Tag: walk through hell with queue

awed-frog:

thejabberwock:

Look at Dean’s face. Look at his surprise. He was trying to give Cas a second third chance and Cas’ response is to challenge him in this antagonistic way. After Dean told him he was like a brother to him, that was Cas’ response. Just look at Dean’s face. {6.20}

These are two people who don’t have a common language yet, and it’s heartbreaking to watch. Because Cas is not human, and he’s a soldier, and he’s been bred to kneel and obey. So when Dean asks him to trust him without framing it as a direct order, of course Cas’ answer would be confrontational. He just doesn’t understand how is wellbeing would be important in any way (he still doesn’t). Dean is in no position to give him an order even if he wanted to, and Cas has never known anything different. He’s not familiar with ‘Please don’t do it because I’m afraid you’ll get hurt’. He just doesn’t get it. And Dean – you could argue Dean was trained for battle in the exact same way, and you wouldn’t be wrong, but at the same time, Dean is human. Dean can feel. That warmth in his chest he gets every time he looks at Sam, at Bobby, at every hurt and broken and vulnerable person he meets – that thing that blooms and spreads and almost drowns him every time someone needs him, even when that someone is John – Dean knows what that is. In an instictinve, primal way, and despite all that was done to him, he does know that. And he knows he’s allowed to have it – not too close to the surface, because he’s still a hunter and a soldier and John’s boy, Jesus Christ, man up, but still – he’s not a psycho. He knows he can love, and he does. But Cas – until he met Dean, Cas never had a name for that. All he knew about it is that it was a fault and a disease – something that made him weaker, that held him back, that made him different. Something he got punished for, and that’s why they had to break him, again and again and again, and may God forgive him.

And really, that’s one of the reasons I love their relationship so much – because you see it here, like you see it at the very beginning – how Dean is prepared for this, because he’s gone through it God knows how many times with Sam – because in a way, Cas’ Or what? is no different from those angry, humiliated things Sammy used to shout, and that’s how teens sometimes get during a fight – because they don’t stop pushing you until you fucking blurt it out, won’t they, that Goddammit, I love you and I’m worried about you and That’s why I’m angry, you child, Sammy, you fucking idiot. So, yeah – that’s something Dean knows. But at the same time, Cas doesn’t think like that. He’s millions of years old and immortal and far more powerful than Dean can even imagine, and he’s genuinely curious about what Dean could ever do to him, and why, exactly, Dean would care. Because he knows, of course, how love works, but he’s never had it directed at him. And the way Dean deals with that – that way he teeters between For fuck’s sake, not you too and Of course I goddamn care and also Please don’t hurt me (because that’s always on the back of his mind, has to be, how Cas is big and scary and unknownable, how he’s not a man at all but a thing that can break into Hell and mostly how easily he could toss Dean back in) – yeah, the way he teaches Cas what humans are truly like, the way he and Cas tame each other like the Little Prince did with his fox – well, I know it’s not the story they wanted to write, but it’s a work of art, and it tears my soul apart and it’ll never, never cease to amaze me.

you’re killing me