching Dean murder the world, which finally after like 5 years toppled this as the most depressing Destiel concept, so grats, Dabb.)

The second gif has been written about a looot so I’m mostly including it for data, the obvious nod to Cas after mentioning him to link it to the other moment and its not. The mention of the friends, and then a long chunk of intervening sentence, and THEN only after that, “Cas, too?” as a thing too significant like, sure the others are human and it’s horrifying but Cas is *special* He’s CAS we - we don’t do that to our Cas, right?? The fact that we’re right in this Carver-Edlund DeanCas spectacular set of episodes, building up their - friendship? But Dean doesn’t class Cas with “friends”…

And then Dean returns, and is saved, and Cas deadpans, “We had an appointment” and Dean… MELTS. Look at his face. His sudden need to touch Cas, and then in the next gifs the gentle way his hand rests on Cas’s shoulder, and the way he pulls it away. And then watch the next loop of the gif for Cas’s face, because A+ Early Destiel staring there… Even if you take it in the most platonic fashion, Cas is smiling as much as Cas smiles and it’s all aimed fondly at Dean.

On the other side of the hellscape of an episode, this moment of utter softness and affection for each other, and the start contrast to their potential future selves, hits home all the harder that they feel this strongly about each other right now.

(The next 2 Cas episodes I’m gonna skip because honestly it’s either plot bickering or just more of this affection and concern, especially from Dean to Cas. I’m just going to link these 2 gifsets which already exist and I didn’t make and have nothing substantial to add about them:

https://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/147479796111/frecklesandfeathers-never-forget-dean-holding
https://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/127700812198/some-people-call-it-tragic-dean-worrying-about

While they do not have any actual emotional bonding, the closest we get to it is Stuff Happens To Cas That Freaks Dean Out, Dean Is Concerned And Makes This Known. Also, in this stretch of time, I don’t believe there are any relevant Destiel moments from Dean’s POV while Cas is not around, which means I have the wonderful job of skipping straight from one Edlund episode to the next…)

there's a whole other tangent about don't ever change and how it is primarily protective not specifically about wanting Cas to stay an angel but for him not to be harmed from the things that make him Cas because many of the most Cas-like things that Dean admires were stripped from him and we can use the portrayal of End!Cas as Dean's POV on what makes Cas good and what he values about him and what he feels are Cas's inherent good qualities and therefore the things which would most hurt to see him lose he wanted Cas's wings to get him home aka needing him for his powers but what hurt was seeing Cas altered from the Cas he got to know in 5x03 which is deliberate episode placement building Cas up in one and tearing it down in the next while in both showing Dean's fondness for what Cas is at heart and the details that make him that way exemplified in that deadpan comment about the appointment :')

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Yeah, I know this moment isn’t about *Dean n Cas*

It’s about family.

And of seasons 1-5, *this is it* - this is the core family that they ever had in the whole found family aspect, the only members of it to ever get formally added and these are the people who of Kripke era were shown to mean the most to Sam & Dean as their found family, and the default found family arrangement (e.g. for the quickest/best example, in 4x17 Dean Smith’s family is Bobby, Ellen & Jo).

The entire middle of season 5 is fairly sparse in showing their relationship development, as it’s tied entirely to Cas’s quest for God and gets Real in 5x16, and otherwise until then we just get the demonstrations I’ve already mentioned of how Dean shows obvious emotional care for Cas now, especially in the episodes I skipped where Jesse then Gabriel were giving Cas a rough week and Dean was the one to react to it. They don’t really have a great deal of interaction this episode, and it’s not about them at all and Cas is generally existing as his own character whose relationship to Dean is important and defining to what we get on screen but still not his entire existence either plot or emotionally.

So I thought I should say something, and so I just wanna stop and ruminate for a second about how once again Cas is essentially Dean’s plus one for the family photo. And in a more general way, Cas even being present for this moment is a great gesture, a sign that he’s becoming emotionally embedded into the fabric of the show, that he’s now survived a whole season and a half. There’s something satisfying about his presence here, that beyond being just a bit of fun to see him hanging out with Ellen and Jo, he’s included in the family moment - Sam hauls both him and Dean in to these places - and this group who date back to season 2 for strong emotional bonds suggested or shown between all of them, have added Cas to the group.

I can kinda see why people who hate Cas might push back that of this core family group which dates back to the apparent hazy golden days of the show (when you only like season 1 & 2) suddenly has this interloper among them… I’d like to actually not kick back against that and defend Cas’s right to be completely embedded in this family because, well, he *hasn’t* had core bonding episodes with Sam, Bobby, certainly not Ellen and Jo, because that great drinking scene *was* it :P But ignoring fake concepts of “deservedness” because the characters in the show presumably feel he earned it for falling for ostensibly them (“did all of it for you” but shh) and choosing to fight alongside them, at least gives them the cameraderie of fellow soliders and while Cas isn’t exactly going to consider himself even a potential hunter until muuuch later, we see what’s left of the show’s presentation of the hunter community, accepting Cas right now, and so seeing him as one of their own in this way too. There’s plenty of *reasons* they might care about him - without stepping on characterisation toes, they also seem to have been hunting the Colt together for a while. But in terms of what we get on screen, of the bonds built, when you look below the surface of “here’s a photo of all the characters we expect you to care about right now” presented for us, what we have seen is of course a season and a half of DeanCas interaction and personal dynamics, and then a presentation of Cas in a family photo with 4 people who have never had a positive personal growth moment with him, and Dean. Who he rebelled against Heaven for.

I think this has to be the first indication that Cas is considered family, without stating it in words, and it’s just too early in him knowing Bobby and Sam for it to make sense that they’d see him in the same way. Maybe by the end of the season - but then, in 6x20 it’s clear they both consider Cas to be Dean issue to take to heart from the start… And I maintain a defensive stance about Sam n Cas only being obviously portrayed as friends with actual emotional scenes from much much later on. So it works on both levels of giving us a very early proof that Cas is considered near and dear, and in giving us a solid surface level depiction to dig deeper on.

In a weird way, it’s almost like Dean brings Cas home to meet the family for the first time - and in return, Cas being strange and reserved to an incredible degree at this point, is shown both in how much Dean has changed him, but also in a way, that he is doing these things for Dean - the callback to “last night on earth” just before the photo is taken reminds us that in 5x03, Cas would happily sit stock still in a dark room and call it a good evening. Possibly Dean already broke him in 5x03 after attempting to show him a good time. I mean, again, either way pick a level and there’s something humorous about Dean corrupting the angel or dragging him down to his level going on here.

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Hollowing Dean Out

This chunk of episodes has a clear purpose to utterly destroy Dean, in order that he might get to the lowest point to consider saying yes to Michael. Obviously there’s other parts of these episodes which hit him extremely hard in other ways, but this specific chapter of the story is about taking Cas - or the image of a strong, reliable Cas - away from him.

In 5x13 Dean trusts Cas enough to send him to meet Anna instead of just going there with Sam and getting themselves killed. When he time travels them, he immediately collapses and is useless for the rest of the episode, although he manages to fly himself back to them. At which point Dean’s wry description of him for Team Free Will is “mr comotose”…

I just wanna mention that “Team Free Will” was originally said in the most depressed, sardonic way ever and was in no means a particularly inspiring or intended to be good group to belong to. Dean’s already wrung out and it’s only episode 13 and he cracks in 17… Of course fandom claimed it and turned it into a positive description for Sam Dean and Cas as a team, but “Mr Comotose” is only a temporary description of Cas in that moment. In the wider picture, it’s how Cas is progressively becoming more and more vulnerable, and this was the first sign that, cut off from Heaven, he didn’t have the same power to pop in and out on them like he had in 4x03 when easily time-travelling Dean with no apparent cost to himself. In any case, Dean’s describing them all in the terms of how he rates them the lowest - his pain at Sam and demon blood, Cas’s growing uselessness, and his own estimation of his intelligence and worth.

(I’d guess Dean’s later use of the term is remembering more positively from the POV that they actually won - think of Cas’s amazement when describing their team in similar low-rated descriptors in 6x20 while looking nostalgically back on 5x22.)

That episode ends with Mary uttering the lines which up until this point have seemed almost sweet, if you remember from 2x13 that she said angels were watching over Dean - the addition of Cas to his life in the intervening time feels like a positive idea, that Cas is the one looking over him, and since 4x22 has sort of become his guardian angel in a very literal sense of choosing him to latch onto and help. At this point Mary, mind-wiped and oblivious, repeats the line but now in the full context of the apocalypse and the set up we’ll discover in the next couple of episodes, that Heaven orchestrated her marriage to John, and that she’s only there to have her babies so they can grow up to be the vessels. The “angels watching over” them are Michael and his host, eagerly waiting to snatch Dean up and use him for their purposes. It fully corrupts the line from its positive connotations, so with dramatic irony also takes away the comfort of what Cas might be for Dean.

Then Cas is affected by Famine, and at first Dean’s surprised when Cas steals the burger from him, then utterly perturbed when he shows up eating them to deliver exposition, asks with concern when Cas tells him it’s in the “low hundreds”, and finally sees Cas unable to fight, sitting on the floor eating raw meat with his hands, completely overcome and one of the first times (the first time?) Cas is referred to being Dean’s attack dog. There’s the great moment where Dean suggests 10 seconds is too long for Cas to do his thing and immediately goes in after him, but that again shows his faith Cas can do something in 5 seconds has been broken, and sure enough, Cas has been overpowered.

Finally we come to the end of the episode, where Dean’s got to deal with detoxing Sam yet again, and Cas shows up to offer very little comfort about the situation. He can’t do anything about it, and they’re feeling in general miserable, having learned the extent to which Heaven has manipulated them, and facing the helplessness of Heaven’s will, as 5x13 also showed in spades, with the cupid thing the icing on the top.

And Dean leaves Cas back there and goes out to the scrapyard, where he breaks down and prays to the sky, reminiscent of 4x18, where he first prayed in desperation and Cas answered… But in this case it’s very, very deliberate to show that he is not praying remotely for Cas to hear and answer, and that Cas may be in it with them - and this is important to bond them in other ways, facing the bad times and desperation together - but right now, Dean can not pray to Cas and get what he wants. He needs a higher power, and at this point in the season, Cas is no longer remotely the source of that strength for him.

Compare to the start of the season where they were built up, and Cas saving Dean in 5x04 was met with the “don’t ever change” and the sense of Cas as powerful and heroic to Dean, and you can see Cas changing and the narrative twisting what he meant to Dean away from him.

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It’s worthless.

This is straight up the answer to the exchange of the amulet in 5x02.

We return to the core of their season 5 bonding - the absent father issues which in 4x10 were a way to make Dean laugh and sympathise with Anna over her - and by extension all the angels’ - plight, now transferred to Cas.

Dean’s first action on getting back to life is to phone Cas and we cut immediately to him standing by the door, looking utterly broken. He bargains with them, but Sam says no, sorry, I don’t think he was. Cas in this moment comes to terms with his futile quest thwarted by God’s order to back off. And his anger and disappointment are clear as he turns his eyes to the sky and cusses out God, and trails off from finishing his sentence - “I believed in you.”

His faith visibly shattered as we watch, he turns and throws the amulet back to Dean, declaring it worthless - it can’t find God if God doesn’t want to be found. Dean’s reactions through all this are where the heavy stuff lies because once again Sam is the one to reach out and try and call Cas back, but he flaps off and leaves them.

At this point we should probably cycle back through the meanings of the amulet since this is the conclusion of 5x16, Dark Side of the Moon, and Dean’s faith in Sam has been shaky all season for obvious reasons, but this episode has driven home how utterly different and fractured they are at this point - as the narrative takes Sam away from Dean too - and shown Dean a perception of Sam where fundamentally he seems to want to run away and disown their family, favouring memories where he was pretending to be normal without them, or times he had ditched the family to try and make his own way in the world. As I said in the previous gifset in this series, this part of the show is about hollowing Dean out, and leaving him in a state of wanting to say yes, and the build up is not subtle with seeing how their encounters in this time shape him.

This shared personal arc with Cas, on a note that they have always shared but is now putting them in tune with each other, is a different way of taking Cas to Dean’s level, and that certainty and furious approach in 5x02 to finding God disappears and Cas is now relatable to Dean over this. This isn’t seeing Cas vulnerable with powers being overwhelmed, but with seeing him emotionally toppled, but in a way with pain that is utterly relatable to Dean, and takes Cas to the same place of furious atheism that he and Dean will continue to share to date; a mixture of existential horror and despair in a father figure that has abandoned them.

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This is one of my favourite scenes between them, because it’s just a quiet break from the action, based entirely around this simple interaction. Dean tries to make Cas feel better, first of all with seeing him sitting around nursing the biggest hangover ever. He responds with this lovely care which sure he may extend to anyone who was suffering in his general vicinity, but he’s got an even stronger connection to Cas now than he ever had before, and there’s a connection too that Cas went out and tried to treat this feeling with alcohol. As Dean would and does do for his own feelings.

This opening move to tend to Cas’s physical needs has always seemed really sweet to me, that Dean takes a moment to think about how Cas feels, and consider his needs on several levels, snarky as he is about it.

And, of course, it’s the framing that Cas has spent all his time in the episode so far sulking around including spending some time alone with Sam, and while I absolutely love their interactions this episode and think it’s really important for the whole eventual Sam and Cas friendship, I love more that this moment is one of stillness and singling Dean out to come have a quiet moment with Cas shaped around concern for Cas’s feelings and needs.

Oh boy, absent fathers… There runs a thread through season 5 of two particular subjects for Dean n Cas: absent fathers and last nights on earth. There’s, uh, some emotional overlap:

ANNA
I was stationed on earth 2,000 years. Just… watching… silent… invisible… out on the road… sick for home… waiting on orders from an unknowable father I can’t begin to understand. So don’t tell me that –

DEAN laughs.

ANNA
What is so funny? What?

DEAN
Nothing. Sorry. It’s just…I can relate.

(And then she used his best line on him a scene later and they hooked up.)

This is, also, incidentally, the last real conversation Dean n Cas have at the end of grinding Dean down to the point where he runs off to say yes to Michael, and the subtext of the episode suggests he has already decided before the action scene. So there’s that to think about :P

The absent fathers thing comes in varying degrees of serious and silly, with 5x03, as I said, as the sort of rosetta stone to their interactions over the season, offering us the line in comic relief, and the joke about the post office, that Dean uses on Raphael because of what Cas said to the woman at the brothel. Of course, God is Cas’s father too, and it’s not so funny after 5x16 when he crushes Cas’s faith. Dean, however, has never related more to Cas, and this, I think, is the polish on top of their bond which of course is already deeply established, and once more reaching the top of the rollercoaster in terms of positive/negative development in this time.

This is a very high point, though. I think by now, sealing them to always have a connection on some level, whatever might have happened from this point on, and what makes Cas special to Dean on so many levels, is simply that they share this moment.

(Which, to be clear, that last note is very much still existentially bleak and enjoying some black humour in the task at hand - if you want the absolute dead opposite moment you go to the open of 13x06 and the look they exchange when Dean realises they’re fighting undead cowboys this week, and oh, I hope I get there in this series, but yeah, if you want a grim opposite of the feel-good moment there, this is it :P There is no real hope or comfort Dean finds in it, just some fleeting humour, and underneath it, the only thing that really helps to manage it is companionship with someone like Cas who understands and they can share this feeling.)

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I am absolutely reinventing the wheel with this post because this stuff has been talked over so much: Cas’s break up language with “moving on from you” as a snide implication of how done Cas is with Dean right now, Dean picking Cas to lash out at with sexual barbs, in the contrast to how he chooses to tell Bobby he’s not his real father and Sam that he has no faith in him and bring up all their well-established angst of the season, you know, customising these attempts to lash out at his family with what hurts the most… 

When it comes to the sexuality of these attacks from Dean, it's very much a moment of that faith, that hallowed reverence of Cas and the underlying tension and confusion he creates in Dean being twisted into what to Dean becomes the horrible version of what Cas, well, I guess awakes in him. The tension and comfort they share through their relationship with the underlying sexual tension, but the romantic impossibility of Cas. That he comes to this role in the family not as another brother, or even being disowned here as a brother-in-arms, the focus on his combat use to Dean. His attack comes from the personal, sexual side of the relationship, heavy projecting and twisting what might have been good into attempts to shake off Cas's care for him, that perceived interest Dean feels in the way Cas looks at him, throwing it back in Cas's face. Whether Cas really is into Dean or not - and Cas seems the last person to think about trying to bang Dean in a moment like this - Dean himself interprets Cas's care for him so far and interest, his tension, the feeling between them, as one where rejecting it and throwing it back at Cas, like he tells Bobby he's not his father, Sam he rejects as having no faith in him... This is what he hands back to Cas. Turning their meaningful bond into snappy angry aggressive flirting, the sort not actually used to try and bed someone but to let them know you know the sexual tension is there, this is the level you work on, but no more than that. From there, rejection and throwing a drink on them at a bar or whatever scenario this wanders into in Dean's version of this dynamic he conjures to rebuff Cas and try to make Cas hate him and back off.

And at the end of this sequence of despair and family bickering and Dean disowning everyone he loves left right and centre, Dean uses Cas’s concern for him in order to trick and banish him, knowing that Cas would be the one who would be naive and caring enough to come in and check on him if he pulled this trick off.

I’ll take a moment to point out this is Jeremy Carver’s last episode before 8x01, and that there’s something I like about this and 5x03 which is that Destiel has a sort of structural embedded feeling, that the meaning between them is established in story beats rather than isolated incidents that betray care. The way Dean would never have escaped if anyone else had come, and that he had only prepared an angel banishing, the only clean getaway he can wrangle is the one where Cas opens the door and he banishes him before he can close it again. The way there’s a clear mirroring structure in the episode between Dean’s emotional arcs with Sam, Bobby and Cas. It’s all the little early hallmarks of Carver era Destiel in an episode.

Of course, taking away Cas’s faith in Dean is important too, just because it isn’t any fun unless EVERYONE is having the worst week of their lives.

Cas actually keeps up the same feeling about Dean between 4x22 until Dean legs it at the end of 4x17, at which point the stuff he said in 4x02 about doing all of it for Dean seems ways less funny:

CASTIEL
I rebelled for this?! So that you could surrender to them?

[…]

CASTIEL
I gave everything for you. And this is what you give to me.

(I didn’t gif any of this because I’m super not fond of that scene for obvious reasons.)

This feeling is simmering under Cas’s mood until he has to go chase after Dean trying to say Yes to Michael for the second time in a day.

There’s a strong theme of suicide to this episode, given it starts with Dean literally preparing for his own thematic death via Michael, down to a note and giving away his stuff. He escapes from the panic room by staging a potential suicide which worries Cas enough to open the door for him, and in this case Cas is talking frankly to him that he doesn’t have faith that Dean won’t give in anyway and say Yes, at which point his own suicide mission approach to this fight with a self-banishment is hardly the most self-defeating end suggested today. (It’s also the bleakest way their fates are tied together out of all the more positive “i could go with you” type conversations from much later down the line.)

Also can we talk about the word “faith” in there because after 5x16 that’s a very loaded term and Sam’s faith in Dean comes from an irrational (but not wrong) place of brotherly love, versus what Dean and Cas have built, which is still very much something they are working on together. 

5x17 showed them extremely emotionally close, but on such similar territory it’s easy to imagine that when one of them doesn’t have faith in themselves, neither does the other; Cas relates too much to Dean’s despair to trust his emotional strength, because last episode Cas showed up having drunk away all the loss of faith in his father, and now Dean has betrayed their core principles and the one last thing that Cas was relying on as a rock in his world. 

The fact they’re on such unstable emotional ground, both suicidal and miserable and lacking faith in each other and themselves makes them reflect back on each other - as season 5 is pretty much all Dean POV, Cas as a mirror to Dean to show his own awful state reflected in how his angel has been brought to this point of despair as well. And also to react back at him with a personally felt anger - the alleyway scene might be easier to swallow if you take Cas as a literal shoulder angel or personification of Dean’s rage and self-destruction. Obviously Cas has his own emotional stakes in the story as a separate character, but through this part of the season I think Dean and Cas’s connection is pretty much “misery loves company”…

It’s interesting emotional storytelling… I’ll be glad to get past it :P

Chapter Text

CASTIEL
You could say my batteries are – are drained.

DEAN
What do you mean? You’re out of angel mojo?

CASTIEL
I’m saying that I am thirsty and my head aches. I have a bug bite that itches no matter how much I scratch it, and I’m saying that I’m just incredibly…

DEAN 
Human. Wow. Sorry.

Giffed the first part of this specifically because of the hilarious pause while Cas fails to elaborate while Dean waits. They’re pretty out of step and not recovered a jot from their argument when it comes to the interpersonal stuff, even if Dean may feel internally softened towards Cas because he did a big sacrifice play for them - at the end of 5x18 he does throw in this concern about Cas no one asked him for:

SAM
You think Adam’s okay?

DEAN
Doubt it. Cas either. But we’ll get ‘em.

But yeah, Dean’s face and body language when Cas says “no” goes through a long pause of increasing silent tension, until he snaps at Cas to explain. They’re still pretty snappy with each other…

This episode has Cas having to grapple with being utterly cut off from Heaven, as we saw in 5x04 and threatened to be a result of the Bad Ending - though it happens for different reasons here it’s a bad omen. I keep ending up talking about 5x22’s “awww ain’t he a little angel” so I’m just gonna link a post about it now, out of order, as I talk about Cas being human at the end of the season.

Dean says, “Wow, sorry,” deeply sincerely when he realises Cas is human, because he knows how much it sucks to be human. He met end!Cas and heard how Cas felt about being human then, too, and Cas back in this time is very much in a raw state of character development where, like you might say season 1 Dean defines himself too much by John, of course Cas is still very much defining himself too much by Heaven - while later they may manage to shake off at least some of this programming to be their own selves. But right now the sympathetic POV is that being human sucks (understandable) and Dean knows in particular how Cas thinks it sucks.

He does pretty well for himself this episode anyway, especially showing when he goes up against Pestilence that he has a great deal of inner strength left despite being human. Considering Famine utterly bested him, I don’t think Famine is a zillion times stronger than Pestilence. Or that a scrap of angel is enough to overcome what a moderately strong amount of angel left could not. I think if Cas gets weaker all season and by a magnitude more after 5x18 and the banishing, then his ability to fight Pestilence is all something coming from Cas, as his own self, his own value and strength. Perhaps Famine bested him because he was blaming it all on his vessel and denying that he himself was becoming weaker while 5x21 shows him finding resourcefulness and strength in what he CAN do. He’s still making plans for how to help them, and though he has a moment of doubt in the middle, pulls through with the angel with a shotgun moment.

