#purgatory husbands

[dragon1d]

Obsessed with how Sam tells Bobby that Benny is a buddy of Dean's and Benny goes "a GOOD buddy 😏"

[bennylafittelove]

The thing that always breaks my heart the most is just before Dean sends Benny to Purgatory and they embrace, Benny has a very brief smile on his face, almost as if he’s thinking, “I love you.” and it KILLS me!!

[kayit-z]

Everything that you will be doing from this point on is for the safety of the eggs

Disregard your friendships

There is no room for sympathy in this land

[demonictacobeard]

Lilith, surprised when Adam’s contact picture shows up on her phone: Correct me if I’m wrong, but you’re supposed to be dead aren’t you? I felt the deal break months ago

Adam, who got sick of his and Lucifer’s UST last night and made a move: I mostly lived bitch, I just had to ask YOU PICKED THE BORING ASS BEACHES OF PURGATORY OVER SEX WITH THAT MAN FOR THE REST OF ETERNITY? WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?!

[reddrawnart]

Got that murder rizz, you know?

[apendice-chileno]

— What did you say about my husband?

— Erm look, first of all, he was my husband first eh.

[kissnpunch]

this scene is so… cute in their story of love, because q!cellbit gave him a cup of tea to catch his attention, q!roier saw that and gave him one too attentive of his husband actions and words, after knowing the competition was done, q!roier instantly said “sorry, sorry” and q!cellbit, catching q!roier just followed his instincts and was feeling a little bit guilty (that is a lot coming for a perfect killer), said it was okay, how he would judge him if q!roier supported him at his worst?.

[mokassins]

Them sending this pic to richas for help lmao 🔥

[hei-n1cky]

"Goodbye Guapito"

"No stupid"

"i love You"

"Where are you?"

WTF WAS THIS? 😭 AGAIN

[kindlykolorful]

no blood ver.

sleeping together after doing crimes zzzz

[craziestgonzba]

Guapo dúo &...

I'm late, too late!!! AAHH

[turtle-kidddddd]

“Roier is probably much happier without me”

Cellbit shut the fuck up you weren’t there for one month and your husband got turned into a fucking rat

[bennylafittelove]

I like to think that Dean kept one of Benny’s jackets after he sent him to Purgatory and would hold it tightly when he’d sleep.

[arctic-bookclub]

now that qforever is fucked up again i can’t wait for missa to miraculously log on again just to be hit in the face with another wild as hell update about qforever

[anachronistic-falsehood]

devastated we never got the murder husbands lore btw. im 99% sure they said they had shit planned following cellbit's fed worker murder arc and then we never got to see it. this is my 9/11

[ananke-xiii]

Betrayal&Fidelity in Purgatory

I've never been fully convinced that Dean modified his memories because his grief was just too much to bear and I've always been quite let down by the idea that Cas felt like he had to do penance for his sins. It's all too lukewarm for me so I went looking for other interpretations and oh boy. So, here's what I've come up with.

Cas and Dean are in Purgatory because they killed Dick Roman together and they did so because Dean asked Cas to go with him cursed or not. And Dean asked Cas to because Cas didn't want to. And Cas didn't want to because he regained his memories back, realized what he had done during his Godstiel arc and declared himself unable, cursed and useless. However, thanks to Dean Winchester's great power of persuasion, he was convinced to join the fight against the Leviathans because he detected a note of forgiveness in Dean's voice.

S7 Dean's and Cas' relationship boils down to this: Cas has forgotten everything while Dean can't stop thinking about what happened (the trenchoat moved from car to car is a nice visual symbol for this). When Cas is found out to be alive Dean is very torn between relief and... resentment. He seems to be quite angry at Cas not because of what Cas had done but because Cas had forgotten about it and had later decided he wasn't gonna do anything to fix what he had broken. In other words, Cas was refusing to remember his betrayal, more specifically his betrayal against Dean. And Dean wants him to remember. Cas told him he was going to find a way to redeem himself and then he died. And then he came back. And he didn't remember a thing. And when he did he was in clear denial and was planning on doing absolutely nothing of import to redeem himself besides making sandwiches.

Has Cas really betrayed Dean in s6? Mmmmmh. I'm not so sure. Does Dean feel betrayed by Cas? Absolutely yes. Does Cas feel like he betrayed Dean? Well, at first no but Dean did his best to make him understand that he did and so he did understand it. And so betrayal it was.

