#spn 9.22

[destiel-is-so-real-oh-wait]

(post)

[idontwikeit]

HE WAS IN LOVE HERE

[foxthefanboi]

9x22 - Stairway to Heaven

[mittensmorgul]

How come when Cas was dying from his borrowed grace, he didn't just remove it and become human? That would have prevented him from dying, and allowed him to avoid killing another angel for its grace

Hi there! this feels tangentially related to the other anon I just replied to. Or at least from the same general region in canon (s9, s10). :’D

I’d venture to say you are absolutely correct there, but that’s also failing to take into account the entire reason Cas had stolen that grace to begin with… and again, a LOT of this centers around the issues Cas is STILL dealing with to this day, and what I hope will be resolved before the end of the series.

let’s look back at 9.06, first of all, and also recall Cas’s struggles throughout s9, and even going back to the final run of s8: redeeming himself for his mistakes, being “useful,” or as it’s framed much later, “getting a win.”

So much of Cas’s story is wrapped up in this essential conflict for him– of doing the right thing in a bigger picture sense, versus his own need to have a purpose. He was struggling with this even in s13, struggling to understand why he came back from the Empty, you know? He believed there had to be a specific reason, in a more cosmic sense, and Dean’s “because we needed you” wasn’t enough of a reason for him… because he translates “need” as “we need you because you fill this specific purpose. You take care of a job we can’t do without you.”  And not “we need you because you’re part of our family and we want you with us regardless of what you can do for us.” This has been something he’s been dealing with now through his relationship with Jack… even in s14, feeling that his “key” into the Winchester family was through his duty to raise and protect Jack… Cas… hasn’t yet fully understood that Dean wants him just because he wants him, not because Cas is useful to him somehow.

But going back to your specific question, since ALL of this characterization is part of the same Bigger Picture for Cas:

In s9 and s10, there were specific reasons Cas stole that grace in the first place, and then had been willing to let it slowly kill him. He considered his own actions “barbaric.” But it enabled him to get back in the fight, to have a real purpose again. Because as a human, what could he do to help with the mess in Heaven? That mess he felt at least tangentially responsible for (he had trusted Metatron, after all, and it was his grace that powered the spell that pushed all the other angels out of Heaven to make a mess on Earth…).

But he also felt a duty to do what he could for the Winchesters… and s9 was the season that truly began to clarify his motivations to himself, you know? He’d been pushed to choose between Heaven and Dean for years, and had chosen Dean so often because Dean had been on the “morally correct” side of the equation. Like in s4– Dean had wanted to protect creation from a plot to bring on the Apocalypse that Cas had been brainwashed into believing was the right thing, but was won over to the side of humanity in the end. And this has been Cas’s slow progression of character development ever since.

Metatron sort of forced his hand in s9, making that choice the Main Narrative Point of s9 for Cas (which I just went into detail in my last post, which you can read right here). That he would choose Dean over Heaven when truly pressed to make a clear and distinct choice. And then over s10, Cas was faced with this choice over and over again– from helping Hannah round up the “rogue angels” on Earth vs helping cure Dean of being a demon, and then making his entire mission about curing Dean of the Mark, or dying trying.

And he couldn’t do ANY of that– or so he believed– if he was a human. As long as Dean was effectively immortal, saddled with the Mark, Cas needed to be an angel.

I’ve seen a lot of gif sets and meta based on the fact that Cas has always only needed Dean to ask him to stay, but it’s NEVER been that simple. Because Cas… has always been divided between his desire to stay with Dean, and his feeling of duty to Heaven, his personal need to have a Bigger Purpose.

And Dean, very often, followed Cas’s lead. One example I’ve seen of a time where Dean failed to ask Cas to stay was 10.03 after Cas helped with the demon cure. But like… Cas prefaced their entire conversation with the fact there was a “female outside in the car,” waiting for him. Like Cas made that statement to preempt any notion Dean could’ve had about his intent or desire to stay. Cas had more important things to do, right? He wouldn’t want to stick around and babysit Dean. He’s already got a female in the car waiting for him. WHY WOULD DEAN HAVE EVEN ASKED CAS TO STAY WHEN HE SO OBVIOUSLY WANTED TO LEAVE FOR MORE IMPORTANT FEMALES WAITING FOR HIM IN THE CAR?!

Sorry, I just had to get that out there somewhere. The s15 mess is NOT all on Dean, or Dean’s failures to tell Cas to stay, you know? The miscommunication and misconceptions run both ways. They have both repeatedly shot themselves in the foot this way, and I am SICK TO FUCKING DEATH of seeing posts suggesting otherwise. Okay, now back to your question… :’D

Meanwhile, even before Crowley gave Cas his power-up with Adina’s grace, Cas was telling Hannah that saving Dean was his priority. He just… never made that clear to Dean, you know? But Cas himself was still torn in his duty:

CASTIEL: Um… We can’t afford to lose our way.HANNAH: I know that. I’m sorry about the map.CASTIEL: No detours of any kind.HANNAH: Castiel, if these are metaphors and you’re attempting another human communication … It isn’t working.CASTIEL: I’m just trying to say this mission is everything.HANNAH: I know that.CASTIEL: Getting to Dean and hunting these rogues … I—I’m not at full capacity, so I … we n-need total focus.HANNAH: Like a laser. Got it.CASTIEL: Just … I’ve been around humans for long enough to see how easily distractions occur.HANNAH: “Distractions.”CASTIEL: Emotions, feelings … They’re dangerous temptations.

He wasn’t just talking about Hannah. He was also reminding himself that Dean wasn’t his only mission. He has been trying to convince himself of that for a really long time, you know?