And I would like to bring that all back around to saying that while Dean n Cas don’t define each other in the sense that they can’t exist without each other, I think there is a push and pull between their characters this season and when they despair in each other, they despair in themselves, as I said in the 5x18 post, and in this case, as I’ve giffed for pt.2 of this episode literally the next lines of this conversation, Cas has his faith restored in Dean’s inner strength, we are beyond the chunk of the season hollowing them out and into the little stretch of like 4 episodes where they’re allowed to build some optimism that they might win after all, and so Cas gains emotional, inner strength back by his own faith in Dean being restored too.

I just wanna stare at this apology some, because I love it and it’s… well it’s almost objectively terrible from Dean’s POV, hence the amazing series of faces he pulls as Cas gets into the back-handed compliment seeming part of it. Pure raw honesty is lovely and all but sometimes you’ve got to sugarcoat things a bit, because this just comes across telling Dean how he saw him and why he was so pissed a few episodes ago :P Plus, you know, “You’re welcome.” *hangs up*

(I love Cas.)

But from Cas’s POV much of his personal arc this season has been structured around faith. His hunt for God occupies his thoughts for most of it, up to 5x16 where Dean finally gets close to the one solid lead who can help. At which point, of course, God crushes this hope, because he has chosen his chess pieces to fight this thing and he knows damn well they can do it themselves if they put their minds to it… (Which, you know… Lovely parenting, but great author manipulating the characters and crushing them to fine powder to rebuild from. Chuck has his pluses and minuses :P)

At which point Cas loses all his faith, goes on a bender and miserably nurses his crushed faith and has the most dramatic existential crises ever, right in tune with Dean having his own. And they bond, and Dean reassures Cas that he too has been there, and for a brief moment Cas puts his whole trust on Dean… Who immediately shatters it by running off to try and say Yes to Michael, hence the utter personal betrayal Cas expresses in 5x18 when retrieving Dean from running off again. Dean n Cas both put each other on pedestals and Dean has already seen Cas come pretty far down off his in the natural course of things, both on a personal level and seeing his powers dwindle, and so he can begin to relate to Cas on a human level. Cas, too, should this have been the end of the show, would have come out of this seeing Dean on a better, more personal level.

And of course not to say that he doesn’t - he ends up fully attached. This rebuilding in this moment is a wonderful part of the development on Cas’s side, as he evaluates Dean with a clearer perspective than he’s had before. That Dean fucked up but it’s not to the total detriment of his character, and that he can still be strong. That Cas can have faith in Dean but perhaps a little safer standing than the precarious place of trying to put all the weight of God’s responsibility onto Dean’s shoulders. (As everyone does.)

Long term this isn’t the last season so Cas ends up falling down one heck of a way from trying to protect Dean and still placing him in a position of untouchable safety, and self-denial in the sense of sacrificing their interaction and eventually friendship for what he thinks is best for Dean. But in the here and now this is probably about the healthiest way Cas will interact with Dean for like 2-3 seasons :P

Chapter Text

“So what do we do now?”

You pretty much can not convince me that these are not connected, though this is one I accept people may skip over as headcanon…

I just have a strong appreciation for this thread running through the season of the “Last night on earth” - a theme which HAS to come to a head when confronted with the actual, very real, night before the apocalypse is truly meant to go down, and not some fight along the way, but very much the moment when the “inevitable blast wave” would come.

I think it shows a LOT about how Cas has changed through the season that we contrast him sitting quietly, patiently, and full of his angelic certainty and purpose, then see in 5x04 his broken self from the future, before we start to see his slow crumbling through the season.

5x10 is the other stop along the way, where Ellen and Jo curiously try to get Cas drunk - before he is really weakened up enough for it to stick, and still getting by as their seemingly strange and alien house guest, like his aversion to door handles, and lack of effect from the alcohol he’s plied with.

There’s something I find very amusing about how it is clear during Dean’s determination to pick up Jo that you can see Cas and Ellen are still sitting at the kitchen table moments before Dean gets up to go talk to Jo. 

It’s to be assumed that Cas and Ellen *remain* like 10ft away at the most, while Dean is giving Jo the “eat drink and make merry” line which has her incredulously ask if he’s giving her the last night on earth speech. And both Dean and Jo continually cast their eyes to the side of the kitchen that Ellen and Cas are sitting at. 

Fear of Ellen or keeping an eye on Cas through this to see how he takes it, who even freakin’ knows. I’d have to say the safe money is on pure terror of Ellen, but, ya know, Cas is right there too :P

And by this true Last Night On Earth there’s just Dean n Cas and Bobby left and I suppose Bobby is invited for the drinks, but even just completely platonically, it’s truly harrowing to see how Cas has been changed over the course of the season, that his new answer to Dean’s question of how he would approach the last night on earth is far closer to how Dean - at least in hopelessness - would do it.

… And to cast our eyes ahead, Dean may not lose hope *now* (and the world rather depends on that) but…

DEAN: 
Yeah, you know how I’m gonna deal? I’m gonna stuff my piehole, I’m gonna drink, and I’m gonna watch some Asian cartoon porn and act like the world’s about to explode because it is.

There’s always time to reduce them to hopelessness some other way :P

Well crap.

In many ways this just speaks for itself for how Dean is shaken to lose Cas so obviously and again on his behalf for his plan that he has only a sliver of hope for…

I’ve had a much harder time being remotely objective about this all since Dabb surprised ugly sobbing out of me in 13x01 while Dean was mourning a Cas I knew damn well was coming back alive and well in a handful of episodes, which normally is a great way to chillax through the angsty nonsense. To the point that I may be low key obnoxiously rating all the times Dean witnesses Cas’s death against an impossible metric.

This however is the closest version to 12x23 - Dean is standing almost shoulder to shoulder with Satan possessing his brother, and Lucifer takes a moment to explode Cas, and Dean *stops* and looks on in horror, shares a look of horror with Bobby, is horrified a moment longer, before turning furious eyes on Lucifer, who’s still just standing around next to him, to get to business and make Cas’s sacrifice worth it.

There’s never any time to process it in the action, but this earns a pause and an emotional hardening from Dean, indescribably backwards from watching him shatter at the end of season 12, but still a painful loss all the same, though in this case at the end of all things one they were all expecting to make. Perhaps it’s the lack of hope here which makes the start of season 13 that much worse, because Cas’s death in 12x23 is preceded in 12x22 with Dean talking about the hope for some long-term normality with Cas and Mary back in their lives and a permanent fixture. Taking Cas and Bobby from him in this fight is mirrored in the losses in 12x23, but taking them from Dean in an entirely different emotional landscape.

But still. We take several long, shocking seconds to process this one here at Stull.

Boop.

I’m pretty defensive of the fact this is the first time that Cas heals Dean, or resurrects someone on screen (moments before 4x01 and however they did that aside, though I usually assume that process was way more complicated, hence the bomb site :P). It takes away from this moment to pretend Classic Cas was running around doing all the stuff later Cas does. He has like 2 powers: flapping around, and snark, for the first 2 years we know him.

In any case, God restores Cas, and Cas restores Dean and then Bobby, and as much of the damage that can be undone is undone, leaving them on the other side of the end of the story. And Dean, stunned, uncertain of how Cas randomly reappeared, fully powered and back to full confidence, asks him if he’s God, with chilling foreshadowing for next season.

There’s a strong reset sort of feeling here; Cas has been hauled back from drifting towards being human and Dean is once again shown an all-powerful Cas who doesn’t seem to belong with him any more, who now the job is done is put back to the start if there had been any hope of keeping him. Cas once again has a greater purpose that takes him from Dean’s side, and his restoration only sends him deep into exploring that purpose to his eventual ruin…

And at the end of the day, this story is set up that we see Dean still lose everyone who represented the conflict and the victory - we’re told he doesn’t see Bobby again for a long time. Sam is gone. And he goes to Lisa to recover in the civilian life, where concerns of demons and angels and monsters are all just nightmares and passing worries to protect themselves against but not to engage. Cas is brought back, but not for Dean to keep. Because his “victory” is still entirely about loss:

DEAN:
What are you gonna do now?

CASTIEL: 
Return to Heaven, I suppose.

DEAN: 
Heaven?

CASTIEL: 
With Michael in the Cage, I’m sure it’s total anarchy up there.

DEAN: 
So, what, you’re the new sheriff in town?

CASTIEL: 
I like that. Yeah. I suppose I am.

DEAN: 
Wow. God gives you a brand-new, shiny set of wings, and suddenly you’re his bitch again.

CASTIEL: 
I don’t know what God wants. I don’t know if he’ll even return. It just… seems like the right thing to do.

DEAN: 
Well, if you do see him, you tell him I’m coming for him next.

CASTIEL: 
You’re angry.

DEAN: 
That’s an understatement.

CASTIEL: 
He helped. Maybe even more than we realize.

DEAN: 
That’s easy for you to say. He brought you back. But what about Sam? What about me, huh? Where’s my grand prize? All I got is my brother in a hole!

CASTIEL: 
You got what you asked for, Dean. No paradise. No hell. Just more of the same. I mean it, Dean. What would you rather have? Peace or freedom?

When DEAN looks over, CASTIEL is gone.

DEAN: 
Well, you really suck at goodbyes, you know that?

That final question will philosophically haunt them, and emotionally sunder them next season, as Dean is sent off to live in peace, while Cas will grapple with what freedom really means.

Honestly, to me, a lowest point as bad as when shit finally hits the fan over this in 6x20, as it means they won’t see each other for a year, and when they do, it’s all secrets and anger all the time, and until season 8, we’re left with what Cas had been built up to mean to Dean in season 4 & 5 as the base of their relationship of why it means so much to see it constantly torn away.

Chapter Text

Welcome to Gamble era, the first mention of Cas is Dean’s subconscious referring to him as “sugar” thanks for coming to my TED talk.

…

Okay no I should probably add at least a shade of a thought more :P

Dean’s been repressing his need for Cas pretty well over this period - he has picked up his drinking buddy Sid who he has met every day for a beer for the year and seems to be a neighbour, maybe co-worker, and someone who hangs around the neighbourhood as a regular feature of Dean’s life. Of course, by the end of the episode, what emotional gap no matter how superficial Sid fulfilled for Dean, he’s gonna be killed off to leave him completely open to get his “pal” back one way or another.

I like the framing of Azazel vs Cas: one is the worst villain they’ve ever known, worse than Lucifer in terms of being the agent of personally wrecking their lives. And he represents the threat to Dean’s suburbia life in a massive way, the fear of loss that is blatantly shown with having his dream of Lisa being killed by Azazel and Ben fed demon blood. His greatest horror is still Azazel - 13x01 opens with imagery of Mary’s death, with Dean unconscious in a nursery where a yellow-eyed “baby” had just entered the narrative. The oldest scars in the story are ones Azazel wrought, and Lucifer is just a pantomime villain behind the real fear, so much so that losing Mary seemingly to Lucifer still conjures up the horror of what *Azazel* did to her instead.

I think 13x01 paralleling both 1x01 and 6x01’s paralleling of 1x01 (ow Dabb era headache) gives us a clearer lens to examine this one, as Cas is absent from the story and only mentioned in passing to remind us what happened to him, and that no one has heard from him, the dark side of his absence heavily foreshadowed in the way he has been in contact with no one since Dean last saw him. With the bad way Cas’s story goes maybe seeing how Dean thinks of him in the here and now sans-foreshadowing, but just his raw feeling that Cas coming back is the best thing God ever did for him (again, shades of the prayer in 13x01 with him begging for Cas back…) and used to contrast the idea of the worst villain being brought back to balance out the good of Cas being alive.

And Azazel is used as the element that destroys Dean’s little family, the emotional scars that he can never settle down without the horror that it will all be taken away, while Cas is representative of the new family he built, the sense of Cas completing Dean’s version of the family he needs most - Sam, Bobby and Cas, all of whom are slowly re-introduced into his life over the first 4 episodes on their new, post-apocalypse terms.

Chapter Text

Cas finally returns in the third episode! \o/ But not without some serious struggle to get him here. In 6x01 Sam explains that Cas never answered to explain why he was resurrected, and he repeats this here, but this time Dean is determined to get Cas to come talk to him for the first time in a year, now that he’s back in the game.

Dean listens as Sam explains how Cas hadn’t been answering, and his face is thoughtful, because he knows Cas should be loyal and helpful and “we had an appointment” style prompt to swoop in with answers, if he’s operating at the “don’t ever change” ideal version of Cas that Dean has built in his head.

He decides to try anyway, hopeful before it’s ever stated from his own perspective of Cas and their “profound bond” that Cas may answer him if he won’t answer Sam - that it’s still worth a try when Dean is the one reaching out.

What he doesn’t know is that the reason Cas comes is solely because Dean is calling, and because Dean is calling about a heavenly weapon gone rogue situation aka more twists and turns of the angel war which is exactly what Cas has been dealing with all year - because the last thing Cas wants is Dean back in the game, and specifically tangled up in the angel war, though working with Sam is bad enough because of Crowley’s side of the Campbell scheme.

…

Random other detail that made me laugh: I’m trying to focus on the interpersonal narrative rather than the little details but Dean sitting there all on the bed, legs spread, suggestively with the beer bottle upright in his crotch right as he reaches out to Cas for the first time in a year… Pfft. Sometimes there’s just imagery you have to point at. :P

…

Cas shows up and Dean still looks genuinely stunned to see him, looking at Sam in a way where he should have been gloating it worked if he wasn’t making this weird stunned sparkly-eyed face to see Cas again, too over-come with his presence to try and score points with Sam after taking a gamble on getting Cas to answer.

This line, though… From Cas’s POV there’s stuff we won’t know until the end of the season - stuff that even Edlund to Edlund they just didn’t *know* yet so you’re going to the next level of the text than how any of this read originally, to how it works from hindsight. Because on the first go-through of this episode it’s largely played as a comic beat, and Dean’s reactions, his “can you believe this” look, the sense that he and Sam are somehow more of a mind than not (because we don’t know Sam is soulless yet either :P) all change the side we’re on in all sorts of ways to the kick this gets on the second viewing…

This is Cas’s answer to why he chose to come now, and he’s going to change this answer in a minute, to explain that he didn’t come for Dean, he came to deal with the Rod of Aaron, and to deflect to the angel war. This isn’t 100% true: he may have come and investigated it without telling Sam if Sam had prayed him this tip, and maybe Sam would have run into a dead end, and left town when the deaths stopped. Dean calls, and Cas goes to see him for the first time since the raking leaves scene, because Dean’s involved in the main plot, and it’s specifically because Cas has been playing a juggling act to keep Dean OUT of the main plot, yet here he is, that Cas comes - comes because of the main plot stuff going on, but reveals himself because it’s Dean asking.

And when Sam calls him out on not coming sooner, when there were very legitimate questions to answer, Cas blows it off to Sam as being about caring about Dean more, to Dean blows it off as caring about the angel war more. But in this moment, truth that Cas has built a considerable emotional stake in Dean, which has *already* irrecoverably driven a wedge between them, because he’s *already* listened to Crowley and cut the deal, and from the moment he returns to Dean’s life, he’s in damage limitation mode.

But it is true, and we’ve seen that from 4x01 onward that Cas has a stronger emotional foundation with Dean by a thousand miles… The fact he knows it, the fact that this season for Cas is built around trying to manage the ongoing disaster that is his life with the angel war in one hand and Dean in the other, the fact that he’s already made all his bad choices on Dean’s behalf… If not for this previously established “profound bond” we saw grow on our screens in seasons 4 & 5, none of what Cas does would make sense at all.

I included the final gif, as a parting thought, mostly because there’s something weirdly reminiscent of Cas being confronted in 6x20 in the way it’s set up, with him in the middle of the room, defending himself about a revealed truth. And once again it’s the bond with Dean which eventually brings him to that point - that he struggles to preserve past the point of utter disbelief in 6x20 as it’s crumbling through his fingers. Perhaps it’s accidental, but I can’t shake the feeling about the way it looks.

Chapter Text

Guh, this whole exchange is awful, but this specifically once again highlights the conflict they’re building between Cas and Dean, that the angel war has come between them, and at this point Cas is clearly made out to be lying, without it being clear to us right now why or what about. Again, on the first zap through the season it has to be taken on a sympathetic limited Dean POV because this is the *only* point of view offered to us pretty much all season on emotional issues except for the very specific things about how Sam feels once he gets his soul back. The mytharc and major emotional issues are tackled through Dean’s POV, and at this point in the season he is *pissed* that Cas isn’t answering the phone, and not answering Dean’s questions when he does show up.

This line in particular is a sort of counterpart to the “More profound bond” line from last episode - Dean revealing with “what happened to you”, the extent to which he trusted Cas and felt that he was a good friend before. Again, that “Don’t ever change” save point of when Cas was perfect for Dean, and the lingering goodness and connection between them from 4x22-5x17, the golden era of when Cas n Dean were fairly uncomplicated and bonding and on the same side, utterly. And, of course, Cas had been steadily becoming more human in Dean’s eyes, or “like one” which is to say relaxing from the stoic angel facade into a more natural version of Cas’s personality where he could enjoy his personal freedom and be mostly who he wanted to be in social and tactical situations, and he and Dean had a sometimes tetchy but overall respectful give and take in these scenarios…

In any case, there’s a fundamental understanding that Dean once had about Cas - that he would and could swoop in to save the day, and that he would come when Dean asked for him, not because Cas was beholden to him, but because he cared. Within just a few episodes, Cas has undermined a fairly fundamental part of the trust that Dean thought that he had in him, while avoiding him to avoid having to answer questions about what he had done to Sam, and everything beyond the vague fact of the angel war:

DEAN
Are you kidding me? I have been on red alert about Sam, and you come for some stupid horn?!

CASTIEL
You asked me to be here, and I came.

DEAN
I – I’ve been asking you to be here for days, you dick!

Like in 4x21 and a couple of other season 4 episodes, this episode has the lovely staging of putting Cas in one place and then a moment later mirroring it with Dean standing there. 

In the moment when Cas is in the forefront of the picture with Dean blurry behind his shoulder he talks about the war and the regrettable things he does; turning his back on Dean, who hovers like his angry conscience, hammering home the divide that Cas has caused, that he has chosen to leave Dean out of his plan and can’t take counsel from him. When Cas returns and Dean has walked into that space, Cas is now at his shoulder and Dean has turned his back on him, angry at the neglect he feels that Cas has shown him, not just in not showing up at a whim to help him with whatever, but that he is not behaving in the way that once made Cas feel like a friend to Dean. Cas promises to Dean’s turned back,

CASTIEL
Dean.

DEAN
What?

CASTIEL
About your brother. I… I don’t know what’s wrong with him, but I do want to help. I’ll make inquiries.

I think knowing what we know about the overall plot with hindsight Cas really had no clue what to do about it and would let it play out some more - and since it gets to boiling point in this episode anyway it hardly matters, sparing him having to pretend to look for long. But I think this is Cas trying desperately to maintain the friendship and knowing that showing concern about Sam is the no.1 way to do that for Dean. Next episode he will show up without any on-screen wrangling to help Dean with Sam and diagnose his soullnessness, implying that though he may have been desperate at this point to try and maintain his place with Dean - the concerned guardian angel to the Winchesters, already at loose ends on how to maintain it and have his cake and eat it, months before 6x20 - it isn’t all manipulation. In 6x20 he defines leaping in and recklessly helping the Winchesters without caring about consequences for a moment, but acting altruistically for them, is “Me again”, and I think there are several moments through the season where this breaks through, though for a large portion of it he’s presented in this stand-offish, mysteriously torn and angry way.

The last comment I have about the framing of putting Cas’s anguish forefront then contrasting it with Dean’s, is that at least in this moment, though this season is pretty harsh for Cas fans, I do like it as, especially on re-watching when we know it all and have Cas’s sympathetic POV to layer over the background of the Dean-focused angst which all makes sense from *his* perspective, that though they’re torn and at odds again, the imagery still connects their perspectives as equally weighted, equally conflicted, and two equals struggling with a philosophical issue that’s actively ripping them apart for the next two seasons.

Chapter Text

How long can Cas avoid meeting Dean’s eye… 

There’s multiple reaction shots from Sam and Dean in between these looks, I just once singled them all out and coming back to this gifset a couple of years later for this project, I think it tells the story pretty well as Cas comes to terms with what exactly he has done to Sam, and the struggle he has to meet Dean’s eye and give him the news, because with all hindsight, this is NOT a dramatic twist in the story devoid of any context except adding drama and explaining Sam’s weirdness, but a heavy character beat for Cas on the 2nd run through.

In this moment Cas is thinking hard, realising where Sam’s soul is, how long it has been there, and that it was his own oversight, this first moment of truly even noticing he had some serious hubris due over his actions.

He makes the token gesture of checking Samuel’s soul, while knowing full well that Crowley resurrected him from his apparent stock of hellbound souls (will we ever know why he was there? The longer Mary is around for real the more it makes me itch for answers :P) and is quick to flap off and return to his angel war, leaving them to move on to the seemingly utterly unrelated Nancy Drew adventure to work out they’re working for Crowley and he’s the one pulling all the strings.

I think Cas is lying by omission here, but that his horror and the weight of what he knows he’s dealing with it all very true, and he genuinely feels this - in 6x20 I believe his horror when Sam asks if he brought him back like this deliberately.

And through this moment, Cas knows he’s going to have to meet Dean’s eye eventually, and deliver this news, while knowing he has caused the cardinal sin to Dean - hurting Sammy. By the end of the season it is a sign of how far gone Cas is that he uses breaking Sam’s wall as a manipulation to keep Dean out of the way, as his desperation and the truth being out takes over his short term compassion for the long-term hope of winning and establishing a peace where he can fix it all later. When it has moved to the hope of winning them back, and if not, sacrificing their relationship entirely for the fact they will be protected.

For now, he has the luxury of this being one of the few scenes where, without Dean knowing Cas bears any responsibility, they can talk like adults about things and work together on the problem, as of course Cas genuinely didn’t know what was wrong with Sam up to this point. For Cas, this is very bad, but there is still a hope of pretending things are somewhat normal and that this is just another problem - and Crowley being revealed as running the con this year takes a weight off his personal responsibility for this as he knows Dean sees it, that lasts until the end of the season.

For Dean, I think he’s just glad Cas is acting even somewhat normally and helpful and like he cares about them, as there’s no on-screen wrangling to get him to come and it’s implied that after their conversation in 6x06, Cas came when called this time, and purely to help rather than for purposes to do with the angel war, so far the only way to get him to show up this season.

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This episode… (I think I may start most of my season 6 posts with a weary sigh of angst and despair :P) Cas has cleared the way to have no blame as long as *nothing escalates again* by Crowley taking the fall for everything and faking his own death.

This buys Cas a relative peace from suspicion and all the bad blood from earlier in the season, allowing his stress to be entirely about the angel war and not about the drama that Sam’s soul and the bad shit with Crowley had been causing between them all. Again, waaay too late and all.

But this moment acts as a midseason “watched him rake leaves” moment as Cas explains that he really is struggling with Heaven, given his chance by Crowley to play it all straight for a while, a respite that lasts until 6x19.

Dean offers to help, and it’s sincere and this is the best chance Cas would have got to accept the help and begin to come clean about things if he could involve Sam and Dean. But to Cas, he’s so deep in it at this point, and knowing full well that Crowley isn’t dead, that he’s deceived them to get this chance to work without suspicion (and distraction - which Crowley cites as his main issue in 6x20 and so I can understand why he’d go along with this if he thinks Cas would stop being so beholden to Sam n Dean and under their scrutiny as he has been :P)

I cut a couple of Sam reactions for the gifset just to keep it short, but they’re insignificant and as the conversation gets more dramatic and more personal it closes in between Dean n Cas and becomes a moment between them; Dean’s emotional response to being told there isn’t anything Cas wants them to help him with is the only response we get. The direction Cas is turning to look away is in the other direction from Sam - his gaze is leaving Sam in the first gif, so it’s just a staring away into the distance unable to meet Dean’s eye turning, which I think is also important to clarify how much Sam is not involved once Cas n Dean get going here.

Again, Cas speaks the truth that he wishes things were different, though with the layer of dramatic irony that we only get on the second watch, where we know what Cas is up to and that once again like the raking leaves scene he’s excluding Dean to keep him safe, to try and do this FOR Dean without drawing him into the dangerous mess, trying to leave him to live his own life… The self-sacrificing of their personal relationship well underway for the greater good of Dean’s happiness over Cas’s, already deep down the path of no return on this. And I think I believe Cas again, here, that he wishes there was a world where this wasn’t all happening, and something I think is answered emotionally for him in 8x08 by being allowed to tag along on a plot-free case just as a friend with no greater purpose.

I think the very impossibility of that idea right now, that Cas has been portrayed as so unwilling to come join them that Dean jokes about laying bets against it, is how Cas can state something so frankly, because it’s so close to the line of seeming to be a lie, another way to placate them before the inevitable turn, if you weren’t to give him the credit of being genuinely emotionally torn all season. The credit him for so desperately wanting to be at Dean’s side, but at the same time doing all the hard work to remove himself from Dean right now.

And just like all the other times Cas tries to buy them back emotionally this season, it works:

DEAN: Look, Cas, we know you got a steaming pile on your plate. There’s no need for apologies. We’re your friends.

And we get a reaction of Sam staring stoically and soullessly into the middle-distance, unaffected by the soppy talk and so a blatant example of Dean ducking behind the “we” that only a hypothetical ensoulled Sam in this same conversation would be agreeing with him… But in the moment it’s a personal declaration.

… Season 6 is such an emotional maze it’s easy to get lost in it.

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Ah yes, the good old crack episode which actually has the entire plot embedded in it and is of critical importance to the season.

When Cas shows up and does his display of power which intimidates Raphael, Dean looks just as shocked and, well, concerned as Raphael does to be threatened (we don’t get a Sam reaction shot, just Dean in the middle of 2 shots of Cas being a flashy BAMF). I don’t think the weather is a total coincidence either, to throw back to the time they confronted Raphael together a couple of years before, and while Cas was playing tough, Raphael was intimidating as heck and Dean knew they were lucky to escape that one. After all, it prompted the first “last night on earth” comment. The connection is not a good reflection on where Cas is right now.

When they return to Bobby’s and Dean is trying to complain to Cas about Balthazar, Cas says that while it was his plan, Cas would do the same thing, prompting that annoyed response from Dean. They were very nearly stranded in a terrifying AU, and that’s if they didn’t get killed there. Gambling on their lives and their luck at surviving various nonsense is not a great way to treat your friends, you know? Cas’s comment is the first sign that something is truly wrong, and that Cas’s morality is in danger because of the war.

This whole section from the moment they get back to the regular SPN!verse is the “real” episode, the reason for it all, the power play that on the scripts they’re waving around in the AU is played out in their regular locations, but perhaps with a more grisly end, given Cas’s intervention in the story and taking them off-script.

Cas has been enjoying a sort of safe respite in the story free from suspicion, or from the implication that the angel war is entirely sketchy or that his role in it is entirely terrifying and damaging to his character. Over the next few episodes he’ll be consistently undermined in trustworthiness by various things, from framing to his dialogue, his behaviour, to the mysterious accusations lobbed at him, showing us that something serious is up and he’s in the centre of it, but this is where the turn comes.

And it ends with Dean saying “friggin angels”, reducing Cas back down to his species and his behaviour as generic angel nonsense, drawing a line to show that the angel war has affected how Cas is behaving to the point of isolating and de-humanising him and Dean is basically showing that he’s become unfamiliar, and by refusing to open up, playing games with them, and leaving instead of explaining, they’re right back to square one, except that now it feels like Cas is the one playing all the angel games.

I didn’t crop the “when will I be able to make you understand” gif any closer to Cas to catch his expression because I rather wanted to frame him as the episode does, with that jar of blood right by him, which isn’t ominous at all for the end of the season and the rather more plot-critical jar of blood (also used to open a door between worlds).

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Another post of low-hanging fruit meta subjects we’ve all had an opinion on… but like Rachel next episode, I do wonder since Balthazar also doesn’t know Cas is chilling with Crowley, exactly how much he’s using the Winchesters as an excuse for naffing off to go scheme.

Also, of course, it’s well-known in Heaven that Cas rebelled for Dean, that he pulled him out of hell, that he’s got a suspiciously close connection to him and that even early on in the whole thing, Cas’s association with Dean is so written on stone by the end of season 5, no angel is going to *not* know about it, since they all know the stories of Castiel’s rebellion and that he was the only angel who lifted a finger to avert the apocalypse - which makes him a leader to some, and the enemy to the rest; the fundamental nature of the war in Heaven and Cas’s involvement in it is because Cas stood by the Winchesters.

In any case, Sam leads this conversation to a powerful degree, and in 6x10 Balthazar was one of the few people to accuse Cas of being *Sam’s* boyfriend - again, something fairly easily explained by the fact he has no clue who these rando humans are in specific details, just that they’re “the Winchesters” and he’s not the sort to care if Cas is banging one the other or both… In this instance, however, Dean interjects after some heated Sam and Balthy back and forth with a comment about saving people, and Balthazar snaps back with this - that CAS is the one who cares about saving people, that Cas is the good angel with a heart and oh wait yeah also uses it to have a MASSIVE INCONVENIENT CRUSH ON YOU.

Dean looks away in a sort of fed up way - we don’t know HOW different it is in the AU but we have to assume that most of the major plot stuff is still ongoing and Cas is still rarely answering Dean’s calls or emotionally open with him any more. This insult hurts as much because Cas ISN’T acting this way, as much as it may be an insult to demean Cas and Dean for their relationship as if it were a fluffy romance.

The first scene with Atropos is the first to really make it clear that Cas is up to something beyond just going along with trickery and neglect of Sam and Dean, but that there’s something seriously main arc bad brewing because of him and the war. Atropos gives him a chance to stop the disruption he caused with the Titanic, in order that natural order might be restored, but with the clear implication that things are going badly for Cas, and that something with “the souls”, a phrase Death used for Dean to investigate… while Dean drops the ball on it, Atropos repeats it here to let US know that “the souls” are where Cas is going to fuck up. And these 50,000 are only the ones that are involved in this particular incident.

And her bargain for him to back off in this instance? She and her sisters won’t hound Sam and Dean to death as soon as Cas’s back is turned, and that he will have to give up fighting the war in order to protect them forever - shackling him into guardian angel duty for them forever. Which is a branch down another theme, but whatever.

Anyway take a moment to scroll back up and have another look at her threat, and the camera being placed where Cas is blocking Sam from view entirely, while Dean is the one between Atropos and Cas - Dean is the one Cas is concerned about to a fault. Dean is the one who he would stop everything for. Dean is the one he would sacrifice 50,000 souls for.

And when we get to the junkyard, Cas is allowed to carry on the lie, to tell the story the way they span it, to make Atropos the villain and himself the hero, Balthazar the wacky wildcard like Gabriel before him, and Sam and Dean have no clue that this was anything more than a ridiculous romp. But Dean’s reaction is the one put forefront as Cas says it was to keep them safe, and Sam talks over the look as he says how many souls Dean is worth to Cas - at least.

And we know for sure that Cas is lying to them, and we don’t know what else he’s lied about because we haven’t seen what else he has doing, and we are in the place of Sam and Dean about most of his activities in the season - allowed to see only what he wants us to see, to know what he has done that makes him look like a hero.

And we are left to wonder how far he would go for his protective feelings for Dean…

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I think Rachel is way more interesting than we give her credit for. @mittensmorgul has pointed out in the past that Rachel thinks Cas is spending just as much time with the Winchesters as the Winchesters think Cas is spending on the angel war, NOT answering their prayers or coming for massive important things, never mind a stubbed toe. Sure, last episode he spent some time following them around and sacrificed his plan for them, but the wider picture of the season has been almost entirely portrayed as an extended discussion on Cas not coming when called.

Obviously, this is betraying Crowley’s part in it, as the problem keeping Cas from Dean, and simultaneously revealed that he’s been using the excuse of seeing the Winchesters to bail on the angels to meet with his shady business partner… All framed later as a secret affair that he has been having all season, with Dean as a the wounded spouse.

Cas drops in with suspiciously good timing to stop someone (Dean probably :P) laying into Rachel about how they’ve been trying to get Cas on the phone all season and this is the most wildly uncharacteristic thing she ever could have accused him of, and it doubles as swooping in to show the Winchesters he’s still very much on their side, even against pissy angels who work for him. A demonstration that as bad as it gets he’s still looking out for them. Though, again, this seems to be a problem of his own making on the small scale as well, just by allowing her to go in the first place.

In any case, maybe this one is a bit thin on the Destiel, and I’m skipping past focusing on some obvious things like Dean’s enthusiasm to try calling Cas for it and get him involved in his cowboy schemes, and of course the rivalry for Cas’s attention played with him against Rachel, playing into a trope of the love interest suddenly getting a hot assistant who stands between them, etc, which once again uses Dean as the spouse and Cas as the one who is potentially unfaithful, or in danger of being seduced away from Dean.

Cas intervening here has ulterior plot motives but it is also clearly surface level an intervention that Rachel is out of line and Cas doesn’t want to hear her saying these things about them, and a defence that he responds to by helping them this episode and we are shown no complaint - he asks what they need, and the scene cuts to the plan in motion, Cas’s only reservation the difficulties posed by time travel.

I think in 17-19 he tries to play the part of their protector and we get a last hurrah of that to remind us how it COULD be good before it all goes bad. 6x20 shows him choosing to swoop recklessly in to save them all at one point, as well as the constant annoyance Crowley endures about Cas’s protectiveness of the Winchesters. And once again, though this almost all is done in language of “the Winchesters” the serious back and forth is between Dean calling, and Cas answering or not. Cas helping Dean. A distinction which isn’t as clear in this moment as it is with the rapidly approaching point hindsight comes from, when we get the reveal, and see inside Cas’s head for an episode. Which revolves entirely around him and Dean.

I needed a break from all the angst :P This season is so bleak and without many fun details or moments allowing Dean and Cas to bond. But Cas goes along with their plan despite it being in contradiction to his other business interests (aka Crowley wants him to catch Eve alive, so the whole plan to kill her is something he should resist from the start, though perhaps he just has no idea how to say no to this), and for a while it means he can just be a friendly guy in the room with them.

So here’s an uncomplicated thing where he totally gets to do the “when Cas is judging your clothes you know you fucked up” bit and Dean defends his clothes until he gets embarrassed and looks away and changes the subject because ooops Cas is judging you. :D

And of course with 13x06, a moment that immeasurably improves with hindsight, because we’ve already been through the whole thing about it being Dean’s cowboy fetish with Sam accusing him, and Cas in the room through all this nonsense, and gets to see how giddy Dean is about playing cowboys, but given where he is right now in the bigger picture, can’t and won’t come with them. This necessarily can’t be an episode where Cas gets to goof off and be a cowboy with Dean.

It was worth a 7 year wait 

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Start and end of the episode…

The first moment, back in the last “normal” times of the season, highlights that Bobby and Sam both instinctively see Dean as the one who has to make the call - that Bobby feels like it’s something he has to ask Dean for, because if nothing else, and they all have an understanding that Cas has been prickly and difficult to get hold of all season, that Dean is the one to ask, because Dean is the one who Cas will respond to, that Cas *only* responds to Dean making the request.

Sam turns and looks at Dean expectantly, like this is just how the natural order of things is, and this moment of Bobby and Sam solidarity on the subject of who prays to Cas to get him to come help. There’s a sense of them having a serious understanding, that this is voicing the maybe unspoken between them idea that they know this as a part of the natural order.

And Dean protests because at this point Cas has been a headache for him all season and through all sorts of drama where he offered lukewarm enthusiasm, partial assistance, grumpiness, and generally from Dean’s POV, came across as barely caring, as Cas’s attempts to protect Dean and keep him out of his drama only drove Dean further and further away.

By the end of the episode, Bobby and Sam need only an unspoken look to know they’re both thinking the same thing - not just that there’s something seriously off about Cas’s behaviour, but that this is going to be something which comes down on Dean’s head, that they are somehow separate and outside of the epicentre of this issue, as much as it may suck, they again have the solidarity over knowing about how Cas reacts to Dean, and now dreading how Dean will react to Cas. The need to move away, get some space, take a deep breath and broach the subject with Dean as more than a passing comment in their already ongoing conversation but to rev up for what they know will be a painful thing to say. And that they are on one side saying it, and Dean is in a world of his own having to hear it.

Dean’s face shows he’s picking up that that have a Special Concern, and that it’s something he doesn’t know, doesn’t understand, hasn’t even thought of yet. And yet again, the fact of his anger over the season melts away when there’s a concern about Cas, Dean is soft and vulnerable and in the position of caring too much and about to be shattered; that for all his surface level frustration that Cas hasn’t been opening up to him and has been ignoring him, this is Sam and Bobby bracing for a blow they KNOW is going to hurt.

I have my issues with a lot of the snark in this episode which is aimed at Cas, varying from the infantalising him to the villainous queercoding and odd sexualising comments lobbed at him this season, but I can’t pass up giffing this wildly under-appreciated gem of innuendo, especially as it’s the one time Cas snarks right back at Dean, making it a fair back and forth rather than Dean piling on Cas, as he does for most of this episode and met mostly with confusion or glaring.

(I mean honestly there’s a case to make that Cas’s introduction into the episode shook Dean so much he’s been on his defence the entire time because of it)

For the innuendo impaired (I don’t judge, some people just don’t see it all the time because they aren’t awful like me) Dean’s comparing Cas’s powers being taken away by Eve as being impotent, and Cas snarks back with “figuratively” in order to make it very clear the metaphor applies *only* to his powers, and other, literal, areas of implied potency are, well, not limp.

Dean’s problem with Cas this episode, as I said, comes across in several ways of complaining at him. The line immediately after this about a “baby in a trenchcoat” is the way more popular get-it-on-a-mug kind of line that overshadows this little bit of snark entirely, and is part of the thread of Dean referring to Cas as a baby, an infant, a child, which gets more serious later. The end of 6x20 he uses it to imply Cas’s morality and ethics are very much still in the range of a kid’s idea of good and bad, while after his brief death (rather than the oozy one) in the start of season 7 he calls him a child again. I feel like it all largely refers to Cas’s behaviour when Dean is upset with him, as he feels like all Cas has done this year is be sulky and useless (to broadly generalise Dean’s frustration with Cas - obviously there’s examples of him helping but these will not stand out to Dean over the impression of losing his friend).

The flip side of that is the snark about Cas’s sexual prowess, which takes us back to 5x18 and the barbs Dean chose to throw at Cas there, highlighting that when he’s angry with Cas, his choice of lashing out at him is with sexuality, undermining the depth of their connection from the dangerous emotional territory to be only implications about Cas wanting to bone him, rather than that there is anything deeper between them, a defence from the hurt of that bond being tested. I think that’s a good baseline to remember, for other times Dean needles Cas in ways where his anger shows in comments like this; the reverse implication that Cas with full powers is sexually potent - the conclusion from that that Dean thinks it’s kinda hot when Cas is all smitey (and 8x07 with the boner scene suggests maybe he really is super into Cas displaying he’s at full power and all is well)…

And I think overall this season, it reflects in how Dean may feel about Cas - the loss of their friendship, the sense of betrayal that Cas no longer seems to openly care for Dean as he once did. Dean, master of repression, feeling like everyone leaves him, sees Cas become distant and angry and quick to leave their interactions, slow to show up when he’s needed… Of all the things he says to Cas this season, the snark along these lines is definitely the most interesting for unpicking back to what is going on with Dean underneath it all.

(Also seriously why is Cas’s response not lumped in with things like “I don’t sweat under any circumstances” and all the stuff like that we’ve enjoyed him saying with utter self-confidence over the years.)

Sometimes it’s just the little details, and their placement.

Moments before we discover Cas’s double cross - like, less than 4 minutes from the end of the episode that closes on the reveal - Dean seems to be in mortal peril, and his entire family reacts in panicked horror, Cas included. I don’t think it’s accidental they gave him an entire shot and moment to shout “Dean!” while Bobby just struggles wordlessly behind him, allowing Cas the moment to be the foreground voice of concern, and to have his own reaction after Sam’s, whose reaction is totally taken as a given.

Even when Dean is pissed off with Cas and has been calling him a baby for complaining and sounding annoyed by his lack of powers, he takes Cas with him to investigate, choosing to have Cas on his team, and for whatever reason knowing he would work best with him, whether it was to keep an eye on him or just feeling resigned that he would babysit the angel. And when Cas is being menaced by a Jefferson Starship later, we get the tension in his peril and rescue “surprise Dean is here!” moment for Cas being saved, not Bobby or Sam (though again you could argue Cas was in the most immediate danger or Dean thought the other two could handle themselves - his instinct was still to protect Cas).

They argue about the kids, and it becomes an issue entirely between Dean and Cas, suddenly swerving into “greater purpose” and saving 2 kids vs thousands of lives, Cas’s big-picture thinking that’s doomed him for a greater purpose suddenly grimly clear - though validated in the most miserable way by the fact the kids were the perfect bait and he was right, though he hadn’t known how.

In any case, for all the tension between them, this moment shows us how Dean still genuinely means a lot to Cas, especially on a panicked instinct to shout his name, because in the close of the episode it will leave us to wonder what the hell Cas is up to - but as we will soon see from his POV, care about Dean is his primary motivator in so many of his decisions, and this is another glimpse of the true Cas who deeply cares, though we may see at the end of the episode the threat of the double-crossing Cas who is now standing on a mountain of betrayal and lies.

And Dean finally is confronted with the idea that more is wrong with Cas than whatever he has been thinking so far… And his response is immediately disbelief, defensiveness about Cas, bargaining for it not to be true.

Bobby stands still and looks between him and Sam (several times more than I could fit in the gifset, but it’s the same calculating, concerned look each time, seeing how they’re taking it). And Sam… He knows he’s in agreement with Bobby because he and Bobby have been exchanging looks about this already, and see what Dean won’t in how suspicious Cas’s behaviour has been lately.

Dean challenges Sam and Sam is unable to break his brother’s heart directly; he takes a long time to answer, starts to raise his suspicions, at least that there has been something or other on his mind about Cas’s behaviour, but then he backs off. Though Dean hasn’t actually said “it’s probably nothing”, just voiced utter disbelief that they’d suspect Cas, Sam decides his suspicions just aren’t worth the pain they’d bring Dean.

And Bobby is left looking at Dean, seeing what he thinks; conflicted between anger that they’d even suspect Cas, and horror that they may be right. But between his adamant insistence that Cas has done nothing wrong, and Sam’s unwillingness to trample Dean’s feelings because somehow he and Bobby know this is a sensitive topic, KNEW that something about Cas was something that would take a careful approach to bring to Dean, that it was something safer to back off of, it all buys Cas some time as they decide to look into it, not to go rushing in to accuse Cas. And Dean hates it… He’s not going to believe it despite EVERYTHING that has happened this year, a season of endless bickering and weirdness from Cas, from him not answering Dean’s prayers, no longer acting with open kindness and concern but brushing him off, disappearing ASAP, refusing to share all the information, jerking them around on missions… None of that matters because Cas is dear to him, and he is going to need solid, painful proof that Cas is no longer to be trusted, and that the foundation of their relationship - that hard won trust - is gone completely.

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Cas offers to tell his entire story - “everything” - and after the title card it fades to Dean driving. Later 9x18 plays off the same thing opening the story with Dean showering, and 13x01 has Dean saying “everything” in a way which seems to imply Cas is. The other thing is just that after the enormity of the history, from the dawn of time, all the Biblical stuff Cas remembers witnessing, and then when it comes to what his story really is, what really made him who he was, it really starts again with the events of the apocalypse, and what happened to make Cas more than a random angel watching over it, but Dean's power of humanising Cas and pulling him down into his orbit and making him a personality. It reminds me of 14x08 when we see someone in Heaven as a child and unconscious of being in Heaven, but on being talked to and made aware of what's going on, it's almost like they awake and become their conscious adult self who remembers everything. Dean pulls Cas into a sort of free will of his own, and this is where his story as an individual began. (I would date it, if you've been reading along, to that smile in 4x07 when Dean made Cas laugh.) 

Dean gives Cas another chance to open up and explain how much trouble he is in after knowing Sam and Bobby’s suspicions, cue one of their most infamous staring while driving moments as Cas misses his last chance to open up without judgement. This is just tragic as another one of those tiny watching him rake leaves moments where we know they're all really beyond the point of no return, but unlike where Dean had no idea that Cas was there, this is the point of no return between them where Dean reaches out and offers and Cas has a moment where he really could have opened up to Dean in the privacy of his car, the quiet driving time safe space of Dean's home, his soul... 

Crowley refers to Cas’s relationship to the Winchesters - but Dean especially as the owner of the Impala and the last one that Cas talked to, using sexual terms. Much like 5x18 uses sexual jabs to cover the romantic relationship, Crowley plays off the dynamic as sexual and of Cas having seen Dean behind Crowley’s back. There is a strong implication in Crowley’s words of Cas being romantically unfaithful with a marriage to Dean and Crowley as the affair.

“Crowley had a point, of course. My interest was conflicted. I still considered myself the Winchesters’ guardian. After all… They taught me how to stand up… What to stand for… And what generally happens to you when you do.” Crowley leads on to the recap of the end of season 5 and how that boost of confidence lead to him getting Sam out of the cage, the beginning of his hubris, and a missed opportunity to understand that Sam was not okay. Cas had a reluctance that is unimaginable from a Dabb era perspective to greet Sam, walk him proudly up to Lisa's door and knock on it, considering blowing it down if Dean didn't answer fast enough, and deliver their family all back together. It makes this worse than ever to see the painful shade of that feeling here, all repressed and locked up in Cas, doing these personal things out of love for the Winchesters, giving Sam back because it was what Dean had demanded of the universe, and Cas now feels he is in a position to dictate the universe's terms... Crowley's point about the conflict of interest is clear even here. Because Cas does not assume a family role, but stays shadowed, doesn't understand the human stuff enough to know Sam is not well, that he should say hi to Dean regardless. Instead he tries to have the cake and eat it, and flaps off to be the new sheriff in town upstairs, a series of events that will lead him to this point with Crowley, his interest and attention divided between rule and love, a division which will shatter them on many levels.

Dean “struggling to be loyal” - defending Cas and wishing they didn’t have to lie to him, because it’s tearing him apart. Once again framed against Sam and Bobby as the ones who are getting on with the main work looking for Crowley, and considerably more concerned with the practicalities of a Superman gone darkside than the emotional struggle.

And, of course. Deflect deflect deflect! Dean is blatantly the wounded love interest in this dynamic. Dean is Cas’s Lois Lane. But Dean pushes it away out of hurt and fear. He knows where this puts him in that dynamic and it's conceptually horrifying to him, and so he has to throw it away from his own heart in one of the few ways he knows how at this point when it comes to his walls, projection, performance, taunting Sam, building himself up as tough while others are compromised and vulnerable. And yet he knows just as Crowley is telling Cas that he is conflicted, that he is the one with the love interest that's gone darkside. 

Cas’s silent observation of Dean, glued to him like he’s the most magnetic thing in the room, witnessing how loyal Dean is to him, feeling that pain of seeing Dean defending him while knowing Bobby is 100% right, but silently trapped here if he won’t step out and tell the truth, a visual demonstration of the pain of the betrayal.

Cas chooses to act against Crowley’s interests in order to protect them, yet again, but feels conflicted on hindsight whether it was self-preservation too. Either way, as Crowley points out later, it’s because he doesn’t want them to know he has been doing these things and ruin what he has with them - and hurt them to find out, seeing Dean struggle with it - rather than just because they’ll mess up the plan… Cas is more than happy to mess up the plan to protect them.

More silent staring. More being focussed entirely on Dean, despite the broader language about “the boys” or including Bobby.

Dean continues to stan for Cas, insisting that Sam and Bobby’s position is wrong, trying to demonstrate to them how they rely on Cas, and that he just can not be persuaded that Cas is doing something bad and sneaky because of the things Cas has done for them. He’s calling back to “We’re making it up as we go” and Cas being killed by Raphael and then Lucifer for him at the very least, huge instances which I made long posts about as being the cornerstone of their relationship from Dean’s eyes in demonstrating how much Cas cares for them/him and will fight for them/him. And I think tbh that benefit of the doubt is owed, and the only problem is Cas is too far gone down the bad decisions train that he’s missed multiple stops to get off of it that Dean has offered him throughout the season - because his choice was already made well over a year ago.

Cas continues to watch, having heard all that Dean said in his defence, but missing yet another opportunity to come clean. Scared of the judgement Dean would make of his actions if he explained them.

A ridiculous exchange where Dean says sadly, “Cas is busy” is defeat, and Sam reassures him and pats him on the arm, consolingly, once again showing the extreme difference in their feelings: Dean rants passionately than Cas cares, and is let down, and Sam is put in the position of caring for Dean, in a support role, personally unaffected in the same way by Cas’s lack of showing up.

Though he saves all of them of course, I love how the shot is of the demon straddling Dean and then Cas is left standing over him like that. Despite going to help Bobby last, when we get to the shot after the fight, Dean gets up right into Cas’s space, and looks him up and down extremely appreciatively, another fun microexpression.

Ow. You know that Simpsons meme where Bart pauses the TV and says “You can  pinpoint the exact moment his heart shatters?” Theeere it is. And all the shit Dean’s been through this season on Cas’s account that he’s forgiven because of what Cas has done for him in the past is finally crushing down on him.

Crowley essentially explains what Cas had been preserving up to that point, without either of them knowing Dean now knows that Cas has been spying on them and therefore is up to something shady after all, and this is what he has just lost: the illusion of the good Cas. Again as I was talking about in 5x21, though obviously they are their own characters, it’s not just mirroring and imagery in an abstract way but they define each other textually, and Crowley explaining in the bottom left gif basically summarises how Cas’s definition of himself comes also from Dean’s perception of him. Just as in season 5 their loss of faith in God and each other caused them to have such a painful fight. And once again sexual language is used to describe Cas’s unfaithfulness to Dean, Crowley defining him as a “whore” for sneaking around doing this plot with him and not telling Dean.

I asked myself, “what was I doing with this vermin?” As if I didn’t already know the answer.

Cas questions his own decision, finally, in the narrative, while reflecting on how he had ended up caught in this conflict. And the answer is, of course, Dean. He went with Crowley because he believed that Dean was happier and better off out of the game, that he couldn’t interrupt his peace with Lisa, in order to fight for freedom once more. It’s a complicated love quadrangle, with Dean tied up with Lisa, Cas invisibly pining, and in the end “seduced” in the narrative away by Crowley.

Crowley using more sexualised language, this time seeming to imply directly because of their location and the nature of the conflict Cas was in - Dean or Crowley - that he might get a happy ending of his own one day.

Cas makes his choice, once more looking to Dean, before symbolically turning and walking away. His choice is FOR Dean, but removes him from Dean’s life, and starts ALL the emotional drama that I’ve been cataloguing since the beginning of the season. And now, with hindsight, Cas’s narration from the POV of sitting on the bench after everything has gone down, he begins to see the flaws in his decision, the pride that he thought he could beat Crowley.

He once more refuses to allow this to become Dean’s problem, and once again the dark irony of everything is here because Cas is refusing to get Dean involved in doing exactly what he ends up doing once he is involved in the Campbell scheme thanks to Sam at the start of the season.

I think I’ve seen this theory around before but this post by @jtmcas is the first time I saw anyone point out that the specific number of 50,000 souls from 6x17 suggests when we learn of Crowley’s loan, that by mid-late season 6 Cas was desperately looking for a way out of it, and as a result adds another huge impact to that episode and his decision, belatedly.

The confrontation.

I like the initial framing, where Sam and Bobby set the trap, and Dean is still sitting watching. Cas looks between Sam and Bobby, and remains seated while they set the trap, demonstrating his ongoing uncertainty and unwillingness to be a part of trapping Cas for info. The look they share after is especially painful, as Cas finally looks at Dean almost like for confirmation they’re really doing this to him.

After some brief arguing back and forth about the plot in ways which won’t come to a satisfying conclusion about Cas’s untrustworthiness, Dean steps in and demands Cas look at him, taking it from snappy confrontational to emotional, and uses the quieter moment to focus on eye contact, on the honesty of looking each other in the face, and is the final judge on Cas’s trustworthiness because he is the one that can get this reaction from Cas. He’s the one that Cas can’t face, can’t make this lie directly to, and knows he’s caught out as a result. The confirmation of Cas working with Crowley doesn’t come from any of the circumstantial evidence Sam and Bobby suggest, but by Dean’s emotional appeal to Cas.

The old “You - all of you” thing that I assume if I carry this series on for too long I’ll have to address in 12x12 and may or may not remember to mention happened here too. In this case, there are a LOT of direct “You” moments from Cas to Dean, and it’s a fairly clear cut you is Dean, all of you is Sam and Bobby as well as a result of how utterly about Dean to Cas this episode is. It’s not exactly a love confession like the 12x12 one, but it’s Cas’s statement on what he thought he was doing, and why he refuses to back down, why he eventually falls down into the dark place that he does, because he rationalises things deeper and deeper into being for their protection… Maybe in the long run… when he breaks Sam’s wall.

An appeal for trust, as this episode from Dean’s POV (not that we really get it but we can infer) has been all about losing his trust in Cas and having it utterly shattered. This is his facial expression when after having it shattered, Cas asks him to trust him. The experience of finding out everything about Cas’s plan has hardened him against it, because it’s been such an enormous breach of his trust, and they have all been manipulated and hurt in the process. 

I don’t think it’s a coincidence we get a different version of Cas walking away where we can see Crowley’s smug face in this moment. Most gifs I’ve seen of this moment leave out the walking away clip, but it’s so important to remember that Cas doesn’t just stare mutely at Dean, but that we are getting this story from his POV, and in his narration, in Cas’s choice of how to tell this story, he inserts for our benefit the memory of leaving with Crowley, and with Crowley’s smug face in his mind, the love triangle such as it is in this episode shows Cas now facing the consequences of where in the narration of that scene he said he was a fool. He KNOWS he wasn’t there because he left with Crowley because he thought he was protecting Dean long-term.

And this realisation is the crux of the entire confrontation. And it’s the sign that Cas was asking for, spoilers for the rest of this episode

Is it broken or not? This is perhaps the biggest philosophical misunderstanding between them about it - is Cas doing the right thing, or is he not? It’s an unanswerable question because it was left too long. The raking leaves scene is where Cas’s decision was made that lead them here and they would have to go back to it and change the course there, because once everything was set in motion, there were only bad endings left. What chance did Cas have to save the world and stop Raphael from kick-starting the apocalypse again? Or, could they have worked together and found another solution? Would fate have been kinder to them if they had worked together, either for 2 years, or scrambled together a positive solution in the remaining two episodes with the resources they had?

But things went the way they went.

And it was broken.

Of course it all doubles as a metaphor for their relationship. Dean’s been utterly shattered through the course of this episode, and he can’t trust Cas right now; can’t work with him, can’t help him and so he has to leave on that note. But Cas still has a certainty that if Dean just listened, if they could work out this problem of him feeling betrayed and lied to, the plan itself is the only way to win, and Cas would like Dean with him.

Dean leaves, and looks back at the door as Sam and Bobby leg it, with a final reminder in case it wasn’t abundantly clear already that whatever part of TFW & Bobby was important in the rest of the scene - the discussion of Sam’s soul, the souring of the “raised you from perdition” line, at the end of the day this was the break up of Cas and Dean and this is the last moment as Dean looks back and Cas stares defiantly, sadly, back at him. Daring Dean to stay. Seeing he paused to look. But in the end it’s wordless and Dean leaves, and Cas has to watch him go, and is left standing trapped, to face the consequences alone.

Cas returns to see Dean in private - next episode they’ll find out he stole that book from Bobby to get into Purgatory, but I like to think that he only did it after this conversation >.> I think he wanted a one last chance appeal to Dean, because of course they have the greater connection. Of course it’s personal between them in a way it isn’t to anyone else. Of course Dean’s trust and say so is the defining message as they all turn to him as the natural leader of the group in many instances. And what Cas gets is this:

DEAN
You’re a freakin’ child, you know that? Just because you can do what you want doesn’t mean that you get to do whatever you want!

CASTIEL
I know what I’m doing, Dean.

DEAN
I’m not gonna logic you, okay? I’m saying don’t…Just ‘cause. I’m asking you not to. That’s it.

CASTIEL
I don’t understand.

DEAN
Look, next to Sam, you and Bobby are the closest things I have to family – that you are like a brother to me. So, if I’m asking you not to do something… You got to trust me, man.

We have Dean’s (angry, broken) appeal for trust to mirror the one Cas asked him for, and once again we have the back and forth - and that neither will give ground to the other. While Dean’s trust in Cas has been shattered, Cas’s certainty in what he is doing is overriding his chances to trust Dean, to trust in the message of family and that throwing yourself into a dark and terrible cause to protect them is worse than just taking the horrible consquences head on but morally reassured and side-by-side with loved ones. Because he sees a bigger picture than Dean, sees the destruction Raphael will bring, and sees no way to confront it without taking on the terrible burden himself, with or without Dean’s approval but ultimately FOR Dean’s sake. And that the desperation on that point is enough to make him do it.

And with Crowley’s last message in his head:

CROWLEY
You know the difference between you and me? I know what I am. What are you, Castiel? What exactly are you willing to do?

And the ring of fire confrontation, his family’s refusal to listen to him, give him a chance, and work with him to let them protect him (as he sees it) he is immune to Dean’s appeal, and instead heading down the awful path of necessity and the “long road of good intentions”

Dean argues from the heart, hoping one last time to appeal to Cas as family, dropping the biggest declaration of what Cas means to him for a long long time in the show, and it’s despair that none of this is getting through to Cas - he sees Cas as having learned from him the wrong message of freedom to do what he wants to consequences Dean can’t fathom, and justifying it in ways that scare Dean - Cas’s intensity about how it is for Dean is mirroring 5x02 where he declares he rebelled entirely for Dean. And in 4x22 when he’s doing it and 5x02 when he says that, Dean seems to be scared at the enormity of what he’s done to Cas; now it comes crashing down that his is how he has shaped Cas, what Cas has learned from him without seeming to grasp nuances which might have made him share the truth sooner (from Dean’s perspective Cas is learning all this human stuff and still struggling with it, although it’s far more debatable how much Cas truly does or doesn’t get here, considering we have his wry internal monologue to guide us on how he feels) and in general the confrontation comes to the philosophical difference between them that I mentioned at the end of 5x22 - the “peace or freedom” debate that they didn’t even know they were having.

So, Cas goes dark, and says, “Or what” to Dean stopping him, and Dean reacts in horror, seeing really for the first time how FAR Cas has gone - how, yep, he’s making this call and I don’t even know about the raking leaves thing but if I did that was the last time I could have reasoned with him - and threatens he could take Cas down, should he need to protect the world from him. Should he have to place him in the same category as Crowley. And Cas says the final line which severs them - “You can’t, Dean. You’re just a man. I’m an angel.” Seeming to seal their fate and carrying a weight beyond just Cas’s declaration that Dean can’t stop him. And so their final words are bitter apologies seeming to mark the end of their friendship for good.

Cas returns the narration to the park bench, showing his story bracketed either side with Dean first reaching out to him without knowing, and finally begging him to stop when he did know what was up. Cas tries bargaining with himself to ignore Dean’s warning, saying the “Human perspective” is limited - and Dean stands in for humanity. And Cas asks for a sign from God, when all along the message is implied to be the one from Dean that he has ignored, and we end on the darkest irony of Cas losing his relationship with Dean over trying to protect him, and the choices he made to do so. So ends Edlund’s dark, miserable, supposed farewell to Cas’s character from the show; his defining emotional arc being that Dean had meant so much to him he self-destructed in order to protect that feeling. And broke Dean’s heart in the process.

Chapter Text

Handling it well™

In the aftermath of the deception… After last episode opened and closed on Cas in contemplation, now we open this one on Dean lost in miserable thought about the emotional loss he’s taken. Sam tries to reassure him, but Dean is about as bleak as if Cas is already dead.

He quickly moves on to other issues, like that he is a sexually competent straight guy unlike the nerds he hangs out with who know who Lovecraft is (and literally anyone who knows even passing information about Dean’s music taste would know that he knows who Lovecraft is because the nerdy-ass bands he listens to keep making songs about Cthulhu or like, Lord of the Rings or whatever else he’s deflecting about now.)

Or, of course, complaining loudly to Balthazar, the last link in the ridiculous love tangle of this season that all comes to a head in this episode, that Cas is banging Crowley behind all their backs (more sexualised language, more wow where on earth is THIS pain coming from *stares directly into the camera* feeling). I didn’t really go into it in 6x17 and Balthazar’s accusation there that Cas is in love with Dean, but a strong common reading of his character is that like the reading of Benny crushing on Dean, Balthazar had it bad for Cas. It makes an interesting connection here where he agrees to help them on Cas’s behalf as he’s worried about Cas, and completes the collection of queercoding Cas for the whole villainous descent going on here (though of course none of them are actually banging Cas and from Cas’s POV nothing sexual happens all season bar the pizza man boner scene, part of the other bit of making him seem more skanky somehow to darken his character).

This specific line somehow manages to collect the entire mess: Crowley took Lisa to manipulate Dean because Cas is in love with him and won’t stop being a pain in the butt about it; Dean is pissed that Cas is working with Crowley and calls Balthazar for help and tells him that Cas and Crowley have an unfortunate connection and that if Balthazar is as duped as they are he ought to feel just as hurt that Cas has a new “butt buddy” instead of them so they should set aside THEIR rivalry over Cas and be hurt about this instead… And yes, Balthazar’s behaviour towards them and Cas this episode does make his snark about Cas’s interest in them in other episodes come across in a new light now…

I wanted to gif this part of the exchange in its entirety because it’s got one of my biggest pet peeves - that Cas’s “I always come when you call” is used out of context like it’s a good thing. Which, you know, cool when you’re doing comparisons to later when it is used in nicer contexts, or whatever, but presenting it as a romantic comment HERE that this is earnestly true? I’ve talked a lot through this series of posts about the “ideal” Cas, and mentioned the ~save point~ for this impression was the bookends of 5x04, the “we had an appointment” snark, the swooping in to save Dean, the heart eyes. The “Don’t ever change” which by necessity had to be defied one way or another for Cas to evolve and grow as a character because that save point would immediately become stagnant and boring.

To Dean in this scene, that version of Cas is dead and has been since the previous episode, and just as it was harrowing and weird to hear Cas say “I was the one who raised you from perdition” to Sam and take that line out of context of the DeanCas awesome moment, or Mary changing “angels are watching over you” to a line about Michael overseeing their destiny in expectation of getting his vessel, so this concept of Cas coming when Dean calls has been utterly corrupted, and this line is dark and horrible, and an omen of the death of their relationship in its old form.

Cas opens this exchange saving Dean from a demon, but in 6x20 he felt a moment of positivity about this where you might almost imagine he could be saved from himself by that feeling until he wasn’t… but now he’s crossed lines which even last episode he hadn’t crossed yet, and it’s not just that things are spiralling out of control on his end, but he has hurt Dean in ways where he can no longer pretend things are normal. He insists they could be family, but last episode ended in his own rejection of that. He asks for trust, but last episode it was shattered and Cas wouldn’t give Dean the trust he wanted either, making this an unbalanced request as the trust isn’t running from him to Dean, as Dean sees it. And he brings up faith, which has been a constant theme of their relationship, threats, that he made last episode first, and this section is bookended in emotional blackmail about how they are family and how he saves Dean. Every aspect of their relationship is ruined; it creates a template out of context of the things they are as a couple when they are good. It shows us what the ideal WAS, what the aspects of their relationship when it functions are and should be. But every word Cas says is to show these things are gone and that he has overstepped or caused the problems himself.

And so the line about doing whatever Dean asks and coming when he calls? All through this season I’ve been picking out the moments that Cas doesn’t come, or doesn’t help Dean. It reminds me of another Gamble episode, back in 4x15 when he was manipulating Dean on Heaven’s behalf rather than his own, where Cas says something about how whatever he asks Dean to do, he seems to do the exact opposite. In truth that line is also incorrect; that Cas at that point has asked Dean to do very little that Dean hasn’t done, and their conflicts were usually engineered elsewhere. It relies on a sense of obligation and reciprocation, of responding to his language but not questioning the actions behind them which might tell a different story, a narrative under the one Cas is telling.

Through this we get a disproportionate amount of shots of Dean while Cas is talking, again showing us that the point of view is on Dean, that we should be watching his displeased, heart-broken face while Cas is talking, that we are supposed to be on Dean’s side, and to hear Cas’s words as Dean does, and bear in mind the context we know full well now. After 6x20 I do emotionally disconnect from Cas a little in the sense that I understand and care for him enormously, but it is not healthy to view his words here as truth or definitions of his character, and we have to understand he is betraying them and emotionally manipulating Dean at this point. YES to a greater end of protecting Dean, and because he cares about Dean. But in the micro level rather than the macro level, his side is presented as flawed and manipulative in its goals, and it does him a disservice as an interesting character to assume his sad eyes are speaking an innocent truth and that he’s right, misunderstood, or means this earnestly without artifice or ulterior motives, and that Dean in this scene should have given him another chance or that he’s coming across in any way as mean or cold towards Cas rather than justifiably hurt. His heart and trust were just shattered by Cas, who has resisted multiple attempts to open up, explain, or ask for help since early in the season, or even nearly a year before the season started.

I just… As with many things people take out of context to make things look better… Why would you try propping up the ship with little flimsy rotten straws when it has such enormous pillars supporting it elsewhere? :P There are better ways this is shown in this very episode than the scenes which directly paint him in their framing as a manipulative villain.

This scene I like because it’s a sort of miserable answer to where Dean and Cas are really at by the end of the season, and more authentically expressed than in the “I always come when you call” scene. Dean is clear that he and Cas are basically irreconcilable at this moment, and Cas, who we have seen doing some off-screen genuine not meaning to hurt Lisa and Ben and arguing with Crowley on their behalf, comes to heal Lisa out of a more genuine action-based apology. I sort of feel like since he based his entire bad decision on Dean getting a happy ending with Lisa and staying out of the life, he thought until Dean calls him back that he might be helping Dean secure it again. Either way, it speaks also of the promise to come back and fix Sam after breaking his wall - which will be his first priority on coming back to himself in 7x17, and the ONLY way at that point he CAN reconcile with Dean.

I think this scene is bitter, dark and miserable but it’s somewhat emotionally honest, and it shows the absolute depth that both have cared about each other - and still do. Cas saying he didn’t come for Dean is still somewhat dodging that everything he is doing is about Dean anyway - a gesture of his concern, perhaps. But as with everything, his heart is still visible underneath the fact the show is treating him as the villain at the end of the season by now, and that betrayal and hurt are the emotions of the day. It’s the most genuine Cas gets at this point, and he’s still taking time to fix details like this, and to try to the best of his ability to un-fuck everything he has ruined in Dean’s life.

Chapter Text

Oh Cas :<

(It’s okay, this makes it much easier to power through and get to season 8 quite soon, I guess?)

Dean tries to appeal to Cas one last time with the family thing, and Cas is LONG past that, now full of leviathan, and righteous victory. And losing the goalposts all together. But Dean declaring how he would have died for Cas and had nearly done so, fighting alongside him various times, is a reminder for us at least of just how much Cas had meant to him. How Dean will still give him another chance to at least step back from the ledge in the name of family. And he lists Cas among all his nearest and dearest that he’s lost, to make it clear that Cas reached the highest order of people in Dean’s heart until now.

Sam then comes up behind Cas and stabs him, and hey you know how I’ve been comparing every death so far to the death in 12x23 and how awful that was? I am starting to feel like Dabb was messing with us more than ever, because I forgot the detail that Dean had to watch Cas get stabbed in the back (by Sam no less, a total reverse of Lucifer doing it). His reaction is torn between horror at seeing this happen to Cas, and amazement at seeing Sam up and about and so this reaction is shocked at seeing Cas stabbed, but Cas fails to die in any case, and Sam’s miraculous return is pretty dramatic for Dean, so once again the death stakes fall very low on manipulating how we feel about seeing Dean feel sad about Cas getting hurt. But figured it’s worth keeping track of these deaths…

In any case, Cas isn’t going anywhere *this* episode, and instead declares himself God, taking the arc from last season about absent fathers etc to horrible new heights. Cas demanding that they profess their love is the last detail to mention here, and the end of the season. Cas has completely wandered off the path right now but as usual when characters are controlled or lost to something or other altering their state, there’s truth in their statements, even if it’s not a whole truth. In this case, Cas wanting to be loved is twisted into this horrible demand for faith and devoutness from them, as they didn’t believe in him and his plan before. And he wants their love. The emotion underpinning so much of what he has done this season.

For Dean.

Chapter Text

Hey, welcome to season 7!

I feel like this is the moment to shout out a sideways inspiration for committing to this series of posts (aside from growing misery at shippers in my inbox constantly asking if they love each other with despair making it clear we don’t talk enough about the epic history and emotional continuity of this ship now it’s creeping up on being a 10 year endeavour).

The inspiration is an ancient fandom relic, a meta series by an ex-fan who has requested no interaction with their meta (please if you click through a couple of times to the main thing and read the big posts, don’t reblog or like, as they request, as they might take it all down as they really do not want to think about Supernatural any more at all and obviously having SPN posts of theirs in their activity is a very unwelcome reminder) but they have left it up for us to read - I’m gonna link a short gif series we can reblog as it was made by someone else; they only got as far as 7x06 translating the meta into chunks under gifs, and as you might have guessed, the title of MY gif series is riffing off the question posed in the old season 7 meta, since my approach and overall mood about the ship is different, but this was a formative meta reading experience for me as a sort of baseline intro to the ship in season 7.

http://waywardism.tumblr.com/tagged/aretheyinloveseries/chrono

In any case, I hope to get further than they did and cover everything beyond that one day so it’s only a brief overlap in projects, and I’m starting my 4th season of gifs so excuse the meta talk… :)

Also, ow, welcome to season 7.

We pick up where we left off… Amusingly, in the Road So Far for this season, the last bit I giffed for 6x22 with Godstiel talking about professing their love for him has been edited skewy - “You will bow down” now is said over a shot of Sam, “and profess your love” is over Dean, and the rest of the line is said over Cas, where once “and profess your love” was the first line said by Cas on screen AFTER the shot where Dean’s being told to bow down. Aka, moving the line about professing love onto Dean’s face.

Now Bobby nudges them to kneel because yikes you don’t want to piss off a vengeful God and sometimes Bobby is the only sensible person in the room while the others freak out… Godstiel sees this for what it is, and expresses disappointment that he hasn’t earned their love. Once again, his eyes are on Dean - Dean who is the reason he is in this mess at all.

Once again his dialogue betrays that he wanted love and respect, in less dramatic Godly ways, just, that he loved these guys and wanted to help them, wanted them to respect him and his plans and trust him etc, but he rapidly has untethered, and Godstiel is partially fuelled by the Leviathan’s wrath and hunger, partially just unimaginably powerful, agitating Cas’s own emotions and impression of how a God should act into something unreachably distant and cold, translating his desire for friend-level love and respect into God-level worship and devoutness.

But his actions have only earned him fear from his family.

Dean makes one last plea for Cas to turn it around and stop being like this, but he vanishes to start his work as God, and Dean is officially now Season 7 Dean with all the awful Cas-related angst THAT entails. GOOD TIMES.

The montage of Dean repairing the car and dealing with the apparent new order of a world under Godstiel is one of the most painful parts of their “relationship”, as he’s forced to listen to how Cas is re-shaping the world.

As she often does, the car takes on a metaphorical role of Dean’s soul, and his attempt to piece himself back together after the hits he took, from many sides but with the loss of Cas as the new threat and the biggest overt loss hanging over them, while he can only live in dread of what’s wrong with Sam, and we see Sam struggling with his hell visions away from Dean, keeping it a secret for the time being. The fixing of the car is tied in with the radio telling him various things Cas has done - from good like eliminating the KKK to dubious like killing motivational new age speakers.

Including the inescapable joke where the woman on TV talks about how hot Cas is and Dean’s already moved to turn the TV off before she confirms his defining feature - wearing a raincoat - especially after Bobby was joking about looking for a trenchcoat on a tortilla a scene or so ago. Cas’s attractiveness and lack of interest in sexual orientation are pointed out via the scenes to do with this church - striking down homophobia and to Dean the reminder comes in how attractive Cas is of what he is currently doing rather than being with them. A sense of establishing these things in his absence from Dean’s life.

And once again, Sam and Bobby are witnesses to Dean’s misery about Cas, observers and those he bounces off in conversation when it comes to this specific subject, where he is the one who knew Cas best, he is the one who defines how they lose and regret and mourn Cas.

Dean also remembers the conflicting versions of new and old Cas as two different people - a sense of that default ~old Cas~ who is a very solid concept, in the show and the fandom. This sense of the unruined Cas who exists almost more as a figment of our and Dean’s imaginations, when he was at some perfect moral and powerful best and also Dean’s BFF (as I say, he pretty much exists in 5x03/4 :P) but in this case, anyway, despite Cas only becoming affected with new powers and Leviathan buddies in the end of 6x22, and the betrayal coming from a ~normal~ Cas, Dean’s writing off old Cas and new Cas as 2 different people, and new Cas is Godstiel and the one doing these violent things. It’s a way to remember the Cas he knew and loved as a good guy, and to bracket off the destruction as the fault of this new version of Cas he doesn’t like, and is terrified of.

And the last mention of Cas as anything other than an adversary comes here where Dean says no more talk, he’s spent enough time on him. Still hurt and embarrassed with this language that could double for the end of a bad relationship where Dean is the wounded party who doesn’t want to be reminded of the time he feels he wasted on someone who turned out not to be the person he thought they were when they had their golden honeymoon period.

“Nostalgia” Godstiel says, abstracted 1000 levels above where Cas once was to Dean.

It’s that word choice that makes so painful what has disappeared between him and Dean - not that they’re in the middle of a messy break up as far as Godstiel is concerned, but that he is too lost in this sea of monsters swirling inside him, the power to put him snark-to-snark with Death, but Dean is just some distant pleasant but faded, sepia-toned and irrelevant memory even before he asked Death to kill Cas. It’s dismissive and puts Dean in his place, and Cas in his.

Death rolls his eyes at being shackled to this whole drama and commences to talk Cas into his place, reminding him he’s just a wobbling tube of Leviathans waiting to pop open right now, and Dean’s reaction is one of utter horror in concern for both Cas and the world. The phrasing is tuned to make us horrified for both - our and Dean’s old attachment to Cas is not forgotten, as the threat that Cas has underestimated that lurks inside him is introduced to make us concerned for not just the world but him as well. Godstiel is not entirely unsympathetic, as he has been healing people and attempting to heal the world, making choices that are ultimately understandable such as removing the KKK from the face of the earth. So. We’re supposed to worry. Dean’s face as the character we’re with for all this is meant to be giving us worried reaction shots because we’re concerned about Cas too - and this encounter which was meant to be a showdown to kill him, instead is the turning point that becomes the call to save him.

But first Dean asks Death to kill Cas, in utter horror, and Cas turns to look at him, and keeps his gaze firmly and unblinkingly there and how MUCH this scene is really just them and once again Bobby and Sam are just background characters to their nonsense… I’ll just leave you on those faces because giffing them was awful enough, so you stare at the loop of the gif a few times and see how YOU feel.

(Wow I feel like a jerk for skipping the Sam prays to Cas stuff so I’m mentioning it just on principle :P)

After the disastrous attempt to set Godstiel up with Death, we find Dean drinking in the morning and Sam trying to be sensitive to Dean’s hurt while also attempting to motivate him through his despair. Sam’s response to Cas is part of his normal characterisation of always wanting a plan, always attempting to save people from themselves, and BELIEVING they can be saved, and all-round coping better than Dean is, certainly… Which matches the start of season 13 where his grief and Dean’s were contrasted with his attitude towards attempting to get stuff done while minimising his own problems.

Which on the flip side, of course, makes Dean’s emotional reaction to what has happened with Cas seem so much extremely stronger than how Sam is handling it, to show him suddenly in the depths of despair, and Cas isn’t even DEAD yet, this is just about the betrayal. Him giving up on Cas is shown with how earlier he has already tried to do all he can to bring Cas back from the brink, and then back after he went over the brink, but Cas resisted every step of the way so far, and in their personal argument the way it has been subtextually described as a break up thanks to the language used around it, codes Dean as the spurned and sulking lover who was betrayed and had every attempt to make it up despite that thrown in his face.

(As usual the truth is somewhat more of a middle ground between every POV but this at least is how Dean is being written.)

Anyway, this is interesting where Sam and Dean are arguing about if Cas can be saved. And that Sam is right and that Cas - who off-screen has been suffering a lot from the Leviathan by this point in the episode and has started to realise he maybe does have some serious concerns he can’t handle on his own - has become much more willing to listen. Sam has the emotionally less hampered view on it, as he is upset but not harmed to the extent Dean is, and his belief anyone can be saved is the first step in redeeming Cas, that he can die an even somewhat good death for the time he has to be out of the story - that Sam, who he has hurt the most in physical, measurable ways, and is the block between Dean and Cas as hurting Sammy is the no.1 worst thing to do, is willing to forgive and reach out to Cas and believe there is still a part of him that wants to be saved. Dean can’t see this because he has been hurt by this fight, betrayal and loss to such a degree that he’s already begun his season 7 drinking and depression now, before Cas’s death. Sam describes how he didn’t tell Dean about his hallucinations because he ALREADY perceived Dean as being in a terrible place, when relatively little else has happened during the period Dean was montageing fixing the car, except for being upset about Cas. All the other worst blows are yet to come.

So Cas answers Sam’s prayer, and though the moment is mostly for them as of course it’s a Sam n Cas lovely moment and this is just not a meta series about them, much as I love ‘em, I’ve giffed Dean’s stunned and horrified reactions to Cas showing up and seeing in how bad a state he’s in, and of course understanding he’s desperate enough to return to them. There’s no sense of gloating or whatever about Sam being right about this - the shock is all just about seeing Cas rather than annoyance or anger, which might be stronger emotions if Dean didn’t still instinctively care a great deal about Cas, despite the surface layer of pure awful they have between them right now.

It’s these little bits that mess me up the most about Cas in this moment. Cas speaking from a clearer mind, having managed to admit between the Leviathan’s out-of-control damage and been drawn back by Sam’s appeal (which was coming from a MUCH less complicated place than Dean’s, and more powerful not for a competition of who cares more/who Cas cares about more, but for what Cas had done to Sam vs Sam’s willingness to reach out to him WITHOUT the weighty interpersonal drama and confusing intertwining of self and each other that Dean and Cas just melted down over when it came to philosophical disagreement vs personal investment or however you quickly summarise what was wrong with them in season 6).

As the “Old Cas/New Cas” thing near the start of the episode showed, Dean’s also managed to compartmentalise a new sense of the Cas he likes and the Cas who hurt him, and *now* the influence of the Leviathans is also a handy way to bring Cas’s violence to a dramatically escalated metaphorical point BEYOND his actions and choices, elevating his bad decisions into a separate entity in a way. (This is good storytelling rather than, like, a way to say “my fave is a precious cinnamon roll who did no wrong” because obviously Cas has fucked the fuck up, but in the telling of it, when any character is at a dramatic crossroads, because it’s a show about magic and monsters, some sort of magic or monstery fuckery will immediately show up to externalise things :P)

In any case, on a character or storytelling level, we have a Cas back who is able to say these things to Dean; to realise he has done wrong, to wish he could heal Sam if he was strong enough, and to promise repeatedly that he will fix him. Dean is still rightfully angry (Cas BROKE Sam, and until 7x17 and Cas fixing Sam, there is NO meaningful way they can have permanent forward progress just because of the entire premise of the show :P)

Anyway I just like this bit where Cas is scrambling for the Right Thing To Do when you feel like shit about your actions, in the most Cas-like way vocalising that he’s uncertain these words in a human way to attack human emotional issues have done their job, and through this shows that words are not the way to fix it, and Cas can say whatever he wants but it’s actions that will actually talk. But he asks Dean anyway if it helped, and Dean angrily says not a bit, and Cas looks away, pained. Just… That whole little exchange shows the impasse that they’re at, the struggle they’re facing to ever truly reconcile, and since Cas will soon be dead supposedly for good, at this point only emphasising the wound that he’s going to leave behind.

But that sense of unfinished business for Cas is, I suspect, the main reason he could come back again because he had such an obvious “motive” (as a character) to return…

Of course, fixing Sam is just the means to making the real repair that will allow him to return to where he once was with Dean. And it is between the two of them that it needs to feel better.

You know what KILLS me? We’ve seen for like 3 episodes or so how utterly furious Dean is with Cas, how badly hurt he has been by Cas. How utterly devastated he’s been by the entire betrayal and argument.

And yet. He still CARES about him. Despite all his better judgement, despite everything that Cas has done and how furious they got with each other and how a few scenes ago they were snapping back and forth at Death to get him to kill one or the other for them… And now Cas returns to them to start to make it better, and even when Dean says, no, this isn’t enough to repair things, he’s still got such a tender way to handle Cas, he’s still got such a soft, concerned look for him. He still has concern about him that goes beyond anything that got broken between them, and in truth, though he’s struggled to harden himself against Cas, or snap at people to cover the pain he’s in, he’s never truly closed Cas away completely… Cas is trying to do the right thing again, and Dean is quick to help, and can’t stop himself from looking concerned.

Cas takes his potentially dying moment to look over his shoulder, and apologise specifically to Dean, no last words for anyone else, to pass on to Sam or to Bobby who is also in the room; just to put his eyes on Dean, and to offer what would be very passable final words, if this were to be how Cas dies. It would be with the memory of Dean’s face looking at him with eyes full of *concern*. And once more, the sense of Dean softening towards him again.

Obviously as I’ve been saying, it takes Cas fixing Sam to *truly* be permitted back, narratively, as someone Dean can learn to care about in the way he’s done before - if shaped by this experience for some time to come… But look at the last two gifs before the Purgatory portal bursts open and Cas ejects the souls and seems to die, as potentially the last look Dean and Cas share, and think about this as it was presented - as the potential last moment of their story.

Dean bargaining with the universe that “maybe angels don’t need to breathe” is perhaps one of the worst things he ever says. I’ve seen parallel gifsets of him sitting over Cas’s body in 12x23/13x01 because of course Cas’s death is paralleled again in that moment to this moment because apparently it turns out literally EVERY time Cas has died in front of Dean has some sort of parallel embedded down in Dabb’s choices.

Another little detail for me is Dean’s hand on Cas’s shoulder, briefly visible in that gif where he removes it - that he’s been sitting there with his hand ON Cas’s shoulder, roughly in the same place he had his own hand print.

That “Damn it” is an extremely broken little noise from Dean, which really needs the audio equivalent of giffing but I can assure you is included because my poor shattered heart couldn’t bear it. And neither can Dean’s, facing that all Cas has done has lead to him lying bloody and damaged on the floor of a disgusting basement, and no way to bring angels back truly exists (even to this day, without divine intervention from cosmic entities of the most elite tier).

Anyway Cas wakes up and makes the understatement of the century about it all, so I giffed Dean pawing all over him as he gets him up. This is one of those things very much like the season 12 touchy touchy stuff I got so weepy about during that season where Bobby and Dean both assist Cas in superficially similar ways, but Dean’s touch lingers and strokes where Bobby’s is merely practical.

In the final gif, Bobby is holding onto Cas too, but Cas struggles out their grips to stop and face Dean properly, and swings around to make the two of them the only people in the room… Between gif size constraints and Bobby once more being cut out of the conversation completely to have a private moment between Dean and Cas despite him literally having a hand on Cas’s elbow to keep him upright and being very much right there in the picture with them despite it… I just went with it and chopped the poor bloke out of frame.

Cas makes his real final words to Dean, and these sparkly eyes compare very much with the expression of “I always come when you call” but to me, all artifice has been stripped away from Cas since he answered Sam’s prayer; we get a genuine Cas who can mean the things he says, and at this point, thinking he has a second chance at life, his priority is to make it utterly clear to Dean that he wants to redeem himself, that if he has been brought back, or spared, this second chance will be about what he has done to Dean. His intensity and urgency about it, unknowingly or not, adds to the tension that in a moment he will be overcome and Dick will take over control…

Once again, Cas’s death seems like it will be permanent at the moment so these words are tuned to give Cas a sense of miserably tragic, unresolved redemption; a moment to show that his heart was still there though he couldn’t do anything to meaningfully redeem himself on a personal level; he managed to put back all the monsters, but his actions will unleash the leviathan, something they have to deal with all season as a metaphorical extrapolation of the emotional damage of his actions, and something that only at the end of the season, he can actually make right for them.

I will probably get back to here in 7x23 but hindsight and finished product rule a positive and friendly reading of season seven. Discarding the pain of live-watching (apparently I did but this year for me was a haze of painkillers and fatigue and I literally remember watching Plucky’s and that’s it if you want my first opinion on this season as a live-watcher :P) you end up with a season which overall is entirely about Cas, about the damage and redemption of his actions. It starts and ends on him, in the open of 7x01 and end of 7x23. His actions, his emotional story with Dean, power both the drama that leads to his death and the unleashing of the monsters, and in the end their ability to come together, forgive, and fight side by side. It’s not a neat palindrome-shaped story or anything particularly fancy, but the demands of what should have been the dramatic arc to kill this unkillable fucker off ended up creating demands on the end of the season to resolve this for him; to allow himself to redeem himself to Sam, to the world, to *Dean*.

And so these words of saying he will find a way to redeem himself to Dean, lose the hollowness that Cas dies with, and become a promise of his return, and his vital, inextricable importance to the story. And with that, sealing his emotional arc with Dean as the actual main arc of season 7 - the only season to date where the main arc’s entire purpose, cause and resolution tangles with the Destiel arc with barely any interruption in the grand scheme when you lay its points out flat on the table.

Chapter Text

Dean has lost Cas 3 times in a month or so, and this time it looks very very final, the empty trenchcoat like a ghost, proving Cas is gone in a way that he never seemed to be physically destroyed before. That it floating up to Dean is the last straw to prove that he is gone.

Since we now know that God can’t enter the Empty and bring angels back from it - not without a lot of trouble - I have to assume that Cas, or Emmanuel as he will come to be known - is already floating down the river to wherever Daphne found him, alive but separated from the trenchcoat, from his sense of self, the spark of which Dean will keep.

Improv to pick up the coat, to fold it, to take it, saves Cas yet again. Jensen’s choice to have Dean keep it seems so trivial, but its sporadic appearances in the back of their cars, and the choice to have Cas come back, the return of the coat to its former owner, become so wildly important in this arc that it seems terrifyingly precarious that in a small moment acted to wring our hearts just a little more about this loss, another powerful thread about who Cas is to Dean endures and in a whole 16 episodes pays off.

For now, of course, Dean folds the thing and presses his hand into it, gives it a futile squeeze of all the feelings he never expressed to Cas, of the pain of this loss, still complicated, still unresolved and unredeemed, but with Cas truly gone, put in a place where all Dean can do is sort through how he feels and mourn what Cas was and wasn’t to him.

In 13x01 we get Dean privately handling the funeral arrangements for Cas, being the one to wrap his body. The one to have that private, personal sort of farewell. It’s like a deliberate, scripted extrapolation of what this unscripted, but devastatingly powerful off the cuff moment was.

I can’t stop watching it so I’m going to make this a short one and flee before it makes me cry :D

Between 6x19 to here, Bobby witnesses e v e r y t h i n g as a functional part of the background scenery to Cas’s betrayal and Dean’s heartbreak. He and Sam are used to contrast Dean’s reaction, and to reassure and comfort him in the wake of it all. Now, alone and in a quiet moment in the story where he has the room to do this, Bobby asks Dean how he’s doing, when Cas is well and truly gone, and with a damp trenchcoat in the back of the car, Dean has all the closure he’s going to get for most of the season.

After the midseason they’re going to use Bobby’s death to blanket over Dean’s angst and make it grief about Bobby (I mean, fair enough in-character, as Bobby has been more of a father to him than his own father was, and 7x10 finishes adding that retcon to his early childhood as a final kick in the heart on the way out the door) and therefore the early part of the season - Sam’s “you’ve had a lot of severe crap swinging your way” comment and this attempt from Bobby, which I have cut out all the comments about other things like Leviathan and Sam’s wall which are adjacent (Cas-CAUSED problems but not Cas himself as an emotional issue) - are all the most important comments to collect before Bobby’s death to show Dean was already a hot mess before Bobby died, and to highlight especially Bobby himself calling out Dean’s mood.

BOBBY 
Of course. Yeah. You just lost one of the best friends you ever had, your brother’s in the bell jar, and Purgatory’s most wanted are surfing the sewer lines, but yeah, yeah, I get it. You’re – you’re fine.

DEAN 
Good.

BOBBY 
Course, if at any time you want to decide that’s utter horse crap, well I’ll be where I always am. Right here.

(I think this should be blindingly obvious as 9 episodes pass here between Cas’s death and Bobby’s, but on the other hand we tend to read stories in a very short-sighted way of what is happening in the immediate moment, and to many people this blanketing of the angst with Bobby’s death comes across as a no-homo, something to be wanky about, like the show is trying to minimise Dean’s pain and make it less about Cas, to retract or deny what came before. 

I find this really silly since there’s nothing in what comes after which actually states that suddenly Dean was sad about Bobby all along (in the same style of retconning “old Cas and new Cas” despite “old Cas” still being the one who betrayed Dean, as I talked about in a couple of the previous recent posts), but we’re now really into the part of the show, from here to literally present day canon, where I see all sorts of ways people are miserable about canon doing things they don’t like specifically when it comes to things minimising the ship which leads to constructing narratives which minimise its importance and doubtfully deny intent or wider meaning.

Since I feel like as I’m writing this meta series largely because I’m trying to help people see the ship in a more positive, happy way, to remember the good stuff and understand the painful stuff in as neutral a way as I can manage (as I don’t stan either Cas or Dean over each other), I think a clearer mission statement for me at this point is to define this as trying to explain the narrative in a way which shows clearly how Dean and Cas’s relationship is mutual, and important.)

Anyways, this particular moment is nice because Bobby takes the time to ask Dean, having seen all he’s seen. Dean tries to talk down how he doesn’t matter and no one cares when Bobby is literally asking, because he’s depressed and miserable and doesn’t think he matters. Bobby persists, and lists off all the bad crap swinging at Dean, including this definition of what he feels Cas was to Dean, which is heartbreaking no matter how you read the romance or not. Dean blows it off but the end of the episode answers it that no, he is not fine at all:

BOBBY’S PHONE MESSAGE
This is Bobby Singer’s direct hotline. You should not have this number. [beep]

DEAN (on phone)
You cannot be in that crater back there. I can’t… If you’re gone, I swear, I am going to strap my Beautiful Mind brother into the car and I’m gonna drive us off the pier. You asked me how I was doing? Well, not good! Now you said you’d be here. Where are you?

Dean is literally as bad as we ever see him at this point - as spun out and depressed as he is in 11x17 or 13x05, and while a new monster threat is run of the mill, Sam’s current terrible state has just been emphasised by the harrowing warehouse scene, and Dean now understands fully that he’s Sam’s only tether to sanity, taking on the full codependency burden of keeping Sam upright and all, and of course, yep, he’s lost Cas. And that freaking sucks for him.

Bobby probably gets this answer phone message, and is unusually tender to Dean when rescuing him in 7x03

(x) but no further comment is made on it until 7x09 when it comes up again through things Dean says rather than Bobby independently seeking out how Dean is doing.

In any case, this is definitely not a “Bobby knows” post, although there’s plenty of theories he’s in on it, but since 6x19 he’s been treated, along with Sam, as knowing there’s something Dean has with Cas that they don’t, and he defines it as “best friend” and, of course, after Rufus died we had an episode where he himself was in deep mourning and doing all the same coping mechanisms Dean does… And that was with the POV that he had Ellen there to magically help and comfort him. Who knows how he was in the week after that when she wasn’t there, that the main world Dean witnessed and would remember.

This is, I guess, more about the fact that the loss of Cas is now being treated as a loss, not a betrayal, that Cas has some peace in death when it comes to Dean (after Rufus’s death he told Bobby and Sam, but not Cas, that they had a clean slate with him if he died, no grudges held, and perhaps there is an element of learning to forgive in death he learned there which is being passed on to Cas). And, of course, that Cas’s death has such a critical importance to Dean’s mood over this period. That despite being currently written off the show, he’s still of serious emotional importance.

Chapter Text

Seems like things are going great, Dean.

(This is such a depressingly long stretch of obviously only getting one side of the relationship… I think when it comes to the one-sided argument, Cas’s looks and comments and even motivations from season 6 can disappear under the barrage of this - I know a feeling from season EIGHT was a fear that it was all one-sided on Dean, though at least when we get Cas back, *I* have plenty to say about him :D)

This dream is usually cited as one of the main ways to know Dean is still fucked up about Cas, mostly because it gives us such a clear visual reference rather than being wishy-washy dialogue. As a BL episode, the exposition and point to the main emotional arc are extremely clearly laid out in this episode, and this one and 7x04 (which is too subtle for me to gif ANYTHING to pin on this off the top of my head but here’s an ancient post musing on it :P) use the guilt over Amy to add to Dean’s issues. This turns into a complicated mess, and we see here in the dream, Cas’s death, Sam shooting nothing in the warehouse, and Dean killing Amy.

I think for now, anyway, this is a good moment at least because it presents these three things separately but their tangle comes together as a result of Dean’s guilt moving on a stage, and the things Cas did having an impact into the season. Though Sam is being tormented by Hallucifer, it’s Cas’s fault Sam is seeing him. Dean killed Amy through a sharper sense of not human = bad and hard to trust, which spirals from Cas. After all, the part of their argument which made clearest their philosophical divide was the last back and forth in 6x20, which aside from the discussion of freedom and motivations re: Cas doing it for/because of Dean, also had Cas declare that Dean was just a man, and he was an angel, and Dean calling Cas a child, insulting his perception of Cas’s emotional intelligence, knowing he struggles to keep up with many of the nuances of human interaction, and now seeing how on a philosophical scale that can also cause deep deep problems.

In the previous episode we saw Dean struggling to get a hook up, having to pep-talk himself into it (and ultimately being abducted by Osiris so he didn’t have to put himself out there before he was ready), and having various issues with food and drink on a sort of low key level which really needs a close read to explain, except that they were obviously there. Now we see he has apparently been drinking a beer at bedtime, and is having cold-sweat nightmares, much more blatant signs of Dean struggling. I find, like, one beer pretty low for Dean since the start of 5x16 has something like 15+ beers and a couple of liquor bottles involved in the tableaux around their beds in the opening shot, but it makes the point, at least, that Dean is drinking. Of course around Bobby he’s poured a drink almost any time he shows mild distress. In any case, Dean’s going through a coping mechanism phase, which includes working the job, and killing monsters, and following a simple black and white code, supplemented with hook ups and drinking to ease away the demons. Not that either of these are working for him right now.

Chapter Text

Ellen reaches through the void to try and tough love Dean into reaching out to Sam. Season 7 uses Ellen and Jo is very short succession to each other, both times to check in with Dean about how he’s feeling. His conversation with ghost!Jo is one of his most tragic for miles around, but not strictly Destiel and I’ve got to stick to the relevant season 7 angst :P Ellen, however, is addressing Dean’s depression directly, and what is interesting is how this episode goes on to answer what “how bad it is” is rooted in, and to suggest this is why Dean’s behaviour has been manifesting this way.

This episode is the reconciliation from the Amy fight, and where it is put to voice that one of the serious motivators for Dean to kill her was the lack of trust that he’s been left with since Cas. That his entire world view has been shattered so completely that he has been in part lashing out and in part refusing to give the benefit of the doubt to non-human things. At this point the secrecy about killing Amy is over, and along with it the guilt of lying to Sam, but this leads to a few rounds of the argument again, until we get to that final declaration.

I think again it’s important not just for this fight but their overall arc, to look at how that argument ended in 6x20 with Cas saying Dean was just a man and that he was an angel, as so much of this becomes tangled up in not trusting a non-human thing to do good and to have mostly innocent intentions, or to have been harming people (specifically with the aim of clearing up some bad folk from society) for a greater good, and promising to stop when it was no longer necessary. As carefully morally weighed as Amy’s actions were from her perspective as an ethical monster, Dean struggled too much with his overall lack of trust and the similarity to the Godstiel situation to make a clean decision.

In Dean’s nightmares the Amy, Sam trauma issue and Cas’s death all conflate together in 7x05 when giving us the clear exposition on what haunts him, and all of these things are rooted in Cas’s actions at the end of season 6; Amy is now firmly linked into these things too, to make it clear that *all* aspects of what has been wrong with Dean lately go back to Cas as a root cause. It’s also the nature of this season, that Cas has unleashed the leviathan, that eventually it is Dick who kills Bobby; to trace back why we even have the leviathan problem, and how he was in the place to do that, goes back to Cas. So no matter how you attack this “How bad it gets” for Dean’s season 7 depression, you can find a thread going back to Cas.

This is one of the rare examples of him openly acknowledging this, as of course his preferred method of coping is bottling up, and hitting the bottle. It means a set up like this for the episode, where Dean puts words to “how bad it is” and explains that it is due to Cas, gives us a way to understand his depression throughout the season. I think this is important because there is a lot more discussion of his depression to come, but it rarely includes Cas in his thinking. And fixing down the read that Dean’s depression of the season is *overtly* and *textually* linked to Cas and is not just a desire or fanon reading is really important, not just for the characterisation to make sense this season, but in the wider picture of understanding the show; for example to be more confident Dean’s misery is meant to be at least in part if not wholly about Cas in other instances where Cas is off the board for whatever reason and Dean appears affected. Or to understand that these are the deep roots that Carver era used to grow the story from, especially with the prevailing attitude that Gamble era is *complete* garbage or that there would be nothing of value, ship-wise, here.

Chapter Text

What a SCENE.

I mean, on the freaking SURFACE LAYER it’s about Performing Dean for Sammy and the various dynamics between them - Sam’s surprise, Dean’s deflection, Dean’s secret love of the song, his desire to sing along being unrepressed until he mouths along, unable to belt it out, staying entirely in lip-syncing through the entire scene (though, please watch the deleted scene)… Dean seeing Sam judging him, Dean stopping, guiltily, looking over his shoulder like who saw me doing that, iN THE CAR where who the HELL ELSE would see him, and then getting a “I like this thing” smirk he uses on the side of his face conveniently always away from Sam in the car (I assume this one is a genetic quirk of which side Jensen is more smirky on but it plays well for the meta :P) and then getting drawn back into the song with twice the enthusiasm, until Sam, WHOLLY uncomfortable, shuts the radio off and diverts back to the case, enforcing and even silencing Dean’s brief, literal, performance, which was actually a betrayal of the layer he normally performs to HIDE, when taken at a metaphorical level of discussion.

Anyway yeah, then we probably have to consult the lyrics they use of All Out Of Love… :D

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWdZEumNRmI

You probably know I’m one of the worst people to send a message to with a “I found this song and it’s so Destiel omg!” and I’m like “It probably sure is!” but as with everything like that, even wanting to write this meta about an actual song from the show, I listened to the opening 3 lines and got confused and closed the tab in a moment of delirium and alarm, so I can’t wrangle this even when I want to, I’m sorry. It’s a literal mental block from tiredness and bad audio comprehension. Here’s the full lyrics if you’re into that sort of thing:

I’m lying alone with my head on the phone
Thinking of you till it hurts
I know you hurt too but what else can we do
Tormented and torn apart
I wish I could carry your smile and my heart
For times when my life seems so low
It would make me believe what tomorrow could bring
When today doesn’t really know, doesn’t really know

I’m all out of love, I’m so lost without you
I know you were right believing for so long
I’m all out of love, what am I without you
I can’t be too late to say that I was so wrong

I want you to come back and carry me home
Away from this long lonely nights
I’m reaching for you, are you feeling it too
Does the feeling seem oh so right
And what would you say if I called on you now
And said that I can’t hold on
There’s no easy way, it gets harder each day
Please love me or I’ll be gone, I’ll be gone

I’m all out of love, I’m so lost without you
I know you were right believing for so long
I’m all out of love, what am I without you
I can’t be too late to say that I was so wrong

Oh, what are you thinking of
What are you thinking of
What are you thinking of
What are you thinking of

I’m all out of love, I’m so lost without you
I know you were right believing for so long
I’m all out of love, what am I without you
I can’t be too late I know I was so wrong

I’m all out of love, I’m so lost without you
I know you were right believing for so long
I’m all out of love, what am I without you
I can’t be too late I know I was so wrong

I’m all out of love, I’m so lost without you
I know you were right believing for so long
I’m all out of love, what am I without you
I can’t be too late to say that I was so wrong

For this scene, they use the last chunk of one of the verses to get that line about “calling” because Cas always comes when Dean calls, then while Dean is bitterly complaining in a “I actually like this and want to listen to it but I can’t admit that” way, the lyrics talk about it getting harder each day - and Dean is now getting nice and cosy in his season 7 depression spiral, especially as this is the scene formally mourning the loss of Baby, and technically another surface level read of this scene is entirely that Dean is so cut up about losing his car, the comical level is that he’s singing this song FOR BABY rather than anyone else.

Although, I would think that the “it gets harder each day” would be pretty clear to see that we’re 6 episodes in and Dean has been worse and worse off in each episode so far, so there’s a wider meaning easy to grasp at… But why, huh? It’s when we hit the chorus that Dean starts mouthing along - “I’m all out of love” he pretends to sing. Even when it’s just going along with a song, he struggles to put words to his feelings, to voice the word “love” for how he is feeling.

I don’t know about “I know you were right” but I think in later seasons Dean may be able to admit that Cas made an awful call but it is nice living in a world that Raphael isn’t running into the ground. At the very least, the last bits of Cas in this season suggested the beginning of a tentative personal redemption should he get the chance - a sense of Cas no longer being wholly villainised for his choices and for Dean to see him compassionately again. The song seems to be more about a break up with someone still living than with someone who has died before they could make up to you about something, but “What am I without you?” is also interesting because as I’ve talked about several times here and there where it seems relevant, Dean and Cas in their establishing relationship stuff came to define themselves by each other a considerable amount.

Elsewhere in this episode, there’s the “applications for sainthood” analysis of how Dean has relationships, from his Leviathan copy, and one of the important things about all this is that through the season 5 and 6 fights, Cas and Dean will, eventually, when things are a bit more normal in season 8 onward (“normal” as in no one is actively betraying each other to such a degree we have to go through anything like THIS again :P) Cas and Dean both seem to have each other less on pedestals than when they were in the gooey-eyed honeymoon phase of their relationship, when both thought the other hung the stars. They obviously care a great deal for each other, and there are a lot of issues with how they put the other ahead of them - especially so for Cas to Dean - but in the parts of the show I’ve waded through so far, they are learning to see each other in a much more grounded and realistic way, which ultimately benefits them in the long run, that they will EVENTUALLY have a healthier relationship.

Anyway, I’m just so amused that Dean cracks like this, at another horrible low point, he takes some fun in singing along to the radio, and there’s such a wealth of meta storytelling going on here. In Dean’s emotional landscape, THIS is the song with lyrics such as these that is used to show him cracking open and mouthing along, and the words seeming to go core-deep for him… The love ballad of loss and being stuck after an argument wanting to communicate and make up with a loved one… Yeah.

Chapter Text

Oh dear, the turducken slammer.

Giffed especially because of the “limited edition return” of the sandwich in 13x03, on a billboard, while Dean was mourning Cas yet again.

This moment is the other time in this part of the season he specifically mentions that when he has not been feeling fine, the biggest things on his mind have been caring too much (as per usual), the leviathans, and Cas. Betrayal or death, it doesn’t really matter, once again he links his mood to them.

In truth, this is just getting to the heart of the matter, as what Bobby truly calls him out on is a rant from before he was even drugged, at the start of the episode when he was grouchy and tired and complaining:

DEAN:
That’s just great. This is stupid. Our quality of life is crap. We got Purgatory’s least wanted everywhere, and we’re on our third “The World’s Screwed” issue in, what, three years? We’ve steered the bus away from the cliff twice already.

SAM:
Someone’s got to do it.

DEAN:
What if the bus wants to go over the cliff?

SAM:
You think the world wants to end?

DEAN:
I think that if we didn’t take its belt and all its pens away each year that, yeah, the whole enchilada woulda offed itself already.

BOBBY:
Stop trying to wrestle with the big picture, son. You’re gonna hurt your head.

Before Bobby gets around to talking to Dean, Sam brings up his own concerns, and once again specifically mentions Cas, and then describes, in case we missed it in the first 9 episodes, where we as an audience are supposed to be with understanding Dean. After all, this is SAM. His perception on Dean is important. He thinks losing Cas is on a level to something terrible happening to himself to Dean’s eyes, and that’s an important evaluation, that Cas mattered nearly as much as Sam himself.

Bobby’s answer, “How could he be?” is so sad, but it’s taken for granted that they understand how important Cas was to him, just as in 6x19 they’re the ones sharing a silent look before they break the news to Dean that they think Cas is acting sketchy.

Bobby finally gets to Dean when it comes to their own talk as Bobby is given a little farewell moment with each of them, and he spends the entire thing lecturing Dean about how he feels and trying to give him a motivation so that he doesn’t end up dead himself, seeing how Dean is reckless and doesn’t care for his own life. Dean finally bursts out with this proclaimation about how he doesn’t think anything matters any more.

He’s going to be redirected onto a vengeance course; this is set up so that his nihilistic depression instead is placed on single-mindedly pursuing Dick, at which point his earlier concerns almost seem inconsequential to Bobby’s death and this new mission, at least for what Dean will talk about openly. This is Bobby’s last advice to Dean and it rings similarly to advice that Dean gets in 2 subsequent episodes, all pushing him into the same course, minimising his softer feelings and pushing him onto a track of just doing the mission, getting revenge, forcing his way through it day by day:

BOBBY:
Oh, you poor, sorry… You’re not a person.

DEAN:
Thanks.

BOBBY:
Come on, now. You tried to hang it up and be a person with Lisa and Ben. And now here you are with a mean old coot and a van full of guns. That ain’t person behavior, son. You’re a hunter, meaning you’re whatever the job you’re doing today. Now, you get a case of the Anne Sextons, something’s gonna come up behind you and rip your fool head off. Now, you find your reasons to get back in the game. I don’t care if it’s love or spite or a ten-dollar bet. I’ve been to enough funerals. I mean it. You die before me, and I’ll kill you.

7x11

FRANK: 
Okay, then, fine. Do what I did.

DEAN: 
What? Go native? Stock up on C-rations?

FRANK: 
No, cupcake. What I did when I was 26 and came home to find my wife and two kids gutted on the floor. Decide to be fine till the end of the week. Make yourself smile because you’re alive and that’s your job. Then do it again the next week.

DEAN: 
So fake it?

FRANK: 
I call it being professional. Do it right, with a smile, or don’t do it.

7x12:

ELIOT NESS: 
Sometimes you just want to punch through the red tape with a silver bullet. Yeah, hunting sets me free. Isn’t that why you hunt?

DEAN: 
I used to do it ‘cause that’s what my family did.

ELIOT NESS: 
Hmm.

DEAN: 
But they just seem to keep dying. To tell you the truth, I don’t know why I’m doing much of anything anymore.

ELIOT NESS: 
Boo-hoo. Cry me a river, ya nancy. Tell me, are all hunters as soft as you in the future? Everybody loses everybody. And then one day, boom. Your number’s up, but at least you’re making a difference. So enjoy it while it lasts, kid, ‘cause hunting’s the only clarity you’re gonna find in this life. And that makes you luckier than most.

So I think it’s important in this last moment before we switch to the “Get Dick” revenge plot for the rest of the season, to tally up these moments firmly including/prioritising Cas as one of/the main reason for Dean’s depression in the first half of the season. Being an Edlund episode, whether Cas was really due to come back or not at the time of writing, he’d be sure to mention Cas several times, and in this case that is keeping his memory alive in how Dean still carries this pain with him and to make it absolutely clear that even before Bobby gets killed, Dean is in a very bad way and he’s not letting go of Cas any time soon.

Chapter Text

Hey Jeffrey! Thank you for being the first true DeanCas mirror in the narrative! A very, very dark one, but we’ve now cleared a large chunk of the season and are back with Edlund 2 episodes short of Cas returning. This is the beginning of what I would consider the narrative telling of Destiel which is embedded at a structural level, and I know this was a moment sparked a lot of the early meta community into action, as this is a fairly huge moment in the way the storytelling changes. Carver era starts with a wealth of romantic narrative mirrors which seem clearly to be about Dean and Cas, mirroring their position in the plot or emotional issues uncannily.

At this point, Jeffrey provides the perfect example. He says he was in love with his demon, with whom he had his own special, secret connection. While this is kind of an evil gay trope in the sense that we’re getting a queer story but it’s about a serial killer, setting that aside in this world we have angel vs demon, heaven vs hell imagery, and once Jeffrey gets into describing his life between season 3 & 7 (aka the entire time Dean knew Cas) he starts to sound like he is just listing off Dean’s behaviour for the season.

I think it’s important to mention that line Jeffrey leads in with, about wanting to save the world, because the “people getting hurt” thing also ties to the fact that he has lost Cas (and Sam is hurt, Bobby is dead). What sets it all aside here is that it is a romantic mirror, and there are no alternative explanations to make Sam or Bobby, emphatically NOT romantic interests to Dean, a part of this picture. And as I’ve been saying, Dean’s loss and misery this season is split between these three issues, mostly, plus the vague promise of the leviathan threat. But Cas is sometimes and importantly singled out as a primary cause and ongoing contributing factor to Dean’s misery. And, of course, that he is the reason for everything from Sam’s broken wall to the unleashed leviathans, to Bobby’s death. 

The final line, Jeffrey compares himself directly to Dean, saying he understands HIS depression and hopelessness, which, like everyone else who seems to come into contact with him this season, he diagnoses at once in Dean’s behaviour. Having equated his own feelings to Dean, he talks about how he felt because the love of his life was gone, in these terms which specifically describe Dean - “A wreck, an emotional shell, a drunk. I was suicidal.” All of this is what I’ve covered extensively in the posts about season 7 so far, and it’s almost like with Cas’s return due, this episode swoops in to summarise everything in this little exchange, and pin it once more all on Cas, in preparation for his unexpected return to Dean’s life…

Chapter Text

Listen, this fucker has a lot of dramatic entrances, but can you really beat him returning butt-first this time? I think not.

Dean either.

There’s a lot to say about Emmanuel along the way, but I just want to take a moment to appreciate Bobby nudging Dean in his direction, once more acting as a wingman to them - although it’s been more like an angst wingman since 6x19. Now Dean has Cas delivered to him in the most desperate moment, and we have the trope of seeing the face of a seemingly dead loved one return to your life in the most unexpected way. And of course, Dean also accidentally comes to “Emmanuel”’s defence, as of course he would kill a demon any day of the week, but he unknowingly arrives just in time to foil the plan to kidnap him. Not knowing he’s an angel, Emmanuel could have ended up in a lot of trouble, as he was set to be taken to Crowley.

While giffing I couldn’t help eventually noticing the sort of vines and fairytale garden effect going on at Daphne’s house - there’s something sort of magical about Cas’s return, and it all plays into the tropes, just the casual setting of a slightly run down house with vines growing all over it, rather than some perfectly pristine suburban look. It adds just a bit more fairytale drama to the return.

And, wow, he may not know who he is, but Emmanuel knows how to join in with the staring thing with Dean… I think as an angel, full powered but in a way almost unaware of how different he is, he can probably read Dean as deeply as Cas ever can, and that at the very least, he knows there is something about this man on his porch, staring at him like a lost love returned, that is more than just a random chance saviour from a monster that he doesn’t even know yet was a demon.

And it’s this perfect blank slate, the amnesia trope thrown in for good measure, that allows some tentative communication to pass between them; at this point Emmanuel is offered for Dean’s sake as a “soft” way of getting Cas back, to process the mere existence and *possibility* of Cas being returned to him.

Since we have the parallels all over the place, I think it’s also interesting to compare to 13x05/6 when Cas returns, but knows full well who he is, reaches out to Dean, and Dean instinctively knows and trusts that it is Cas. Because in this moment here, though it’s not a nice reunion with automatic hugs and relief, Dean KNOWS that this is Cas, and not a trick.

I think of all the things you can say about the scene, the one that interests me the most is that once again it’s on a very structural level that the strongest Destiel moment comes. They could have chosen to return Cas to the narrative in just about any way, even within the confines of being memory-less. Meg could have even already had him, you know? But instead we get this innocent scene where Dean is forced to confront the concept that Cas has picked up a wife while he’s been out of the picture.

This is a fairly classic trope in the amnesia range - the love interest has seemingly moved on, has found a romantic false lead through no fault of their own, and the lover is forced to see their object of affection casually shattering their heart with no idea that they are causing the slightest problem.

As others have pointed out, Dean even takes a moment to realise for sure that Cas doesn’t know about demons, and, slowly, that he doesn’t know who Dean is, and that this isn’t just moving on but that he’s truly oblivious and living a different life, unaware of who he once was.

Daphne also fills a pretty much otherwise empty role in the narrative except to explain where Cas was and how he didn’t get into any other more noticeable trouble any time sooner than this, and disappears never to be seen again after this scene, with no further role in the narrative now she has rescued Cas and returned him to Dean. She has a few mythological ties, of which rather a lot was written over time… nothing new here etc.

The use of her to add a little extra heartbreak therefore seems like a sort of pointed thing towards Dean - that of all the things he stumbles in on Cas doing while living a memory-less life, it’s that he’s made a little domestic place for himself and apparently fallen in love. Daphne isn’t remotely his concern after the story starts rolling, even when he still thinks he’s Emmanuel, and a word isn’t spared for her after Cas gets his memory back and is clearly never going back to living that life.

It leaves the entire point of this scene pretty much to be on Dean’s reaction to seeing Cas’s life here; and in this case, of course, Jensen’s face does oh so much of the talking.

First two gifs are just Dean STILL harping on the Daphne thing - whether this was meant to cover a cut scene or some behind the scenes nonsense that ended up with the same line repeated, or a mistake to motivate the conversation again, Dean ends up accidentally or deliberately harping on Daphne and Cas’s relationship all the way down the road, despite the fact that it was already clarified for him in their previous scene. Whoops. :)

Anyway. Season 7 is a gruelling watch and there are multiple points that things seem to be pasting over other grief to make Dean’s rawness about Cas less obvious - the thing that season 13 did the opposite of by hitting him with multiple grief but writing primarily about the loss of Cas. But by 7x17, at a lowest point, when they don’t even have Bobby’s ghost in order to get some better closure with him, never mind anything else, right down in the depths of their loss and Sam at his worst, driving a stolen car… Dean talks about losing Cas (to Cas) in this way, about how hard it hit him, about how this was the thing that has rattled him to the core, and affected him in the way that nothing else ever has. And he doesn’t understand it. This is a fascinating moment to me because it shows one of the rare times Dean explores and questions his feelings about Cas, or, at least, voices that there is a question there, though he doesn’t have the answer. The pain is different from anything he’s ever felt before, but having grown so close to Cas and then to lose him in the way he did… It was grief and broken trust and broken heart and dead family all at once, and that’s not something he has handled before.

I love that last line from Emmanuel and I can’t help sticking it in, because though it’s more about showing his empathetic kind nature, in the same way that he is gently considerate to Meg’s ability to make everything awkward until she rolls her eyes and tells him that Dean was joking… This is still a kind reassurance coming from Cas’s mouth, to Dean, and it’s something both of them need to hear when it comes to the stuff they pile on themselves and their expectations that they need to muscle on and not deal with their problems. Emmanuel might not remember Dean, but he certainly is able to read him, and I have to wonder if there’s a familiarity in him that he’s not really recognising as familiarity, but Dean taught him to be human in the first place, and reading that this is how someone *like* Dean comes across might be very familiar in his inner processes to reading people, just from all his experience based so much on learning humanity from this one particular person. In a way, an impersonal personal reading, Emmanuel accidentally telling us what Cas might think about Dean, from an objective point of view…

Ah yes, Cas’s “everything” moment, where “you” somehow covers “everything” too. After all Cas did “all of it” for Dean.

This has been picked over a LOT as a very blatant moment so I’ll be quick on it as I’m sure most of us know the drill :)

(And apologies for the truly awful quality of the screencaps but there’s a ton of them and they were all flashing and if I don’t have to make flashing gifs I’m not making flashing gifs)

I picked out this moment before for being a change in the narrative - Cas’s return reclaiming the story to tell his side, as 6x20 was his point of taking up the reigns for the first time, this recontextualises the narrative from his POV and offers us a chance to review it from his eyes. For his reintroduction into the story, he is being embedded at a deeper emotional level, one where the things which he has done and which have happened to him are now part of a meatier character arc which will build on the early seasons of development and now take him to a point of reflection and recovery from those, and onwards to development to the Cas of more modern times we know and love, who carries a proper embedded personal arc of significant narrative value both on and off screen. 7x15 with its Jeffry and his demon parallel already has begun to lay the groundwork of telling Cas’s story in mirrors and parallels, and Carver era will slam us with these to a previously unprecedented degree.

So.

Cas remembers his intro to the show via showing Dean he’s an angel… This is where his story starts for US and for DEAN, but not necessarily for Cas. Cas’s personal narrative is already defined by meeting Dean, which, as we frequently point out, for a billion year old critter, is a blink of an eye.

He remembers rebelling for Dean, with lots of staring amongst the flashes. And he remembers the Ur Touchy Feely moment of handing the knife back to Dean, in a moment of trust (not that it can do him much harm but it’s a bookend to his intro in the barn where Dean stabbed him, so, symbolism.) It’s a moment of showing the closeness of their hands - comparisons where they pass significant objects to their personal arcs between them carry on through the show - the mixtape being the last to whack us around the head like this. So far this is the best example to date, so it’s the one we see :D

Then we see a few flashes of Cas’s betrayal in season 6: working with Crowley, breaking Sam’s wall. And then contextualising that again: “I’m sorry, Dean”, again, Dean looking at Cas, Cas remembering that last look back at Dean that I spent a few paragraphs weeping on several gifsets back in this series. He regrets the betrayal, the Crowley and Sam thing, in the context of how they hurt Dean. How Dean was unhappy about it. How in Cas’s last moments before he loses himself, he wanted to apologise, to make amends.

For Cas’s ongoing arc to the end of this season, the fact that he said he would redeem himself to Dean is key. I think the ONLY way to bring Cas back and emotionally reconcile him with Dean is exactly what he did: not just immediately going to Sam, and fixing his wall, but doing a reckless, and unprompted save at his own expense. His regret and need to redeem himself has him at a lowest point where he is “lost until he takes on [Sam’s] pain” as he says in 7x21, and this is a step Dean needs to see Cas’s willingness to throw himself away by taking on a potentially fatal affliction for Sam, for Dean, and for Cas to do this to feel like he has done something big enough to undo the betrayal of breaking Dean’s no.1 rule of hurting Sam.

(It’s interesting that this only reflects on Cas, as through the season Dean is hurt, but also immediately on Cas’s death, begins mourning him, and feels the loss of a friend, and the fact that Cas broke rule no.1 of course hurts him, affects him to the point of killing Amy and claiming that since Cas he has a hard time trusting everyone, and all the anger he spends on Cas especially while he’s Godstiel, but in comments along the way. But he recovers, he reconciles and he begins to find maybe not peace but at least some sort of balance of what Cas meant to him along with what Cas did, so that from Dean he is not emanating any “fix him or fuck you” and his drive in the episode is only to fix Sam because, well, it’s SAM DYING. His only comment is that maybe Cas was brought back to fix it, but only AFTER Cas is expressing despair and needs pep talking into helping… Like, that came up organically in conversation, which is a world of difference from him forcing Cas to fix Sam at gunpoint in order to start from square one again, you know?)

(Also: here’s some important follow-up reading)

DEAN
If you remember, then you know you did the best you could at the time.

CASTIEL
Don’t defend me. Do you have any idea the death toll in Heaven? On Earth?

CASTIEL
We didn’t part friends, Dean.

DEAN
So what?

CASTIEL
I deserved to die. Now, I can’t possibly fix it… So why did I even walk out of that river?

DEAN
Maybe to fix it. Wait.

….

Somehow a part of me always knew you’d come back

Honestly, though we know that is a deleted line (from either the promo for the episode where there was footage of it, or the script a fan received, but that line is embedded in my brain despite it not being in the show :P) the actual moment of handing the trenchcoat back, all the implication of Dean keeping it after saying, so, he’s gone, and then carrying it from car to car for all the months they’ve been on the run, says it all. We know he kept the coat from 7x02 at least so much as he didn’t leave it behind, but unless you have a sharp eye, it’s not until 7x17 that it’s openly acknowledged with its appearance in the story again that, yes, he really has had it with him all this time, ready and waiting for Cas’s return.

This one speaks for itself so much I don’t even know where to go with it except gesturing.

The dialogue beforehand is very short, but very important. Dean starts with reassuring Cas that it’s okay and his stance on Cas’s season 6 actions has changed, that he understands now, that at the end of the day there is a part of him that can accept what Cas has done. And this is important because as much as he sometimes lashes out about it - once in 8x22 and once in 9x22 - he doesn’t carry an insurmountable resentment about Cas’s actions in his heart. Not so much so that though they didn’t part friends, it’s not wild to think they could be again.

Dean’s room to forgive Cas, just to have him back, is astronomical, given who we are talking about, the “welcome to next time” style grudges he keeps, and what Cas did.

Chapter Text

Oh, this one hurts. The classic “hello Dean” as an introduction, and for a moment it seems like everything is somehow back to normal, after all of Dean’s fears of seeing “what’s left” of Cas that he expressed on the way in.

That first gif of Dean is his silent reaction to the “hello Dean” by the way, while Sam beamed and said “hello” back when Cas turned to him and said his name. But Dean’s maybe more wary for at least a moment. As Cas approaches, we get him beaming at him, really beginning to think, hey, maybe he can have Cas back and things will start to get back to normal.

Then, of course, the illusion breaks and Cas starts behaving in really un-Cas-like ways, throwing Dean off. And once again the clouds cross his face, and the struggle to reconcile with Cas goes back to the start…

This is one of those scenes I’ve picked over so much.

“You realise you just broke God’s word.”

This scene starts on a great note. My general response to every line and action from this scene is “that’s got to be a metaphor.” In this case, we’re taking the entire conversation as a metaphor for Dean and Cas’s broken relationship, and this is how it starts: Cas broke God’s word. He rebelled against Heaven and the apocalypse arc is all about tearing up God’s script and picking free will. So one line into the conversation, and we’ve got the base of their relationship established; this was how they met, how they became friends, how, in the end, they were ultimately torn apart, when you factor in 6x20’s exploration of the knock on effects of tearing up the script. It’s all key Cas stuff, and in this case, Cas playing rough with the Leviathan tablet is a metaphor for all of that.

Cas just looks kinda sad, and Dean does his first step-back-and-try-again and sits down, backing off from the accusation and opening up the conversation properly.

The important thing here, by the way, is that Dean is seeking an apology for season 6, while Cas desperately wants to give it, and Dean is in no place to accept it, and Cas is in no place to meaningfully give it.

(I rambled a lot about the actual path to forgiveness the show took, aka, how to not make season 8 entirely an endless loop of this scene over and over when it comes to their relationship, basically arguing Purgatory cleared the slate. If that’s the case this scene is setting up what needs clearing.)

Anyway.

“It’s Sam’s thing, isn’t it? You, uh, taking on his cage match scars. I’m guessing that’s what broke your bank, right?”
“Well, it took everything to get me here.”
“What are you talking about, man?”
“Dean. I know you want different answers.”

Dean actually does know exactly how Cas ended up where and how he is - he wasn’t exactly absent in 7x17 when Cas cured Sam and they had to leave him behind with Meg. He knows that taking on the hell stuff from Sam incapacitated Cas completely. Him asking “how” seems to be a redundant question even for Dean.

Fortunately Cas isn’t answering Dean’s questions: his response doesn’t correspond with Dean’s question at all, and he then explicitly says, you want different answers. Assume Cas is answering what Dean wants in the subtext.

So what does “Well it took everything to get me here” mean?

Dean’s first question is saying “Look at what’s wrong with you, Cas” without asking. Rather than get to the hard subject, and asks the redundant but actually less painful question than approaching Cas head on. It also serves as another plot reminder - Cas saved Sam, for Dean. One of the last things Cas said before the Leviathans was about finding some way to redeem himself to Dean, and the Sam thing was it. There’s a lot else going on that needs forgiveness, but for Dean, hurting Sam is the most unforgivable thing, and even then he’s already given and giving Cas second chances no one else would get. Cas taking on the full brunt of Sam’s pain himself, literally shifting the problem back to its source, and Dean facing that, is him asking by way of the obvious, “This is what you did to yourself for me to fix the Sam thing.”

“It took everything to get me here,” is probably in reference to all the factors that led to Cas nearly being back on the path to forgiveness. Factors mostly including Sam’s appeal to Cas to come back and let them fix it, the involvement of Death in setting things up so Cas could try and let go of the Purgatory souls, as well as all the stuff between Dean and Cas from 6x20 onwards where Dean appeals to Cas, then Cas’s death, resurrection, and Dean once again finding Cas and bringing him to Sam. Each event is against all odds but was Sam or Dean or both working to try and draw Cas back for the sake of their friend (and with some help from Bobby :3), and this is Cas appreciating that they made this effort for him - probably an important part of his decision to take on the scars.

So that part of the exchange is basically “Look what you’ve done to yourself [for me to fix Sam].” “Yes but it was done to redeem myself to you.”

On with the conversation:

“No, I want you to button up your coat and help us take down Leviathans.”

Hah, coats. Ha. Destiel. Ha ha ha. Season 7. Ha.

Okay, Dean-keeping-the-trenchcoat aside, Cas’s coat is sort of symbolic from his de-coating at the beginning of season 7 onwards of Cas’s state. Dean keeps it in remembrance of Cas; giving it back to Cas after his coat-less Emmanuel phase goes along with Cas’s memory coming back. They keep using the metaphor consistently after this - season 8, Cas recreates his old outfit to show he’s back to himself (much appreciated by Dean), season 9 he loses the coat when he becomes human, gets a replacement coat that’s different with the stolen grace (and as that fades out at the beginning of season 10 you see him take the coat on and off in much the way we see his grace flickering as he tries to heal himself). Here, we’re in early days of Coat Metaphor, but it’s got to come from somewhere. :P How about Dean asking Cas to button up his coat - become normal angel Cas that he once knew, who’s a useful friend who can fight beside him.

Leviathans were always metaphorical monsters; obviously the blatant plot thing was as a metaphor for corporate greed and all that jazz, but on a personal level they were a metaphor for the depression and helplessness that they went through in this season. So Dean asking Cas to come help him defeat the metaphor-villains of the seasons with him is a pretty straightforward metaphor for their reconciliation making them happier I think.

*long helpless stare from Cas*
“Do you remember what you did?”
*longer, more helpless stare*

And Cas reaches for the “Sorry!” board.

Cas does remember, and being prompted about that leads him to try and make his apology. He can’t say it with his own words because he still hasn’t reached that point, but he wants this to be over, and he wants to make things better to Dean, and his remorse is evident. But he can’t fully mean it like this.

And so he wordlessly holds up the boardgame, hoping it can convey it for him when he can’t. Which, obviously, is not the proper way to offer an apology.

Cas sets the boardgame up with magic, trying to rush into the apology by not taking the time to open the board, lay out all the pieces, etc (just like how in this conversation they’re not saying a LOT of stuff: they’re not laying all the cards on the table). Instead he dumps it all on there ready to go and expects the Sorry! to happen like this. 

“Do you want to go first?”

Of course it takes two to play Sorry!: Dean doesn’t just have to acknowledge Cas’s reasons to apologise, but while he didn’t exactly break the universe as per Cas in season 6, their personal relationship was terrible for the entire season, even before Dean found out about the betrayal. Mommy Dearest has multiple moments where Dean demeans Cas, and right up to Cas’s death, Dean keeps on calling him a child. There’s other stuff from Cas’s side suggested especially in 6x20: Cas felt like Dean could have extended him some trust over his plan, and while, you know, terrible idea, Cas’s fault over much of it, blah blah, he’s still personally feeling like Dean didn’t trust him as part of the problem and we can’t invalidate how he feels even if we don’t fully support what Cas did and he himself acknowledged his faults in going along with the plan.

Last time Cas and Dean talked (that one other time Cas was just Cas in season 7) Cas said, “We didn’t part friends, Dean.” Asking Dean to go first is suggesting there are things he could say - smaller things than what Cas might, perhaps, but things which are still about the cornerstones of their friendship regarding trust and how Dean sees and treats Cas, which they could smooth over.

This is the first part of their conversation, and has basically set up all the groundwork for what lies between them and that “Sorry!”

We cut back to Cas and Dean after a brief bit with Kevin fixing the tablet (probably not symbolic down to this scene…) and they’re clearly a few rounds into the game now. The scene starts with Dean holding up a tiny “Sorry!” card, and then grudgingly moving his piece back a few steps (assuming normal boardgame conventions where you move left-right as if reading as default movement order). It seems like this conversation is going well. :P

Cas is talking Neanderthals and poetry, musing on the chance that humans won. I’m not 100% on the metaphors here, except that it is showing Cas’s age and appreciation for small, wonderful things in the world. He’s enamoured with creation, and his words about how it was modern humans who won and “ate the apple, invented pants…” bringing it back around to the Biblical story of how humanity got its apparent kickstart, and, again, sort of leads back to where they are: if Swan Song was the end of the script, Adam and Eve is the start of it: the beginning of the story. The context is pretty huge here, at least as far as Cas’s issues run. Him reflecting on ancient history and pre-history is a sign of how huge and abstract his history is, leaving you looking at the guy in front of Dean and… Yeah, long road. Faint whispers of 6x20 and Cas telling you his story again.

“Cas, where can we find this, uh, Metatron? Is he still alive?“ 
“I’m sorry, I think you have to go back to start.”
*Dean scowls, resentfully moves his piece back*
“This is important.”
*Cas just gestures the boardgame again*
*Dean angrily makes another move*

Dean tries too hard to press Cas for current plot information, clearly fed up of playing this game, but Cas still wants to work on the apology, and so he tells Dean that he’s got to try harder and work through Sorry! before they can talk about anything else.

Here’s a great line from Dean:

“I think Metatron could stop a lot of bad. You understand that?”
“We live in a ‘Sorry’ universe.” (Cas gestures with a Sorry! card as he says the word). “It’s engineered to create conflict. I mean, why should I prosper from your misfortune?”
*Cas does a move which puts the last of Dean’s pieces back to start since he’s been busy sucking at Sorry! while trying to talk to Cas*
“But these are the rules, I didn’t make them.”

Possibly some of this is largely to suggest that the boardgame has been a metaphor all along (gasp!). Cas, as per the rest of this season, is avoiding conflict, and here he lays out his current philosophy on why he’s not fighting. It’s existential and a sort of defeat that comes from knowing, as this conversation reminds us, how the universe works on every level. Cas has seen it all and he knows how it goes and right now that’s got him completely beaten down, and not inclined to do anything about it when Dean comes to him with another problem.

Anyway Dean is finally going to start to address some of his issues with Cas and starts to get openly angry at last:

“You made some of them. When you tried to become God. When you cut that hole into that wall.”
“Dean… It’s your move.”
“Screw the damn game!”
*Dean throws the board on the floor and slams his hand on the table*

I should note that basically we see Cas move once while making his symbolic point to about 3 or so moves from Dean: Cas is moving off screen and it’s not really been about his moves at this point while Dean is the one trying to control the conversation. Once Dean reaches the point in the conversation where they’re talking for the first time about the deep hurt between them - the stuff that really needs the genuine apology, Cas’s avoidance of it and the fact that he’s not participating, using the Sorry! game as a cover for his actual apology, becomes all that more clear, and Dean is having none of it now it’s turned serious.

They’ve held pretty level eye contact through this (Cas’s is so consistent it’s hard to tell when it’s been his turn in the game) but now he looks down at his lap and can’t even try to raise his head.

Dean tries to calm himself, and says, “Forget the game, Cas.”
Cas looks up. “I’m sorry Dean.”
“No. You’re playing ’Sorry’.”

Which, uh, it’s sort of hard to tell where the metaphor ends there. :P *she jokes because the other option is crying and this line, everything about it, is the reason this is my favourite scene in the entire run of the show*

Dean sounds on the very of angry tears here - he’s choked up and furious and miserable and uurgh I hate this scene. This is where Dean realises that Cas can’t apologise, not in the way Dean wants him to. Not in the meaningful way. I think he was going to give him a chance to apologise, and hear it, but Cas refusing to help, and only wanting to play the boardgame, makes Dean realise how out of it Cas is - and how anything he says right now can’t be taken as fully sincere, as right now Dean realises this isn’t his Cas - his expression is one of searching over Cas’s face, trying to understand him, and realising he doesn’t see Cas there, not the one he used to rely on. Not the one he wants to hear making the apology. It takes him the rest of the season to reconcile this, and only then does he actually get his Cas back, and even inspire this Cas to fight alongside him again.

(brief cut to Kevin and Sam where the angels show up)

Then we get the bit where Cas is on the floor clearing up the game, and Dean is sitting watching him and scowling hard enough to set Cas on fire.

There’s one post I found in my tag which relates to this part in particular. The interesting bit from castiel-knight-of-hell is this:

at a con someone asked why Cas had used his angel powers to set up the game but didn’t use them to pick it up. Misha said he didn’t know why

As a writer this scene made perfect sense to me. The passive character needed an excuse to retreat from the person showing aggression, and needed to busy himself with something as a way to avoid the conversation Dean was so intent on having. It’s like when a parent is yelling at a child and that child gets really focused on the picture they’re coloring. They don’t know how to respond to the yelling, they want the encounter to end, so they focused on a task to help them wade out the storm without falling apart and possibly making the parent even angrier

It’s a good reading for the dynamic going on here, I think.

Cas trying to clear up the mess of the game is symbolic of a lot of pointless tidying - the effect the game apology has is pointless clearing up. Saying sorry over and over but it not meaning anything, not in the way it’s supposed to. The dynamic puts Cas in a deeply subservient position with Dean judging him, and it’s here we can see clearer than in the previous parts that a great deal of the problem here is that Dean’s got a huge wall up that the sorrys are bouncing off: he himself is not ready yet to hear the words Cas has to say: he is as removed from being able to accept the apology as if Cas were his normal self and offering it whole-heartedly. The complete failure to work the situation out results in this: the game thrown on the floor, communication broken down, and Dean sulking and angry, Cas scrabbling to make it right in too-small gestures that don’t measure up to the weight of the situation.

From this the scene ends with the mood breaking into something tragic in an entirely different way as Cas gets excited about the arrival of the angels.

I picked these moments to gif because it just absolutely kills me how Dean goes to deal with Cas, and takes such a deep breath and steels himself to go talk to Cas. He knows this is going to be rough, and seeing Cas like this is heartbreaking for him. He needs a long moment to be ready to walk in and talk to him. The fact that this is so painful for him, and with Edlund as the writer/director, every step feels very deliberate, that he can wring the maximum out of his script, I have no doubt this breath is every much as important as the deeply metaphorical and incredible dialogue in the scene.

“I know you want different answers” “no I want you to button up you coat” really stands out to me because Cas is saying he knows Dean wants a different version of Cas, that he wants the world to be a simpler way - the look on his face back when they met Cas and he said “hello Dean” and it all seemed like it might back to normal. Despite denying it, Dean refers to Cas as going back into the battle as putting his coat on - donning that armour and being the Cas he remembers, which plays a part in the significance of Cas suiting up in 8x07 in the old costume. He WANTS that dynamic of the two of them fighting side-by-side and this is a cross-purposes feeling in the conversation.

The arc to the end of the season is fairly simple for them - they need to reconcile. And at this stage, we get the anvil heavy metaphor of “playing Sorry”, which they literally do with the board game, its moves literally illustrating the way their conversation is going. Dean calls this out, that Cas is still not really giving a proper apology. Of course in the end it comes down to him meeting Cas halfway and better understanding between them both, but Dean is still furious here and Cas isn’t fully owning what he’s done either; this will be the struggle between them in the last episode, and these lines set up here that they’re going to be dealing with this.

It’s a low key emotional arc, and I see a vast number of people not really reading each line by line change in their dynamic and taking it to heart as a whole - quoting anything from 7x21 or 7x23 out of context without allowing that Dean and Cas are moving through their issues literally line by line shovelling shit until they can say sorry properly and accept that apology, you’re always going to have a weirdly distorted view, as it’s an ongoing story as they recover from the hugest falling out they can ever have, and rebuilding their relationship from the ground up. I find each step of the way fascinating but it’s really essential to allow them this process, because people find fault with either or both of them despite the fact they do actually solve this by the end of the season - and, in fact, the resolution of the season depends on it.

The funniest running joke about Kevin for me is how much he hates Dean’s pep talks, while having to put up with them for like 3 seasons.

And, I mean. This was supposed to make Kevin feel BETTER, if you follow the thread until Dean completely loses it…

DEAN
Okay, there we go. [He pats KEVIN on the back.] That’s it. That’s it. Just breathe. Take it easy.

KEVIN holds onto the bag and breathes into it.

DEAN
Oh, I don’t know, man. What can I say? You’ve been chosen. And it sucks. Believe me. There’s no use asking “why me?” ‘Cause the angels – they don’t care. I think maybe they just don’t have the equipment to care. Seems like when they try, it just… breaks them apart.

KEVIN
I just want to be the first Asian-American President of the United States.

DEAN
Then do your homework.

Somehow instead of bitching about angels, leviathans, demons and everything else on their case, he wanders into the territory of his own personal heartbreak with Cas, falls into a pit of despair over it all, and can’t get out.

Of course, this musing, even if it was meant to cheer Kevin up, has pretty much nothing to do with Kevin’s current predicament, because the problem is the angels that don’t care - Hester wanting to take Kevin away without even thinking about how he might want to stay home and live his life. And ends up with Kevin ignoring Dean’s musings entirely to go back to complaining about his own problems.

The angel that does care… Well, Dean’s got him right upstairs, and has been seeing how he’s been broken apart close up all day.

Aurgh, Hester’s iconic lines about Dean… I’ve seen them on more than enough Destiel gifsets, because, well. Edlund. Once again catching the real spirit of Destiel in a few lines, like “more profound bond” and every inch of The Man Who Would Be King. In this case, it’s a callback to how Cas put his hand on Dean and raised him from perdition - a motif that Edlund is very fond of, as he subverted it for maximum angst in 6x20 by putting the line in Cas’s mouth about Sam for all the worst reasons. This reminds of us of the handprint, of the connection that Dean and Cas have, and how it starts on a physical level, then transcends to the metaphysical. 

In some respects Hester is struggling with the concept that Dean “humanity” Winchester has imparted free will on Cas, and her meltdown in a moment is all about free will, the way Cas tried to give it to the angels and the struggle she has with it. She arrived to take the prophet to the desert because that’s what angels *do* but Cas shows up, mad and with his annoying human and demon buddies who all insist the prophet has to help them and that he can’t be taken to the desert, by all rights he should go home to his mom. How Dean Winchester of them, really. And so Hester cracks, because the angels only “think in circles” like the unhappy dogs at the dog track (look, nothing Cas says in this episode is nonsense, it ALL applies to everything and Edlund is a poet and I am unashamedly sucking up.)

This deep philosophical conversation about the very nature of Destiel and what Dean has done to Cas, and what has happened to Cas, what Cas has done to himself, is such a deep subject it really requires essays to unpack and contemplation on everything that’s happened so far, so I’m skimming over the surface to gesture wildly at where it shows how Dean and Cas’s personal arcs are connected and how Edlund puts Cas with Dean and just… everything here about this which shows their connection and the enormity of their relationship, the context for why Dean is the one who deals with Cas, why he’s always the one in focus with Cas, just that Cas matters the most to him and to Cas, Dean has been the curveball that upended eons of obedience. 

And Hester can see that as well as anyone, and all she can helplessly do is punish Dean for ruining Cas. Again, we have the metaphors of the disapproving angel family, Cas the queer sibling or child who is to be rejected for where his heart lies. (Again, a very consistent thread with his relationship to Heaven - the first instance of it I’ve underlined is back in season 4, but this end of season 7 stuff is the set up for Carver era, delivering all the themes and stuff which will put us on the right emotional track for that.)

Of course, before Hester can attack Dean, Cas deftly steps in front of him, rotating around her to draw her attention from Dean and to lead her away. Though Cas might not currently “participate in aggressive activity” he definitely will take the hits, especially - or exclusively, perhaps, given what we actually see go down this season - for Dean. He gives a generic excuse which sounds like a plea back to the angels’ original mission, but of course he is going it for Dean and that’s a blanket statement of peace and love which reminds Hester what the angels SHOULD be doing. If she wants a purpose. But she can’t follow that teaching - only the best angels see it and redeem themselves that way (the Hannah, Naomi, Gadreel, Metatron club). So she attacks Cas instead. 

After all this, the kinder angels - is it Ion or Inais in this episode? - listen to the more moderate teaching of kindness and prioritising people, and allow them to get a translation from Kevin and then take him home. Sadly, they then get eaten by Edgar but whatever, Cas tried and I’m just wrapping up a loose thought, not writing the essay on this because it’s not about Destiel, I just can’t get out of Edlund’s ass to keep to the subject :P

Chapter Text

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I got nothing

Dean needs Cas to get Dick 

… They boned him together. 

Slightly less visually erotic and more punnery innuendo-y parallel of Sam and Dean killing Ruby together in 4x22 >.> 

Anyways. 

Season 7 ends, and this episode is dependant on the journey Dean and Cas go through to make amends. There is no formal goodbye or even good luck between Sam and Dean - their last conversation is about Bobby, and the funeral scene is their last real shared scene; after that it’s Dean n Cas paired together until the end.

But let’s start at the top :D

While Carver era isn’t utterly devoid of barbs like this, I’m honestly struggling to think of one that is so overt aside from the deleted 10x14 scene than Meg’s “he was your boyfriend first” line. I feel like this is the end of the really on the nose teasing and jabbing at them as if being in love is an insult, and the beginning of a more nuanced handling - and don’t worry, deleted scenes are on my to-do list as we get deeper into Wonderland >.> 

Through Cas’s return, Meg has acted as a block and a romantic rival, in both overt and not so overt ways. She shows up to get between Dean n Cas having more private reconciliation and then seems to “win” who gets Cas, while admitting freely it’s a power grab and for her own protection against Crowley. By 7x23 she shows up fed up with Cas and unable to deal with him, handing him off to Dean to talk to and try and reason with him. Considering the ownership battle she conjured on her end, it has the feeling of conceding ground, and in this case she frames it in the romantic terms of Cas having been Dean’s boyfriend first. She treats it as if it were a fling and she is resigning from the competition to bag Cas as a boyfriend, and returning him to Dean. While she hangs around and helps some more, for the rest of the episode, she no longer hits on Cas or does more than look at him a few times, while Dean is left to deal with him.

The moment where Dean goes to talk to Cas in the car, I like that moment where Dean takes a breath… Those top two gifs have been thrown around fandom a lot out of context or for fun, but there’s serious stuff going on in them - as often with this show and/or fandom, the funny things have a real story to them. I like that Dean is still struggling to face Cas, but he will make the effort in a way that Meg clearly won’t, and talks him to come inside with gentle, friendly persuasion. But like with 7x21 before he goes to talk to him in the day room, he needs a moment to face Cas in this state, as he finds it saddening and troublesome to talk to him, though, unlike Meg, he makes an effort. 

Then, we have their ongoing argument which builds up over the course of the episode, but by this point bubbles over about WHY they need Cas to get Dick. And why Cas has been resisting the entire time. His self-worth from the whole betrayal and Godstiel thing is obviously his most prominent, painful trauma. He has to spell out for Dean why he won’t help, but this is the most clarity he shows in a while, and in this episode Gamble writes his non-sequiturs as very clearly labelled avoidance of questions or thinking about his problems. In 8x08 we’ll get another look into his head when he talks about avoiding going back to Heaven with Dean, and I suspect that’s based on the intention with how he was feeling during this time as well.

Dean responds by bubbling over with his own shit; this is for both sides of the argument, their stuff in 7x21 finally reaching its conclusion, and of course both are mis-handling it in some ways, through avoidance or anger, and are not at their optimal harmony… To be delicate about it >.> It’s harsh to watch, but Dean’s anger about Cas is not (just) selfish or motivated to save them - we see multiple times his own pain at seeing Cas in this state, and lines which betray how much it hurts and how he wants Cas back to how he was because, you know, Cas is his friend and he cares a lot about him. Translated into anger, he lashes out with his pain in the situation, the unfairness that Cas can avoid and refuse to help when he caused all that harm, and even to this day is something where Cas still feels bound to make amends for things that he broke - season 13 finally returning to the theme of how much damage he did to Heaven. Dean telling Cas this so harshly is the painful shock that pokes at Cas’s guilt, but also betrays Dean’s own pain and investment in Cas’s situation.

As with moments when they physically attack each other, obviously emotional lashing out betrays care but shouldn’t be like… romanticised and stuff. Just, taking this in a fictional story setting etc.

After this, Cas goes into a defensive full denial mode for a bit, and they turn to doing Bobby’s passing on; at the end of this scene, the camera dramatically pans to Cas with rising dramatic music, and it turns out he watched the whole scene. Of course though he was not a part of his, his presence is necessary and important, because he cared for Bobby too, and Bobby died fighting the leviathans, which Cas unleashed. This is part of his “mess” as Dean put it, and something he confronts, silently, on his terms. There’s no camera work to suggest Dean sees Cas watching but I like to think that he does, as he was facing the right way, and between Dean yelling at Cas, and him going to him in peace, this is the only thing that happens. I think Cas’s remorse is very important even though it may be silent, as is bridges these moments, giving Cas honest reflection which he can’t divert from - seeing Bobby, someone he cared about a great deal, as a ghost that they’re forcing to move on. And Dean knowing that Cas came and watched this and was a part of the family scene despite his current withdrawal from helping them.

Dean approaching Cas is wonderful because finally he doesn’t demand Cas help them, but finds a peaceful middle ground of something Cas can do to help but that doesn’t involve violence, meaning that despite all of Dean’s anger, he wants to help Cas find a way to help them, to clean up his mess, but to do it on terms which Cas can handle. This peace also allows Cas to think about it in non-confrontational terms, and to face up to what sending Dean in to fight Dick alone will mean if he doesn’t help.

The “I’d rather have you, cursed or not” line has been picked over a lot, both positively on gifsets and general squeeing, and negatively about its connotations that it can still carry a suggestion that Dean only wants Cas to help them because he’s the only one who WILL help them, at this stage, and they know that they need him. I like the line after it better, as it’s the much more personal appeal, the sense of them being in it together, and that it’s not just anything - this is something that Dean feels as a connection between them. The less emotional pep talk and more personal nonsense the line, the more it really means, as he’s not saying this in the same tone of voice as rallying Cas, just pointing out that they’re all in shit creek together.

Cas understands what Dean’s getting :D

I should have giffed as well, but no room and I have to make cuts somewhere, Cas asking about what the plan was - because the plan involves Cas being brought along PEACEFULLY, only for Dick identification, while Dean was supposed to be the one to fight Dick alone, Cas at his side, but the expectation was that Cas had one role and Dean had the other.

In the end, they tag-team him. :’)

Also: Dean’s absolute trust that Cas knows Dick when he sees him, and Cas defending Dean from Dick advancing on him, after all that stuff about not fighting, once again as with deflecting Hester away from Dean, he steps in to protect Dean, and even grabs Dick from behind so Dean gets his clean second shot at him that does the job.

Of all season finales, 7x23 really floors me for how embedded the Destiel narrative is in it, when this isn’t even a majorly Destiel season for obvious reasons, and I never felt like Gamble wanted much to do with them in that sense. Whether it’s just because of leading into Carver era or what, or the need to make amends both in the writing for Cas and in the meta level for the writers, once Cas was back this story was oh so very much about and for him, as he was the one responsible, and he had both emotional damage with Sam and Dean, and plot damage to handle. If he was to return as a main character next season and have even halfway a reboot back to a regular Cas, he needed a full redemption in the narrative, and to be brought back into play alongside Dean and back in his rightful place at his side. And this is the set up to get them there, from the awful mess left at the beginning of the season. :D

I know I went on and on about this at the start of the season but here we are at the end, and in the last shots, we have a conflict between Dean and Cas set up as the very last thing that happens. After the culmination of the episode - and like, with Sam and Dean not even in the same scenes for like the last 5-10 minutes or whatever - with Dean and Cas using their emotional resolution and renewed relationship to win the day, now the surprise of where they are is left as the biggest cliffhanger for the end of the season.

Of course, whatever Gamble may or may not have set up for Cas in terms of him bolting for weird reasons or just giving the next writers a hook to play with, or if this ending was scripted with season 8 in mind, once all the new canon unfolds, we know that in this moment Cas is realising that there are worse things that gorilla-wolves in the woods, and that Dean is a tough cookie and that’s the last time he thinks he’s gonna look at him, but he’s still going to stand a better chance if they split up and Cas plays tag with the leviathan to his eventual bloody end while Dean goes home without him. Awww. Romance at its finest.

(ow.)

There’s an interesting parallel to the end of this episode made in 12x23, using Kevin as Jack, and this zoom out of Dean alone as him kneeling over Cas’s body. In 8x01 we discover that Sam completely messed up his duty of care to Kevin, while in 13x01 he’s magnificent with Jack… Likewise this is subverted that Cas is dead in 13x01 and the loss was not really his fault seeing as he’d been murdered and all. Here, he flees from Dean and in the immediate aftermath, and pretty much right up until 8x02 and the flashback where Benny demands an explanation for Cas running and Dean is like shut up he’s perfect, it’s even ambiguous how Dean is left feeling about Cas, considering you have a hiatus to muse on him apparently ditching Dean. The emotional tone is very much not tuned to making you feel particularly positive about this, while ironically 12x23 did such a great job in the sense that with the secure knowledge that Cas would be back next season and this was just for the man pain, Dean’s reaction was picked in that episode to be all about Cas to the exclusion of everything, and his emotional reaction for the next 5 episodes similarly leaned that way, in the mirror of the opening of season 7.

In any case, that concludes our tour through Gamble era… Onwards to the balmy ocean of Destiel content that is Carver era.

Chapter Text

8x01 only has a single mention of Cas, post-purgatory, and I’ve always found it fascinating. In the wider context, this is now Carver era, welcome, by the way, and the narrative is of course changed on a fundamental level in every respect compared to Gamble era. And that was a time that for its superficial differences, still played largely by the same rulebook as Kripke era for storytelling, while 8x01 is across the episode more of a manifesto on creative control and the new order. Of course this thread plays through the season to Metatron’s arrival, and makes a completely irrelevant-to-this fascinating commentary through Carver era. For my purposes, part of the reason (aside from personal health stuff) I’ve been struggling to get back to this series of posts is because Carver era takes such a broader narrative eye to talk about any individual event, it’s very threatening to a project which COULD to this point be casually moment by moment. 

This example is a great one because it is such a quick thing, and I believe I giffed every camera angle of this exchange, because I love the moment so much for its depth and complexity. And yet almost nothing at all happens but relies so much on all the wider context.

Of course surface level it’s quite obvious to see Dean struggle with Cas being dead and gone and his vs Sam’s take on that, which subtly highlights their relationship differences, even setting aside how Dean is dealing with this in person and Sam of course is hearing a vague comment about Cas’s “death” second hand. 

After we take a moment to enjoy Dean’s tormented face, though, we have the whole problem of those air quotes and how it’s not until 8x07 that we can come back and re-watch this moment and see it in the second, fuller light of what Dean is repressing here - the memory of losing Cas in Purgatory, and, really, how he is struggling with LOSING him over seeing him die. The rejection, or sense of personal failure. His whole mission to get Cas and Benny out of Purgatory at the threat of they all go or die trying which made Cas follow Dean to the door and shove him through while refusing to come himself, but having to play out the role until the last moment to even ensure Dean would go etc etc. 

So this whole scene can only be talked about with a complicated amount of information from later on in the season to be fully understood as to why it’s so much more of a Destiel moment than even it seems on the surface. Which would be a great moment on its own, but we’re now moving beyond surface level moment by moment scenes and moving to where Destiel has a narrative weight, and the fact that a first episode scene has so much packed into it from further down the line is the best explanation I have to show the difference between “just a destiel scene” and “a scene that illustrates the narrative importance of Destiel in Carver era”. 

The fact that this one little moment contains the entire first half of the season in the Destiel arc packed into a few lines and that there’s stuff which is secret from the viewer to start with, and on a second watch transforms the simplicity of the moment, is what shows the story is now creating a wider framework for Destiel beyond just character interactions. There is intrigue and hidden information and Dean is lying to Sam, and creating a moment that will have a new meaning for the viewer on a second watch where we will get to interact with it and see how much more has changed and is relevant to it on the next go around.

Just another little aside… A romantic parallel with Kevin’s girlfriend where Dean is quick to assume that he can’t get her back because she’s “probably” dead already. Just for this little moment here where there’s no certainty about it and illustrating where Dean’s mind goes first, in a parallel to how he has lost Cas and assumes that Cas is dead already based on knowing he left him behind in Purgatory with Leviathan who wanted him dead. He has to tell himself that Cas is gone and he won’t get him back. 

Plus side: overt romantic parallel where he’s making this leap about Kevin and Channing, a previously romantic couple. Minus: compared to 13x01-5 this has absolutely nothing on how Dean main text mourns Cas and has to struggle repeatedly with how Cas is never coming back, he saw him die, and there’s no way around that. It’s all so incredibly understated and tame back here now in comparison :P

Chapter Text

Just the collection of Dean searching for Cas in Purgatory you all need uwu

There’s a fandom sort of headcanon one way or the other that “you’re him, the human” is either that all the monsters knew there was a human running around Purgatory, or that Dean was specifically known to be the one running around looking for Cas. The second monster with “your angel” backs this up in this specific headcanon as talking about it as if common knowledge - however the monster had been interrogated for a while by Benny and Dean so the “your” to my ears is just wrought from the fact they were asking so intensely, and he knew the angel was around as well because the monsters sense them all there, and maybe had not entirely connected them in this epic love story way.

On the other hand I’m a tin hat conspiracy theorist that Cas sent Benny to Dean to drag him out of Purgatory on his behalf since Dean wasn’t doing the decent thing and leaving him on his own. And yes there’s like no evidence for this but Benny sure knows a lot about where the portal is supposed to be, how to get through it and how to get himself through it. So. Idk, maybe he collected a lot of odd occult knowledge, or as I often headcanon, Purgatory is considerably more civilised somewhere deeper in and there’s vast secret knowledge to be gleaned from that Leviathan and Eve-based society. The monsters in the woods are just the dredges of their society >.> 

But, yeah. There’s so little we canonically know about Purgatory and what happened there, that the narrative we are given is this very simple, no details given, “where’s the angel” mission, where Dean prioritises finding Cas, and even digs his heels in when Benny offers him a way out that finding Cas is a first priority. This is of course before we get to how it goes down with these declarations after getting to Cas. The open of the season, these first 2 episodes, turn Dean’s initial dash through Purgatory as this single-minded quest to find Cas which of course is extremely easy to mythologise as not only all of us but all the monsters know that he is searching relentlessly for Cas. 

And Dean becomes the human who cuts a swathe through the most terrifying afterlife monster heaven warzone in order to find his angel. Cas is de-personified down to the object of Dean’s emotional quest, and that in itself damsels him in the narrative, and invokes a long history of romantic tropes. It will soon be revealed that Cas subverts many of these with his resistance and self-sacrifice. But for Dean, his coping and reaction in the real world as well as the framing of these memories, all to start with give us this story as the initial meaning of what Purgatory was and how it has hurt him, and what was his motivation for the things he did there.