#dean/cas is referenced obliquely but is not a focus

[thevioletcaptain]

THE LORD TESTS THE HEART

alternate s15 | 2.1k | also posted on twitter & ao3

A second-person POV exploration of Chuck's "very weird, very pervy obsession" with Dean Winchester.

You build him from nothing, and he fascinates you.

He’s made from flesh and bone, blood and pain—just like all the others—but his soul is as bright and beautiful as sunlit sycamore, and you can’t look away.

He’s beautiful. He fascinates you.

You want to destroy him.

Countless times, since the first breath of life sprung forth from the rupture inside you, you’ve tested your creations.

You’ve thrown them to the flames.

Pushed them, just enough that they'd draw themselves into the heat like moths drunk on the promise of flickering light.

But this one...

You burn his world, and it galvanizes him.

He pushes up through charred earth like new growth after a forest fire; stretching long limbs to the sky until he becomes a forest himself, sheltering others from the storms you send to weaken him.

You move the Earth around him.

Force him to take root in a faultline. Wait for him to topple, to crash to the ground & crush those he protects.

Still he defies you. Adapts. Transforms.

No longer a forest, but metamorphic rock that only grows more captivating under pressure.

Again, and again, and again, you try—but in time, even his fractures turn to veins of gold, and you don't know why.

You don't like not knowing.

You are knowing. You are the source of all knowledge. You are everything, and he is yours, and you should know.

You should know.

But he escapes you. Occupies your every thought, this hero you’ve created.

Becomes the focus you can’t shake, despite the endless hum of existence that expands outward from your fingertips.

Around him, the universe hurtles into entropy, but still all you see is him.

His flaws and his perfection. His bravery. His fear. His rage. His rage.

His rage.

You zero in on it.

But you don’t pay enough attention to the place it grows from.

Don’t realize that it’s an echo of the hole in your own being, torn wide by the absence of your other half, your sister, your self.

Don’t realize that it’s born of something else. Something greater.

It's a mistake, that oversight. But you don't realize it yet.

You're too intent on this new knowledge that you think you have. Too busy pulling at the threads of his life that finally seem to make him unravel.

You see him suffer, and you smile.

From a distance, you shift your unseen hand and watch fury rip through him as he struggles against it.

You watch the inferno of his rage consume him.

You watch as he turns desperate and fearful to his family for help, and sets them alight in the process.

It's now, when he's at his worst, that you plant a seed. An idea. A lie. A way to get out from under your own watchful eye.

A trap fit for a God.

He's at the end of his tether, and he falls for it. He falls for it.

Years ago, you wrote yourself into his story.

At first, it was just a way to try to understand what kept going wrong. To see him up close.

To look him in the eye and know him as more than just a collection of blood vessels and synapses and metaphysical vapor.

Now though... Now, you've made yourself the center of his focus. His thoughts are as trained on you as yours are on him.

You orbit one another like binary stars.

For the first time, you feel alive. Exhilarated. Certain that you've finally figured him out.

In the face of your power, his anger is ineffectual, but his contempt, his terror at realizing that he’s not strong enough--it’s better than anything you could have written.

You’re transfixed.

But here’s the trouble:

Your focus is so set on him that you fail to see the others.

His friends. His brother. His son. The angel you’ve been underestimating for millennia.

They all slip under the radar.

You’re so focused on him that you don’t realize their part in all of this. That they’re sustaining him. Making him who he is.

Their existence. Their love. His love for them.

Having them in his life is what makes him your most gripping creation, but you don’t see it.

You’re so focused on him that you start taking them away, one by one, just to see if this is the key to making him crack open.

Just to see if this will destroy him in that breathless, exquisite way that you've longed for.

Just to see if this will finally, finally allow you to peer inside his splintered chest and learn the secret reason why his soul is so radiant.

Just to see. You start with his friends.

His soul gets brighter.

You tell yourself that it’s just the first flash of a dying star on it’s way to going supernova. A necessary final burst of energy before the inevitable end.

But he sustains it, somehow. As though he's carrying them with him; within him.

Fueling himself with memories.

You take it as a challenge. Taunt him with a string of almosts.

You give him battles to fight and people to save and set it up to be just punishing enough that he's a moment too late every time, and then, when that proves inefficacious--

You take the nephilim.

