whoops I’ve fallen into Dean Winchester’s entire sense of identity revolving around the protection of others and never knowing what it was to be looked after in return until Castiel
and I can’t get up
when Dean Winchester was four years old, his mother died and his father fell apart and his baby brother was thrust into his arms, and he was given the first of many instructions which would mark out Sam’s safety as completely his responsibility: “take your brother outside as fast as you can and don’t look back - now, Dean, go!”
And from there it never stops.
- Dean is four years old and he has to pull on his Big Boy Pants for Sam. His mother has just died and their house is gone and all his childhood toys are gone and the drawings pinned up on the fridge are gone and he isn’t allowed to cry - because if Dean cries, then Sam cries, and Sam is Dean’s responsibility.
- Sam will grow older not able to understand where his mommy is or why they don’t live in a normal house like normal people or why he can’t have nice things or why he has eaten the same damn lukewarm Spaghetti-o’s six days in a row - the answer to that one is because Dean isn’t quite tall enough yet to see the top of the stove and into the pan to check whether the Spaghetti-o’s are done, and he has to guess.
- Sam will get upset and throw tantrums because he just doesn’t understand and it’s just not fair, and Dean will just take it and let him scream himself hoarse because he can’t explain why bad things happen to them. Sammy’s still at that age where he thinks that Spiderman is the coolest guy ever, the luckiest, because they’re superheroes and they save people, and Dean knows that it will only make it worse if he explains that Spiderman only started saving lives because he lost someone very important to him.
- (but then again, it seems all stories start that way these days)
- So Dean doesn’t explain these things, because it is not his job to make things worse for Sammy, even if it’s the truth. It’s his job to make things better. It’s his job to make everything okay even if it’s not.
- And even when Sam is eighteen and runs away to college, sure, Dean’s bitter and hurt, but his main thought is but how will I look after Sammy when he’s at college?
- And even when Sam is twenty-two and joining him back on the road, Dean’s still falling into the same old role - snatch Sam out of yet another burning building, come to his rescue with salt and iron and silver bullets when the odds get bad during any other hunt, throw his soul and his everything into the wind when he screws up because Sam is his responsibility.
If Sam is safe, then Dean is Dean.
If Sam is in danger - or if Sam is dead - then Dean is not Dean. It’s as simple as that.
It’s obsessive and it’s unhealthy and if you strip it all away to very basics, this is what’s left behind:
“You don’t think you deserve to be saved.”
All Dean’s life, Sam has been put on a pedestal. Sam is innocent and precious and the last living thing that John has of Mary and he is to be kept safe at all costs - and he is Dean’s responsibility. Dean does as he’s told, he has never heard his father say that he’s proud of him for it. If he could have his way, he would want to die protecting Sam, because then at least he knows that he would have given literally everything he had to keep Sammy safe. And he does.
And then he is brought back.
It’s a completely surreal thought - what do you mean, he exists for a purpose other than to care for Sam? For the first time, he exists independently of Sam; not separately, because they’re still brothers and best friends and soulmates, but Dean is no longer defined by Sam.
And as time progresses, Dean realises that he is in the middle of a situation that is completely alien to him - he is important. The angels need him (although of course, it later turns out that they’re manipulating him for any entirely different reason) and they’re looking out for him.
One angel more than others.
Castiel’s orders are to tell Dean what to do and make sure that he goes through with it. Castiel’s orders are not to find him in dreams and in waking to insist that he’s not a hammer and that he has doubts and that he doesn’t envy the weight on Dean’s shoulders and that he’d give anything for things to different and that he’d throw aside the orders of heaven for one tiny, broken human who has spent his whole life thinking he’s secondary, but who, actually, means everything.
Castiel’s orders weren’t to care for Dean; in fact, he had specific orders to try to stop him from caring for Dean, when his superiors saw that he was slipping from the straight and narrow - but then again, they’re both pretty good demonstrations that you are not your orders; there’s a whole lot more to each of them than ‘save the world and keep Sammy safe while you go’ or ‘lead the righteous man to war’.
Castiel is the one who first shows Dean that he is meaningful and worth saving, and he goes on showing it. He puts himself in front of Dean in any situation, even it puts him at risk - defending Dean from Alistair even when he’s clearly out of his league and ends up having a metal wall bracket shoved through his spine and almost exorcised, defying everything he has ever known about duty and obedience to try and tell Dean the truth about Zachariah’s plans, using his own death at the hands of Raphael to give Dean more time to rescue Sam; shoving Dean aside time and time again in physical confrontations to buy Dean time or even just to keep him safe a few seconds longer.
Cas protects Dean in every way he can - from pain, from loss, even from the truth - hell, he even sticks with Dean for five long years of humanity and suffering and the end of all he’s ever known, just because he knows that Dean can’t carry the burden on his own.
And Cas does all of this not because he’s been told to, but because he feels that it’s something he needs to do… because Dean will always put himself last in order to protect everyone else, and then there is no-one to make sure that he is okay at the end of it all.
An angel, a creature of intent and fury and self-preservation at the cost of the whole planet, constantly throwing himself down at the feet of fate to keep it from treading on a single human - and never knowing if he’s going to get crushed in the process, if he’ll make it through or just be a casualty on the way to keeping Dean Winchester safe… he has no idea how or where it’s going to end, but it’ll be with Dean, side by side, and ready to face whatever’s coming - because they’re making it up as they go.
so much bigger on the inside: