#some rambling dean thoughts prompted by meta i saw earlier on my dash

[wellofdean]

I think holding onto anger, being driven by it, harms a soul, even when anger is justified and righteous. I think love has to be stronger than anger, and that love is oblique (neither parallel, nor intersecting, but on another plane) to justice or righteousness.

Of course I'm thinking about Dean. To me, it goes like this:

The mark of Cain supercharged Dean's anger and darkness; gave it power over his love. He fought against it, but he also thought he could use it as a weapon. Use it to win a battle, but he couldn't, and it subsumed him. Darkened him. Led him to abandon himself.

Love, as embodied by his brother and his angel, brought him back to himself. Family is the source of both the unimaginable pain that becomes anger, but also of the even deeper mystery of faith and grace, which, by it's nature is unearned, and comes to seek him when he cannot seek it (or) himself.

Awake again inside his own skin, having recovered agency over his anger, Dean knows he has to fight it, and reject it, but more pain comes, more loss, and it gives his anger renewed and lethal strength. Dean is tested to the limits of his rage, and finds that its strength is bounded. The boundary of Dean's anger is love. For Cas. For Sam. Dean's love stays his hand with Cas, and won't let him kill Sam. Dean's love is stronger than his darkness, and it defeats death for the first time.

The darkness Dean rejects is reborn of him as Amara/anima, and she is beautiful and alluring. She draws him in, threatens to suffocate him. To consume him. He wants her, and doesn't. He is drawn and repulsed. He can't harm her. He learns to see her. Learns to see that anger is pain in disguise. He empathizes with her, helps her see this. He empathizes with the justifiably angry manifestation of his own darkness. Caged thing to caged thing, he sees her. He sees himself. She raged for justice, but injured love so often masquerades as rage. She wanted nothing more than to be freed and healed. To be reconciled.

Empathy, then, is what gives him the gift of his deepest wound: his mother. But not as he dreamed her, but as she was/is. The architect of so much of his pain and his father's pain. A woman who can't look at what she made of her sons through her decisions and her absence. The culpability is hers, and not hers. Dean goes inside her mind, speaks directly to her mind and heart; speaks directly to her wound. Sees her. Begs her to see him. Loves her and tells her the truth. Draws her to him, and lets her go. He learns to see her as a thing he did not, and could not possess. Sees himself as separate from her.

Dean wishes for his father. Sees himself as his father sees him. Realizes that his father's sight is limited. Realizes that he has begun to accept himself, that he no longer lives in John's shadow. He has begun to see his own life as worthy of being lived. As his. Sees his own family, one built of love and choice, not blood and obligation. He is the patriarch who draws them all together with his love. They are his, he is theirs. He can't do it like it was done to him.

Chuck, though, is the thing Dean still can't defeat. The horror of being Chuck's toy. The nihilism of that. It's the last and deepest paroxysm of doubt that he has any identity at all, and Chuck wants him angry. Wants to force Dean to externalize his pain as righteous fury, pushes him towards it. Love is what gives Dean the strength to refuse.

When we think of Dean's story from the vector of unjust things happening to Dean, it's easy to lose sight of the real story, which is an alchemical process that is happening inside of Dean. In that process, holding onto grievance doesn't serve Dean, it just festers. It cannot give him what he needs. Revenge doesn't remove the pain of loss; righteous anger doesn't remove the sting of injustice. That's why he has to let it go, no matter who is to blame, and that obligation is not because of his responsibility to others, it's his responsibility to himself. To his own soul.

Blame, grievance, and outwardly focused anger externalize pain, but in the end, externalizing it cannot avail him. The pain is in him. Everything that was taken from him, everything he's lost? No one who is to blame for any of it can metabolize or transform it for him, or take it from him, because it is his. Only Dean can transform it.

Culpability is irrelevant to the journey of Dean's soul.

Cas tells Dean: I love you. I know your heart. I see you. Dean can't respond. It's not because he doesn't love Cas and I don't even think it's because he didn't know. It's because he isn't there. Cas's grace can't cure Dean's anger or take away his pain. It can't give him justice, but it can give him more time. Love can stave off death one more time.

(and this is why Dean's end hurts so much. He was not finished! He was on a threshold!)

I think it's interesting how much we want to absolve Dean by assigning blame for his predicament to sources external to him: John, Sam, Cas, Mary, Jack, God himself! How much we want to give Dean his justice! He deserves it! Surely in all of this, Dean is, if not entirely blameless, then certainly relatable. His heart was in the right place and he was thoroughly traumatized and under great pressure, and despite all that, surely no one ever went to the mat for love harder, or was more selfless than Dean! What soul could do more?

And yet, he must do more. Dean's soul is his, and it can only be healed from the inside, by his process. The responsibility to himself is absolute, and Dean's absolution, his justice, the grace that will heal his soul can only come from inside the house.