You make it hurt.

Make sure that he sees it happen. Make sure that it's pointless, and artless, and utterly avoidable.

He carries the body to the car, and his soul flares again, spreading outward in its agony toward the few people he has left.

But you still don't understand.

When you take the angel, you don't leave a body, and he knows it was you.

You hear him in your head, and you can taste his rage.

You know its shape, its weight, its toxic bite. It’s a perfect likeness of your own. Made in your image.

You think this might be enough.

You can see him shimmering at the edges, like he might explode at any moment, and you settle back into yourself to watch from a distance. To wait.

And wait.

And wait.

It’s been days, and he spends every one of them trying to hunt you down.

You spend them plucking people from the Earth and dropping them into the shapeless void between realities, just for something to do.

Just to pass the time.

After a week, there's nobody else left.

After a week, it's only him and his brother, criss-crossing the lower forty-eight, searching for a plan as their hope dwindles to nothing.

He’s been behind the wheel for eight straight hours, and his brother is snoring in the passenger seat.

You’re waiting. Impatient. Restless.

You reach through the ether and stir the air behind him, just enough to make a quiet sound, to shift the hairs on the back of his neck.

It brings you a twisted sense of joy to do it.

To force a surge of reckless hope in him; to trick him into seeking something he can no longer have.

He swerves off the road, and his brother wakes with the sudden motion. Slams a hand against the door in panic.

Dust billows like smoke against the windshield.

Twisting, he scans the back seat. When he finds it empty, he presses his eyes closed.

His throat bobs as he swallows.

It's still not enough.

You follow them to an overgrown roadside in South Dakota where they've pulled over to stretch their legs, and you take his brother.

You do it with your hands; sinking a knife into his throat before he even knows you're there.

After, you wait just long enough for him to see you smile before you leave between one blink and the next.

The sound of his shout follows you.

You think this will be it. You'll finally see. You'll finally know.

You’re wrong.

He’s standing in the dark, back turned to the tree line with dirt on his hands and a shovel at his feet.

Smoke billows thick from the hole in the ground. A breeze shifts a branch in the woods, and on instinct, he turns to his side to ask, "Did you hear that?"

There's no-one left to answer, but the light in him is still there. Still burning.

Burnished gold and verdant jade and blinding, glittering warmth. Bigger than ever.

It flares again. Every pound of his heart sends it wider. Brighter. More beautiful.

He’s beautiful. He fascinates you, still.

That's why it comes as such a shock when he tries to destroy himself.

When the fire has died, he stands over the grave and takes a deep breath, and with a pearl-gripped revolver in hand he tries to make it his last.

You don't let him.

With a thought, you pull the gun from existence, and empty-handed, he screams.

He falls to his knees and keeps screaming, sobbing with great, wrenching breaths.

You can no longer see a line between his rage and his fear and his pain, because they're the same.

They're the same.

It's a single piece of the infinite puzzle revealed.

You take this knowledge, and you hold it carefully in your hands. Examine it from every angle.

They're the same, but you still don't know why. Still don't know how something like this can come from something like him.

It doesn't take long after that for him to realize that you won't allow him to check out.

If anything, you're more focused than ever, and he's alone. Completely. The sole survivor for a hundred and ninety-six million square miles.

He goes through the motions. You keep watching.

Slowly, he drives back to Kansas.

Leave me alone, his eyes seem to say. Let me die in peace.

But he doesn’t speak aloud. Hasn’t made a sound since he left South Dakota. Hasn't spoken in days.

At the bunker, you watch him as he picks his way through the dark halls and touches every surface.

He spends entire days doing absolutely nothing. Spends others cleaning with an intensity that makes no sense to you at all.

And within him, the light grows and grows and grows.

His brother is in the ground. The son he claimed has been scattered to the wind. The angel, the one he’d have chosen with just a little more time, lost to the endless dark that still screams its impotent rage at being awake.

The world is empty. He has nothing.

He’s wasting away in front of you, a brittle shell, too damaged to hold the spirit within, but somehow it’s still there. Still holding on. Still blinding and brilliant.

Stretching out far beyond the limits of his body.

It's been almost a month when it happens.

You're still watching, waiting for the truth of him to present itself, for his soul to crack open and make itself plain for you to see, and he's on the floor, cleaning under a shelf in the library, and he laughs.

