#it's either the truth (horrifying to think about) or a terrible 'trick' to get info on something he already knew about (also horrifying) | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mittensmorgul · 7 years

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Situations in s6 in which Dean prayed to Cas for help (and the two times that Sam tricked Cas into helping... these episodes are marked with *) (oh, and also that handful of times that Cas’s war spilled all over Sam and Dean in ways they never asked for, and he STILL refused to tell them what the heckeroo was going on anyway...these episodes are marked with **):

6.03: Three police officers are dead in what appear to be small-scale recreations of the Plagues of Egypt. Because of the “biblical” nature of these deaths, it’s logical that they would want to talk to someone who, you know, witnessed the original Plagues of Egypt for advice.

It’s noted that Cas hadn’t spoken to either Dean or Sam in over a year despite Sam having prayed repeatedly to Cas after he “mysteriously” returned from the Cage. It’s also noted that the entire case involved another angel trading Heaven’s weapons to people in exchange for their souls. Enter Balthazar, old friend and ally of Castiel, and his cache of stolen “nukes.” Also enter Raphael, general antagonist who is anti-human and pro-apocalypse. Both Balthazar and Cas flap off to points unknown without giving Sam and Dean any further info about what the heck is going on.

6.06: Sam and Dean believe that they may have stumbled across another of those Heavenly Weapons, Gabriel’s Horn of Truth, and Dean prays to Cas to let him know. It turns out it’s NOT Gabriel’s Horn, and Cas flaps off after a short conversation with Dean. Dean is upset because he’d apparently been praying to Cas for days, and Cas only bothered to show up when he thought Dean had one of the Heaven Weapons. As far as we know, Cas and Dean haven’t seen one another since 6.03. All Cas tells Dean is that “I'm at war. Certain... regrettable things are now required of me.” This is not new information for Dean, and leaves Dean feeling just as frustrated over wanting to HELP Cas with his problems. Cas tells Dean he’ll “make inquiries” about what might be wrong with Sam, but tells Dean he has no information for him now.

6.07: After Dean gets confirmation that something is seriously wrong with Sam from Veritas in 6.06 after spending six episodes growing ever more suspicious that Sam “popped outta hell wrong,” including Sam letting Dean be turned into a vampire so they’d have an “in” to kill the entire nest and hopefully capture the Alpha, he calls in Cas, desperate to get a concrete diagnosis and make sure that what came back from the cage was really Sam. Cas diagnoses Sam’s complete lack of a soul, and goes with the Winchesters to Samuel’s compound to see if Samuel (who was resurrected around the same time Sam was) suffered from a similar problem. Cas confirms Samuel still has a soul, and then flaps off without any further explanation of what the heck’s going on.

It’s noted that this is the episode where we learn what Samuel is up to with the Alphas, and that he’s working for Crowley to discover the location of Purgatory. Crowley implies that he can return Sam’s soul, but only in exchange for the Winchesters’ help in capturing the Alphas. With no other hope of retrieving Sam’s soul, they’re kinda screwed into working for Crowley.

*6.10: When Meg captures the Winchesters and demands information on Crowley’s location, Sam makes a deal with her. They’ll help her take Crowley down, in exchange for her help getting some information out of Crowley first. Sam wants Crowley to tell him how to get his soul back, and tells Dean they’ll just kill Meg and her goon demons when they’re through... but Sam, still completely soulless, knows they’ll need some help.

This time it’s SAM (without Dean’s knowledge) who “tricks” Cas into showing up (making him think they’ve run across another of those stolen Heaven Weapons from 6.03). He essentially DEMANDS that Cas help him, because Cas “owes” him, Sam threatens to “hunt you down and kill you” if Cas refuses to help him now. Sam then proceeds to lie to Dean about how he convinced Cas to stay and help, framing it as a gesture of friendship... >.>

Sam overhears Cas FINALLY giving Dean some actual information about the state of Sam’s missing soul, that just happens to sound pretty horrifying... and Sam decides he might not even want his soul back. The fact that Cas believes Sam’s soul is a lost cause, and that Sam’s soul eternally suffering in the cage with Lucifer is an acceptable fate, is frankly disturbing in itself.

Cas ends up banished and Samuel tries to feed Sam and Dean to ghouls, but they both escape/survive, rescue Meg, and capture Crowley. Crowley confirms he can’t return Sam’s soul and seems to back up Cas’s fears about doing so. Cas shows back up (nice timing) with what he claims are Crowley’s bones, which he supposedly burns. Cas agrees to dismantle Crowley’s collection of caged monsters.