Now, in S8 Purgatory and beyond roles get reversed. Cas and Dean take the meaning of Purgatory in a very different way.

Cas does what Dean wanted him to do: he remembers. In fact, he takes remembering to a whole new level and decides to keep carrying his sin by going solo in Purgatatory fighting the monsters he had inside. Literally. Nice symbolism. In other words, he does penance.

And what does Dean do? He forgets. He's so imbued with what he perceives as the "purity" of Purgatory (which is what "purgatory" means so we really can't blame him if he felt that) that he frees himself of whatever happened before he got there. Now he has one goal in mind: find the angel.

Dean eventually alters his own memories to remember it like he wanted to: he didn't leave Cas behind, he didn't fail him. Cas let go. And, in a way, he didn't erase anything because Cas did let go. Just not physically but emotionally and that's what Dean couldn't bear to remember.

Cas was, once again, unfaithful to him. What?! Yes.

See, a paradox of betrayal is... fidelity.

Betrayer and betrayed are in such a profound bond (eheh) that they need to keep the betrayal alive by constantly remembering it. They can't let go and if one of the two parties does they are committing infidelity.

Truth be told, Dean didn't give two shits about Cas doing penance for his sins against heaven and earth: he cared that he did penance for the crimes committed against him.

So Cas letting go meant that he broke their unconscious vow to be faithful to one another.

He broke the connection (with Dean).

A Cas without Dean is a Cas ready to be reaped by Heaven. And so Cas enters a new abusive cycle of remembering and forgetting, remembering and forgetting by Naomi's brain drilling. Until Dean makes him remember (just like Cas made him remember what happened in Purgatory) and Cas broke another connection (with Heaven) but he also realizes that he will never get free of his past if he stays with Dean. He must protect the tablet (himself) from Dean. And so Cas leaves, he lets go of Dean. Again.

Of course this is not the right path because ultimately Cas thinks he can atone for his sins by... dying. He can reach purification in death. Castiel is indeed the Sam Winchester of the angels.

Thing is that Dean is very, very mad at Cas (this is showed twice in S9 too and once in S10) but he wants Cas to stay without acknowledging (with himself first and with Cas second) why he can bear to have around the guy who broke his brother's brain and for whom he spent one year in Purgatory only to be rejected by said guy (spoiler alert: it's because of love. Dean needs to keep the betrayal experience alive otherwise he will have to face the hard truth: he's in love... with an angel).

On the other hand, Cas feels very ambivalent towards Dean and he wants to stay away from him but he won't acknowledge why he needs to do so (spoiler alert: it's also because of love. Cas needs to let the betrayal experience die otherwise he will have to face the hard truth: he hurt the person he loves. Cas' self-harm inflicting tendencies are at their best by the end of s10 when he declares his allegiance and love to Dean in the moment he very well knows he will never get reciprocation: it's his "safest" option).

To sum it up, the phantom of betrayal must always hang around between Dean and Cas so that the other side of it can be concealed: love. However, by virtue of betrayal's paradox, their insistence on refusing to address this ghost shows how faithful and unfaithful they are to one another, howcommitted they are, how they are almost... married.

More on Cas as the betrayer: the betrayer keeps his fidelity by admitting he has betrayed, by refusing to forget it. They have to do so otherwise the wider context of love is missed. If the betrayer fails to do so they keep wronging the other person and they keep cutting themselves off from self-forgiveness. And so Cas, by refusing to acknowledge his betrayal specifically towards Dean, keeps hurting him and keeps himself in a vicious cycle of self-harm.

This is why "The Trap" feels like it missed something to me: we the audience actually know why and how Dean operates, we know he has forgiven Cas inexplicably (to Dean) since s6. Dean telling Cas in Purgatory that he forgave him was something that... we had already seen.

I would have found it more interesting if Cas told Dean something there and no, it didn't have to be his happiest moment ever, it would have possibly been his worst (and it could have been a good thing: sometimes bad moments are actually good moments): he could have admitted to his infidelity in their perverted version of marriage where the Scariest Thing (betrayal) actually constituted the foundations of their binding contract. It could have been a stepping stone towards "Despair".

There is much more to say because I have only touched upon the "love side" of the betrayal/fidelity dynamics. The other is power and it's possibly an even more interesting angle.