He laughs.

Falling back to sit, he lifts a square of yellow paper from the ground and stares at it and laughs. It's nothing. You look at it, and try to understand the joke, and it's nothing.

A tiny yellow square, with the words I AM TALL scrawled across it in black marker.

But he laughs. He keeps laughing, and you--

You feel something.

In that space, the rupture, the wound where you tore yourself asunder--you feel something.

It takes far too long for you to realize that it's envy. Longer still for you to realize that it's more than that.

It's loneliness, and longing, and regret, and shame, and worst of all, it's utter foolish love.

Because you want that laugh, you realize. You want that light.

You want to inspire it. Want it inspired in yourself.

But it's been so long since you felt anything other than righteous entitlement that you'd forgotten what it was to truly earn something. To deserve it.

And you know you don't deserve it. Not from this man.

So you blamed him for the beauty you saw, for his flaws and his perfection. His bravery. His fear. The love that drives him.

Blamed him for your own lack of self control, even as you blinded yourself to what you were doing.

You built him from nothing.

You made him from flesh and bone, blood and pain—just like all the others—but his soul was as bright and beautiful as sunlit sycamore, and you've never been able to look away.

He’s beautiful. He terrifies you.

You want to save him.

You start with his family.

When he sees them, his soul opens like a flower in the sun.

[elizabethrobertajones]

Do you think we'll see Dean and Jody discuss Cas? Does Jody even know Cas exists? They told her s8 angels exits and she was claire but still i thibk textually they never mentioned his name around her? Im guessing they are gonna discuss Deans feeling about Mary since Jody knew her but Cas?

I don’t know, which I know I say to like basically all questions about speculation but this one is something I don’t really have a clue about and I’m not even sitting on my thumbs pretending not to have an opinion because I’d rather not say anything on the record until I know I’m right or not… I really, genuinely, to the best of my ability to sound it all out and guess from the available information, don’t know :P 

It depends how they handle Cas being gone overall, whether Dean’s openly, loudly mourning him all the time every episode constantly, which is a detail where I’d only be able to offer you a confident speculation on the eve of this episode anyway after seeing the first 2. If Dean goes stoic and jaw-twitchy but quiet about it then probably not but that’s just like… super obvious and short term.

In the mean time, please assume the tin foil hat position you’d take to listen to a conversation that sounds like this:

There’s quite a lot to pack in with meeting Patience, and getting our guys some good face to face time with Jody for any emotional support they need to sponge off her. Sam doesn’t seem to be around so he may be off with Jack, but if he wasn’t, he’d probably want to learn how to be a mom to him from Jody, for all we know :P Thematically it might sort of be that way anyhow - if Patience doesn’t come in direct contact with Sam it seems ridiculously unlikely she’s not going to be thematically connected to him and therefore Jack through an extremely easy join the dots between 13x03 and 1x09. (Sam already kinda went one round with this sort of thing in 12x04 so in a way he’s got his booster shot of dealing with it directly so it can just be storytelling mirrors for him :P)

Certainly Jody is more connected to Mary symbolically and in general the Wayward Sisters stuff has been more about parenting and those dynamics recently, with 11x12 looking at how Jody copes and teasing us with hindsight for Mary’s return with Dean talking to her about wishing his mom had been around, and in 12x06 and 12x22 she and Mary sort of bounce off each other as moms directly in a continuation of that - in 12x16 she’s not around except on the other end of phonecalls but Dean’s carrying on parenting Claire as a hunter a lil bit. 

Of all of those, 11x12 was the only one to make a nod to Cas with Claire holding grumpy cat in one of her scenes, but the show has decided to treat him a lot as just the inciting incident to get her onto the road hunting by dragging her into the life, while Dean does the thing he does around feisty wayward teenagers, and probably was mostly responsible for switching Claire’s amateur detective attempt onto a hunting thing in 10x20. I don’t want to make Claire cringe but I think she thought he was actually kinda cool and inspired her or something, because she had not had any interest in the supernatural side of things before that episode… 

Despite all her connections to Cas I think Dean sort of birthed hunter!Claire, so the story sort of wanders that direction and leaves Cas behind because he’s more like Azazel in Claire’s story than anything, even if a very sad soft squishy Azazel who gave her a stuffed toy for her birthday :P Still they played it like her forgiving and hugging Cas was about the same as Dean finally getting to shoot Azazel, in both case freeing them to go do their job with the angsty backstory resolved…