(From what we learn later, that Cas DIDN’T torch Crowley’s bones, and that Cas was the one responsible for abandoning Sam’s soul to that eternal torture in the first place even if it had been entirely accidental, AND that Cas was in cahoots with Crowley and his plans for Purgatory all along... his horrific guilt over EVERYTHING that happened in 6.10 combined with the fact that he STILL didn’t confess any of it to Sam or Dean... and Cas is STILL desperately trying to fix ALL of this... he’s got to be feeling even more isolated and burdened and helpless to make any of it work out. And to think all of this is the result of him missing that first sign more than a year ago, that something was ~very wrong~ with Sam when he first brought him back from hell... Cas just needed a win... and he kept doubling down on every losing hand all season long)

*6.12: After Dean restores Sam’s soul, Cas swings by to examine him. He tells Dean that he’s not sure if Sam will ever wake up, because of the damage to his soul, then leaves again. Later, Sam prays to Cas and tricks him into giving him answers.

**6.15: After Balthazar shows up and throws Sam and Dean into an alternate reality without warning and against their will, Dean tries praying to Cas for help but it doesn’t work in that universe. They manage to find their own way back, when Cas shows up to make a threat display to Raphael, then boops Sam and Dean back to Bobby’s. After being used as bait and telling them he’d have done the same thing if Balthazar hadn’t, Cas reminds them that he must win against Raphael, and Dean shouts back that they KNOW that, but that’s ALL they know. Dean is tired of being yanked around by a situation he literally knows nothing about, and again Cas refuses to tell them anything more before he flounces yet again.

**6.17: The entire episode takes place in an altered timeline in which the Titanic never sank, and Atropos was trying to clean up the resulting mess by killing all the descendants of the survivors who never should’ve been born. They discover Balthazar was behind it (him again). They never once pray to Cas for help on this one. Sam and Dean are literally frozen in time in the background with a huge air conditioner thing about to land on them and crush them, as Cas, Balthazar, and Atropos work out their issues. They talk about how Cas is trying to “make power” for himself by creating souls to “power his war machine.” In the end when Cas “allows them” to remember the alternate timeline they experienced, he flat-out lies to them about why it had happened at all (nothing about souls or war machines, blaming the deaths on Fate), and blaming the entire alternate timeline on Balthazar for hating that Celine Dion song. Then he disappears before they can ask any more questions. (he was acting really shifty there too...)

6.18: Dean prays to Cas because they’ve finally found a weapon that can destroy Eve (aka the creature they believe is the season’s Big Bad), but the only way to GET the weapon is to travel back to 1861 when what was apparently the last living Phoenix was killed by Samuel Colt with his nifty magic gun. Cas’s lieutenant Rachel shows up instead and delivers this infamous line:

RACHEL I think you call him when you need something. We're fighting a war. SAM We get that. RACHEL Clearly you don't, or you wouldn't call him every time you stub your toe, you petty, entitled little pie-- CASTIEL Rachel. That's enough.

Out of context it really makes very little sense. We know Cas has barely been in contact with Sam and Dean all season long. Every time he’s seen them he’s been rushed to get back to his war. Yet Rachel seems to think he’s been flitting off to help them out constantly... hmmmm. I WONDER WHERE HE’S BEEN FLITTING OFF TO CONSTANTLY?! (I mean... he’s got this entire secret plan going with Crowley that he’s keeping from EVERYDAMNONE so maybe...) Cas cuts her off and dismisses her before she can say anything else, but she’s suspicious enough about Cas’s dismissal there that she does a little digging...

Cas sends Sam and Dean to the past and gives them a 24 hour window until he fetches them home. Meanwhile, Rachel’s digging has uncovered a TERRIBLE TRUTH about what Cas has been up to. THIS INFORMATION IS STILL BEING KEPT FROM US, THE AUDIENCE, BUT POST 6.20 WE NEED TO UNDERSTAND THAT RACHEL UNCOVERED CAS’S ENTIRE PLAN. And to understand that he hadn’t just been lying to the Winchesters, but even to his closest lieutenants, about the entire Purgatory plan, Crowley, everything.

He’d presumably been telling Rachel that he’d been “helping the Winchesters” while he’d been off working on the Crack Purgatory With Crowley plan. THAT’S WHERE HER BASELESS ACCUSATION AGAINST SAM AND DEAN CAME FROM.

RACHEL Castiel, I've been hearing things. Things I don't want to believe. Just tell me if it's true. CASTIEL If what's true? RACHEL You know. Your dirty little secret. CASTIEL I have to defeat Raphael. RACHEL Not this way, Castiel. CASTIEL Rachel. RACHEL We put our faith in you, and...look what you're turning into. CASTIEL I don't have a choice. RACHEL Then neither do I. (Rachel stabs Castiel with her blade)

Cas is forced to kill her, and then hides at Bobby’s. He’s too weak to bring Sam and Dean back, but Bobby offers the power of his own soul to give Cas the energy to save them. Just when they think they’ve failed, the package shows up from Samuel Colt with the bottle of phoenix ash, and suddenly they’re hopeful again that they can defeat Eve.

6.19: Cas, get outta my ass... (BOY OH BOY HE SHOWED UP FAST! I mean, like he was standing right there all along and just had to un-invisible himself or something... like we see him do in the very next episode.. so maybe he WAS watching over the Winchesters some of the time he’d been telling Rachel he was, but they certainly didn’t know about it.) Now that they have a weapon that can kill Eve, they need to know where she actually is. Cas can’t sense her because she’s blocked him, but he brings the vampire Lenore from 2.03, because she CAN sense Eve. She gives up the information and then begs them to kill her (Cas obliges, to everyone’s horror). He then boops everyone to Eve’s location and immediately realizes that she’s also blocking his powers, so regardless he’s stuck there until Eve is dealt with.

(pause for the horrifying interlude where Sam and Dean are so “desperate for a win” they fall into Eve’s trap with her “perfect monster” that even hunters (and even ANGELS can’t detect... and Cas horrifyingly torturing a guy for info on Eve’s location... and Cas put into a situations where he’s defaulting to torturing people-- bearing in mind he brought Dean in to torture Alistair in 4.16, Cas has fallen a looooong way since then-- will become relevant again in 6.22 so keep this in mind)

Eve reveals that Crowley is still alive (instigating everyone’s suspicions about Cas again, and if that means Cas has been lying to them), and we get confirmation at the end of the episode that Cas and Crowley are working together (and have been all along).

(AN: Looking at the season-long arc as if it were a cop drama, Eve getting taken down with three episodes left to go proves she was a red herring. Sam and Dean, up to this point, believed she was the Big Bad. But the audience should certainly know better by now...)

**6.20: *cries forever* All the betrayal comes into the light. Even Dean can’t defend Cas after this. Cas shows up unasked for in Dean’s car, tells him he has no idea how Crowley is still alive and that he has no idea where Crowley is currently. Then boops directly to Crowley’s lab... >.>

We see that Cas has been hanging around the Winchesters, invisible, ignoring their prayers, “But I didn't go to them...Because I knew they would have questions I couldn't answer...Because I was afraid.“

But then he’s compelled to reveal himself, in order to save Bobby, Sam, and Dean... after which Dean again comes to his defense. “Wonders never cease. They trusted me again. But it was just another lie.”

*6.21: Sam summons Balthazar to question him about Cas’s involvement with Crowley after demons kidnapped Lisa and Ben to keep Dean from interfering in Crowley’s plans. Cas had demanded that Crowley not hurt Sam and Dean, so instead Crowley went after people Dean cared about. Balthazar confronts Cas, tries to talk him out of his plans, and then agrees to play “double agent” for Sam and Dean.

Sam then prays to Cas on Dean’s behalf, because Dean’s going off the rails torturing demons for info on Lisa and Ben’s whereabouts. Crowley told Dean to stand down and not interfere with his plans, and Lisa and Ben would be fine. Dean refused. Cas makes the same deal with Dean, stand down and not interfere, and he’d retrieve Lisa and Ben when they’ve completed their plan. Of course Dean refuses, because that’s the same offer Crowley had made him.

“Dean, I do everything that you ask. I always come when you call. And I am your friend.“ Well, Cas, one outta three ain’t exactly great in Dean’s book here... He has NO IDEA the extent you’ve suffered in the name of your “friendship” with him over the last year and a half or so... Cas tried to give Dean peace when all Dean had ever fought for was freedom. Cas has done all of this just to keep Dean safe, and Dean never asked for ANY of it. And with the situations that Cas’s choices have brought down on all of them, Dean’s got no peace anyway. Ask him any day, and Dean will ALWAYS choose freedom. Which means not being lied to, not being betrayed, not having his choices taken away from him in the name of some false sense of peace (helloooo “paradise” parallel).

Balthazar agrees to take Sam and Dean to where Lisa and Ben are being held, and the rescue mission goes sideways when Lisa is possessed by a demon. Cas suspects where the Winchesters learned their location and confronts Balthazar. Rachel uncovered his true plan in 6.18, and Cas killed her for it. Balthazar discovered his true plan here, and Cas killed him for it. But he was unwilling to kill Sam and Dean. He’d done all of this to protect Dean in the first place, but the deeper he dug, the more danger he’d inadvertently heaped on them.

He offers Dean the only sort of “peace” he has left, wiping Lisa and Ben’s memories of Dean. THIS IS POSSIBLY THE WORST THING EVER. OMG. This is the lengths Cas was willing to go to in order to give Dean that peace...

**6.22: And the piece de resistance. The crowning moment of Cas’s utter downfall. He broke Sam’s wall in a last-ditch effort to MAKE Dean stand down and let him crack Purgatory. He helped Crowley torture Eleanor Visyak for the information on the ritual to break into Purgatory. He then breaks his deal with Crowley. Crowley returns having made a deal with Raphael, but it’s too late. Cas has already done the ritual, gained the power of the Purgatory souls, and explodes Raphael. Crowley flees. Dean begs Cas to put the souls back now that he’s defeated Raphael, and Cas refuses (because he’s really really not entirely himself with not only all the monster souls inside him, but the Leviathan as well...).

BONUS: *7.01: Even DEATH tells Cas he’s a walking time bomb, and that he MUST return the souls. HE LITERALLY MOVES THE DAMN MOON TO MAKE IT POSSIBLE. Cas rapidly loses control under the influence of all that power and FINALLY comes when Sam, EVEN SUFFERING WITH HIS BROKEN WALL, prays to Cas, “Hey, Castiel. Um... Maybe this is pointless. Look... I don't know if any part of you even cares, but, um, I still think you're one of us, deep down. I mean, way, way, way off the reservation, but... Look, we still have till dawn to stop this. Let us help. Please.”

SAM was the one, after EVERYTHING, who begged Cas to let them help him, and he finally did admit he needed help. In those few minutes between returning the souls and the Leviathan taking over, Cas’s only concern was admitting his guilt, admitting to Dean that he’d been wrong, and repeatedly assuring Dean that he would find some way to redeem himself. And then it’s too late...

Now that we’ve covered all the stubbed toes and papercuts that Cas was summoned to fix for no reason in s6, lets take a brief look at the sorts of things Sam and Dean dealt with on their own, without summoning an angelic assist:

6.01: After a year at Lisa’s, desperately trying to research a way to save Sam from Hell and trying to live up to Sam’s dying wish for him, a group of djinn shows up and targets Dean. He learns that Sam’s been alive for a year and neither Sam nor Bobby bothered to tell him.

6.02: Sam calls Dean for help while he’s working a shapeshifter case and finds himself saddled with a baby... who turns out to be a baby shapeshifter. When Daddy Shapeshifter comes knocking looking for his baby, and none of the standard weapons work on the Alpha, things go very very sideways very very fast. Still, they don’t call for Cas.

6.04: The monsters are all out of whack, but Bobby’s trying to reclaim his soul from the “loan” he’d made to Crowley in order to get Death’s location in order to stop the Apocalypse. Dean is equally concerned about what the heck’s wrong with Sam, but they help Bobby find Crowley’s bones and hold them for ransom until Crowley releases Bobby’s soul. Funny they didn’t even need an angelic assist on any of that...

6.05: DEAN IS LITERALLY TURNED INTO A VAMPIRE. Kinda a little bit worse than a paper cut. Didn’t bother to phone Cas up for a quick healing.

6.08: Pressed into Crowley’s employ, thinking Crowley’s still got Sam’s soul, they discover the packs of skinwalkers that have infiltrated towns across the country and are growing in numbers. They kill this town’s pack, but the threat that there are more hidden everywhere looms large. Apparently that’s not something they think Cas needs to help with.

6.09: Dean is literally abducted by fairies and taken to a faerie realm. When he escapes, they set a Red Cap after him, while Sam has to find the banishing spell to send the faeries all back to their realm before they can kill Dean. Even soulless, Sam pulls it off without having to call Cas for help.