In any case, I think Cas is probably an emergency contact Jody has for Claire-related stuff, although whether they told her to or not, she’d probably always call Sam and Dean first because she knows and understands them (and has met them), and I think the story is asking us to believe that with this symbolism of Claire getting past what Cas did to her family, she’s in a new stage of life he’s not a part of in the same way even if she does cling onto grumpy cat, and Cas is still family to people who consider Jody as family, who she considers family. Sort of shunting him from awkward dad no. 3 of 4 as per 10x20′s recap and symbolism to a weird uncle or something. (Although if Jody has mom symbolism to both Claire and Dean, that makes them siblings and Cas her brother in law… this found family stuff is really difficult :P)

So there’s all that shaping my expectations - Claire’s not in the episode and she’s our connection between Cas and Jody. Previous episodes have made it clear that Sam and Dean really hate calling even beloved friends with their shit and don’t tell Jody alarmingly huge things like that Mary came back from death. She’s been offering a shoulder to Dean personally while he’s been going through all his stuff, and in 9x08 I think Sam did open up to Jody more than Dean even when they were all in the same room, never mind in that and 7x12 they got split up from Dean and actually bonded (And I think this is also a quote from Kim Rhodes but also just something fairly obvious, that because Sam was the one connected to her more in her intro episode and ended up shooting her zombie son for her, they’ve always had a closer emotional bond via shared trauma). 

I don’t think it’s showing that Sam and Jody aren’t as close now to have her switch focus to Dean but that Jody is determined to get Dean to open up to her *too*. In 12x06 they have really different attitudes about her when Sam makes the comment about Dean’s “animated Japanese erotica” which show how they’ve grown in different directions with Jody. So I think Sam’s closeness to her is fairly accepted fact and now Dean’s the tough nut to crack for her :P Anyway she’s made the offer two or three times now that she’s there to talk if Dean in particular needs her (definitely 10x08 and 12x06… Can’t remember if she said as much in 11x12 although they did also have an actual personal conversation in that episode, so one point to Jody there). I think 12x06 made it clear there’s still an owed conversation of greater than that opening up and spilling the beans on what’s making him emo right now, so there’s that.

And Cas and Mary have been connected all through season 12, in their arcs, in the subtext, in basically everything, and Dean textually named that in 12x22 that in the start of the season he’d “got Cas back, got Mom back” and in 12x23 of course he loses both, again, in a highly inter-connected way, and so again they’re going to be parallel lines to him, though again I think showing how he feels differently about one and the other and hopefully we get to unpack what those individual losses mean by the way of having both at once (and Crowley, who often in these cases is included to put a finger on the scale :P). 

One of the things confusing me right now is of last night’s behind the scenes set peeking which revealed a Turducken Slammer relaunch from the ever-hopeful Biggerson’s, which is not letting frequent murder and mayhem and dodgy meat recalls on its premises stop it from trying. Even if it’s as overall irrelevant to the story in the sense of being mentioned or actually explored as the Mystery Spot sign in 12x01, it’s still telling us something and making connections. I mean yeah it can just be worldbuilding continuity but it’s always picked for a reason and they know what all these signs mean and how to connect them, which is why we have the beer language for example. 

And Jody is pretty deeply connected to season 7 and Dean’s arc. And this connection was obliquely referenced in 12x06 in that moment I already mentioned, where Sam outs Dean’s porn habits to Jody. It was a nod from Yockey that he’d watched past Jody episodes because in every way it was a season 12 style rehash of Sam’s “strictly into Dick” comment, which was from a Jody episode. And… look, maybe this is the best way to explain how I felt the season 12 references were kind of out of this world in their scope and intelligence :P 

For starters, that comment was not just a run of the mill Dick joke, that was a Robbie level Dick joke, which collected up a hilarious character thing for Sam (his fucked up moment when he should have made the barb, his determination to hang onto the Best Zinger Of His Life until Dean next gave him an opportunity and bless Sam’s cotton socks he delivered it like a pro :P) and Dean’s spiralling obsession with Dick as a Dick or Anime thing. Dean’s anime-watching was from 7x01, when he was waiting for Godstiel to blow up the planet in despair, and was at just about the lowest point we’ve ever seen him. In 7x02 Bobby gives him the “You just lost your best friend” pep talk, which is a role of comforting parental figure Dean then went and lost that season when Bobby died. And in the end of 7x02 Dean reveals how Not Fine he is to Bobby’s answerphone, which is important that it’s never commented on again but I think affects how Bobby treats him and in the subtext of 7x09 you have to know all that happened. 