6.11: Dean bargains with Death, desperate to retrieve Sam’s soul and tired of being at Crowley’s mercy and getting no help from Cas or anyone else on how to help Sam. He learns a bit about Cosmic Consequences, and Death gives him a vaguely unhelpful warning about the dangerous road Cas is going down and hints that it’s about the Souls. Meanwhile, Sam is desperate to keep his soul from being returned, and gets advice from Balthazar that leads him to attempt to kill Bobby. None of this is apparently alarming enough for anyone to consider giving Cas a quick lil shoutout.

6.13: Against everyone’s advice, Sam starts “scratching the wall,” and uncovering memories of his soulless year. We learn some of the horrifying things he did (Sam’s horrified, Dean’s horrified, we see Samuel was horrified, the audience was horrified by giant spider people...), and still they don’t need Cas for this one.

6.14: ehhhh, a simple salt and burn... kinda-sorta... even when everything goes sideways, Dean nearly gets run down by his own ghost-possessed sex doll car, and the haunted item in question is a woman’s transplanted kidney that her sister’s still using, they don’t think to call Cas to maybe help deal with the haunted kidney situation. In this case, it may actually have saved said woman’s life, but whatever. They couldn’t have known until it was too late anyway.

6.16: The monster situation is coming to a head, leaving a trail of victims so obvious that MULTIPLE hunters independently converge on Eve’s location, almost as if they’ve all been lured there like the “victims” in a certain Agatha Christie novel... ANYWAY, they find themselves trapped in a situation where it’s impossible to know who’s possessed by the monster worm, when calling Cas could’ve solved all their problems with a quick lil boop-n-smite, but no. They deal with Eve’s special monster spawn on their own, losing Samuel, Gwen, and Rufus along the way. *cue horrific guilt*

For anyone who is still somehow confused about season six, this is why our tongue-in-cheek tag for the season is “we don’t talk about season six.” Not because we shouldn’t talk about it, but because nothing was beautiful and everything hurt.

Cas proved to be the season’s true Big Bad. But it wasn’t because he set out on some evil plot to ruin everything. It all started for one simple reason: Dean had lost almost everything to give the entire world freedom, and Cas wanted to give him peace as well. That conversation at the end of 5.22, “Which would you rather have, peace or freedom?” Cas realized in that moment that in winning for Free Will and stopping the apocalypse, Dean would never have peace, and in trying to save the one tiny bit of peace Dean did have, he nearly destroyed the world again anyway...

Yes, Cas’s plan “worked.” Raphael died. The second apocalypse was averted. BUT AT WHAT COST?! *cue the Leviathan and a fate at least as devastating as the apocalypse* So no, it really wasn’t a win. Cas hasn’t won. He hadn’t been right. He’d ignored every warning sign begging him to turn back, begging him to stop (and not just from Dean-- from Balthazar, Rachel, Atropos, and even Death). All because he’d fallen so deep and painted himself into that corner, all because he didn’t go to Dean way back when on that day he watched him raking leaves. And then he was too afraid and too ashamed of everything he’d done along the way to turn back, to ask for Dean’s help, to even tell Dean what was really going on and just how bad the situation was.

Who knows if they could’ve found another way. Maybe there really wasn’t another way. But at that point it was moot. Dean (and Sam) had given him endless opportunities to help him, or even just to listen to what he was going through and offer their support, and at every turn he chose to lie to them, to betray their trust to ignore them when they called on him, and to hide from them. All in the name of doing everything to protect them both, to keep them safe. Which (by the time he broke Sam’s wall) had been narrowed down to protecting Dean alone... all the while Dean never wanted Cas to sacrifice himself that way. Dean never wanted to be “protected” from Cas’s difficulties. He would’ve eagerly helped Cas, the same way Cas had always helped HIM.

Maybe we really need to start talking more about season six. Though I’m fine if we can all collectively ignore the spiders, the haunted kidney, and the weird dog episode. Aside from those, there’s a hell of a lot of important stuff that seems to have been conveniently forgotten or ignored that lays the groundwork for every bit of Cas’s personal growth that happens after his return in 7.17.

#we don't talk about season six #spn s6 #castiel winchester #oh DEAN #sam fucking winchester #crowley #the scheherazade of supernatural #because this is really and truly the beginning of that story #without all of this ^^ nothing that comes after really holds water #THIS IS WHAT MAKES IT ALL SOOOO WORTH IT #And why cas is STILL trying to get a win for dean and redeem himself to dean and why he spent a year in purgatory on the run #i was just gonna hold on to this post for a while but then i saw lizbob's long post from this morning and i thought this was relevant :P

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