In 7x09 Bobby’s on his farewell tour of comforting advice to his adopted sons, in the last great set of retconning episodes to embed him permanently into their backstory as having always been there for them, to make it hurt juuust that much more than it already does. Towards the end of the episode he has another talk with Dean that mirrors advice Dean will get from Frank and Ness in 7x11 and 7x12, and *that* is opened up by Dean getting drugged by the turducken slammer and going on about how he doesn’t care about how he doesn’t care, and that he feels great for the first time since Cas and the black goo. Like, wow, his depression and hurt and betrayal didn’t go anywhere just because he said he was fine, who knew :P 

And that’s the backstory to Dean’s obsession over killing Dick, who has taken everything from him by this point in season 7, told through the medium of anime and sandwiches and somehow always ending up about Cas and Dean’s feelings for him. The anime was an attempt to not care and not think about it that the slammer actually inflicted on Dean, and was used to get Dean to tell us how he really felt. By 7x12 it’s a joke for Sam to make implying Dean’s into lowercase dick, with one of those false binaries the show loves making. And like in season 13 Dean’s lost a love interest and a parental figure, and now things are really blurry about which one hurts more in this short run of episodes before they both reappear in the narrative and make it confusing. 7x11 makes the hurt most about Bobby. 7x12 subtextually tells us rather a lot about Cas, especially by making a Bobby figure to contrast in the background with the lady in the shop who literally calls Dean an idjit at some point, I think, or some other Bobby-ism, to make it clear that Ness is definitely not standing in for that and all those Cas parallels are probably where it’s at while Dean fangirls over him :P 

And nope I’m not even done unpacking the Yockey Robbie Edlund turducken because of course JODY is all tied up in this completely. She’s incidentally in 7x02 as a useful local beloved character who can get menaced by Dr Sexy and let them know there’s leviathan nearby, and so she’s pretty embedded in the early Leviathan worldbuilding. Of course Edlund being Edlund, while the lil girl leviathan is channel surfing for ideas, there’s a Biggerson’s advert, I think the same one that plays in 7x03 or 7x22 about their pie salad bar (it’s like a salad bar, but pie!) and in the end she lands on wanting to be a Dr Sexy when she grows up. 

(Stop me when you think this might somehow subtextually be about Dean :P)

The Dr Sexy leviathan has an amusingly childlike view on being a surgeon as a result of forming its opinions on that job while being a little girl, and apparently not listening to the memories of the poor guy it ate except to get a frightening knowledge of anatomy. It very much acts the part of being a doctor on TV who can just wheel patients off to perform unnecessary surgery, as per the malpractice of our favourite sexy doctor on TV - and there’s a thing to contemplate about “I’m not a doctor, I just play one one TV” but that’s digressing :P But it goes and menaces Jody and Bobby goes and saves her, and Robbie brings her back 2 more times in season 7, once in 7x06 to thank Bobby for saving her, and to link them romantically so she can even more handily take over the parental role by being romantically linked to their adopted father, which is just a sort of easy association to help. And in 7x12 of course she’s just there and helping and mourning Bobby a lil bit with Sam (since Dean was the one in the focus for mourning Bobby in 7x11), drinking his dubiously won scotch from 11x16 (… Rufus didn’t have to let him have that one, Bobby WAS insisting it was a ghost :P I think he just wanted Bobby to have a win after seeing how down he was.) But that IS a Jody episode so it would have been on Yockey’s list for homework for 12x06 and it contained the anime/Dick thing. 

And, if he’d watched the deleted scene, at the end of the episode Dean makes it clear that he’s not sitting alone in the dark watching anime, he is strictly into Dick, and goes and reads an article on Dick “erecting” a tower.

(I hope it is clear how much I love the Dick references in season 7 by now and I’m not sorry, they started it :P)

So yeah. Jody is already intrinsically linked into a ridiculous chunk of the Dean/Cas subtext from season 7, the absolute wild nonsense that Edlund and Robbie were messing around with with pie and turducken and Dr Sexy and anime and Dick, to create the absolutely most ridiculous, like… no one part of it on its own in isolation doesn’t make you cry laughing, bit of storytelling (that, of course, added up into a full picture, just makes you cry a lot in earnest for poor Dean right then).

To me this is the picture of Dean mourning Cas in season 7, and the unique elements to season 7 are the anime (already referenced in season 12 just as an aside and I don’t think as anything more than a witty reference to past canon except that Dean was “kinda bummed” about Cas being gone (and don’t worry, I’m getting to Berens :P)) and the turducken, and Jody as one of the key characters wandering through all this picking up the emotional baton from Bobby, which she has been attempting to use on them ever since season 9, when they got back in contact with her after neglecting her all of season 8. 

(And, oh gosh, I stared out the window to try and collect my thoughts for the next paragraph and washed up on thinking about Sam going and crashing out on Jody over the Dean in Purgatory period instead of hitting a dog and ending up with Amelia, like Dean with Lisa except by the time Dean gets back Sam’s probably been whipped into shape and is wandering around Sioux Falls in a deputy uniform…)

Anyway yeah, to go back to 13x03 finally… If the Turducken sign isn’t portentous of anything, I’m still seeing the Gas n Sip sign, in the maroon colours rather than blue one, but still, in a Berens episode. And if you can’t get mourning Cas in season 7 via Jody and a turducken related things to stick, you can totally shortcut through the fairly simple steps of Berens + Gas n Sip = 9x06 and assume whatever personal feelings stuff Dean and Jody talk about, this is a great way to cram Cas into the background via the enormous glowing yellow sun that has come to represent him. (And, of course, it was Berens who had the “morning, Sunshine” line for us in 12x03.)

So I think the set stuff and character stuff all have some fairly good slap to the back of the head things for Dean to maybe open up to Jody or at the very least for whatever he says to her to be heavily subtextually about Cas even if Jody asks about Mary. Because Dean’s wearing weirdly Cas-coded clothes, and Jody is wearing the family unity red n blue plaid colours. The maroon Gas n Sip seems to be more about family and even Wayward Sisters, since it was prominently used behind Claire in 12x16 and maroon has been a lot about family because of the infamous red hoodie that Kevin, Charlie and Cas all wore, and that Mary was put in maroon within an episode of getting back (and Chuck tried to cash in on it in 11x21 to make himself look harmless and cute and relatable in the same hoodie). But even in 12x16 having the Gas n Sip sun looking over Claire, with her connections to Cas, made it seem like he was watching over her too. The colours change the meaning in some ways but the overall message is the same. I think in 13x03 we have to remember it’s also going to be about the Wayward Sisters so whether Jody and Dean are having a personal conversation or not, the sun might be about Cas but the overall thing might be a more neutral family building thing for the main arc stuff. If it was a blue Gas n Sip I’d immediately think it was all about Cas and oozing tragic subtext *everywhere* and completely unavoidably.

(it might also just be that they’re maroon because Biggerson’s are and maybe there’s some sort of corporate alliance of Gas n Sips connected to Biggerson’s, because, after all, Dick Roman ended up owning both franchises and by 7x23 you can see that both are involved in his masterplan, which is part of why I love so much Cas is then intimately connected to both later while still in a gloomy penance mood about the whole thing and everything he’s ever done since…)

… So to actually answer your question, I can see some really really convoluted reasons in the history of the show that if Dean and Jody have their big important “seriously how are you” talk in this exact location while hanging out and hugging in front of all these signs, that they might either not mention Cas at all because he’s not a part of the openly stated story going on between Dean and Jody and all this family stuff and Wayward Sisters and everything absorbed into the entire chunk of the show about parental relationships, of which Jody has been a part since 7x06 thanks to Robbie. Or it’s a part of the emotional backstory to Dean losing Cas which Edlund kicked into high gear in 7x02 while dibsing all the important Dean and Bobby conversations which shine a light on Dean’s loss and Cas, also dragging Jody into a ridiculous web of Dr Sexy and stuff that Robbie and then much much later Yockey were playing around with.

Either way,