By the end of s10, he finally recovered his own grace and was no longer in danger of slowly being poisoned by stolen grace, and was now weaker but at least all “himself” again (and heck doesn’t this directly mirror a lot of Jack’s issues with his own loss of grace, the temporary solution they thought they’d found for him, his theft of Michael’s grace, and the damage he did to his own soul in the process). For the first time since Cas had been human, his grace having been stripped against his will, he felt capable of actively CHOOSING to stay with Dean, even if that meant “watching him murder the world” as he gave into the Mark. Like… it was not a pleasant, happy, or hopeful situation, you know? And then when Dean was “cured,” and doing so freed the Darkness… well, duty overrode desire yet again. They had bigger issues to deal with than what they might choose for themselves in a world that wasn’t in immediate danger of ending again.

And these are all issues Cas is still sorting through. It’s never been as simple as Dean just asking him to stay. And it’s never been as simple as Cas just wanting to be more human. There’s always been a Bigger Picture they both needed to consider, and what they each needed to do in order to save the world (and each other… because that’s the big elephant in the room between them), rather than making choices based on what they’d actually want for themselves.

Let’s all just blame Chuck.

[webcricket]

Castiel 9X22 Stairway to Heaven

[jennsens]

MoC!Dean for @salvachester ♡

[mittensmorgul]

So I just finished S9 on my rewatch, and I'm a lil confused. I don't really understand Metatron's speech about how Cas "drapes himself in the flag of heaven, but it was all to save one human." Obviously, Cas loves Dean, I'm not disputing that. But Cas started his campaign to get the angels home before Dean was in danger from Metatron, and before anyone knew the MoC would be a serious issue. What specifically was Metatron referring to when he said Cas' actions were about saving Dean?

right so you watched 9.18 and 9.22…

Metatron had spent all season attempting to force Cas’s hand. He didn’t want Cas to be the hero of “his story” (sound familiar? Like Chuck in 15.09?). He was setting Cas up to be the villain. Using the ONE THING he knew Cas wouldn’t budge on to seal the deal.

Dean.

In 9.18: 

CASTIEL: And you did all this to make me a hero?METATRON [laughing]: Ah, that’s priceless. Um no. You are not the hero in this mess-terpiece. You are the villain. I’m the hero.

In 9.22: 

HANNAH: You gave us order, Castiel, and we gave you our trust. Don’t lose it over one man. [She hands a blade to CASTIEL] This is justice.[CASTIEL takes the blade and holds it as he considers. DEAN stares at him in shock. CASTIEL struggles but then decides]CASTIEL: No. I can’t.HANNAH: Goodbye, Castiel.

He literally did give it up for one man, because he refused to “punish,” i.e. kill, Dean.

CASTIEL: Dean. Those bombers – you don’t really think that I –DEAN: Cas, you just gave up an entire army for one guy. No, there’s no way that you blew those people away.

Metatron was implying that all along, the entire “setup” of the season, was specifically pushing Cas to make these choices (in his personal, direct impression of Chuck-As-God, and Chuck-As-Author). Because he didn’t just want Cas out of the way, he wanted to set Cas up specifically for the hardest possible downfall, so that Metatron himself could simply step in to clean up his mess and be viewed as the savior/hero to the rest of the angels.

OF COURSE Cas would feel obligated to help the angels… and he spent most of s9 DECLINING the job of leading them. Of mostly trying to stay out of the skirmishes between the factions that formed after the fall. For most of the first half of the season, he was human and mostly hiding from the other angels. What could he do against them? He had no power, he wasn’t really one of them anymore. Until he was captured and forced into a corner. HE WAS READY TO DIE until he saw the horror of what was really going on… he was pushed into “doing what he had to do,” and still disillusioned by Metatron, Heaven, and angel infighting in general. And all along Metatron was behind all of this… pulling his narrative levers with the help of his angel tablet typewriter. When Metatron forced his hand, forced him to make a public declaration of where his loyalty truly lay, Cas… very publicly chose Dean.

As the Author of s9′s Heaven mytharc, that’s the story Metatron told.

And isn’t that just like a slightly smaller scale direct parallel of what Chuck is trying to do in s15, with ALL of TFW as his antagonists, and the fate of the entire universe on the line.

[mittensmorgul]

So I have a question about 9x14. Bart talks to Cas about leading "an incursion against Raphael and his loyalists." So we can assume he's talking about season 6 stuff. But later, Bart also talks about how Cas was called back to the battlefield because "our leaders wanted those captives killed, and they knew you'd stand in the way of their order." I thought Cas was the main commander in season 6, since he led the rebellion. Why were there other "leaders" that acted against Cas's wishes?

(9x14 Anon here, I know these kind of questions are kind of inconsequential to the overall story but I still like to understand these small things, especially when it comes to Cas. Sorry if that’s not your thing, you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to 🙃)

Hi there! I’ll start by saying that this is EXACTLY the sort of detail I LOVE TALKING ABOUT THE MOST. :’D I love picking at things like this and attempting to find the truth, as much as we can in a work of fiction.

I’ll start by saying I have already asked myself this question, even if I didn’t give myself a fully satisfying answer, back the week before 13.03 first aired, in October 2017.

https://mittensmorgul.tumblr.com/post/166754538920/rewatching-914-i-love-this-episode-so-much

The series of thoughts I posed in this rewatch are:

Who ordered Bartholomew to kill those captives, if Castiel had been the one to leave them in his care? Who other than Castiel had the right to give that order? Just like the demon Crowley left in charge of his own captives, who tortured and killed Crowley’s captives without Crowley’s orders to do so.

It is sort of hand-wavey of s6 as a whole, isn’t it? Then again, s6 sort of handwaved itself in 6.20… Or at least dropped the curtain on all the secrecy surrounding the war in heaven that we’d only heard hints and whispers of until that point. But it also leaves out the entire previous year of events between 5.22 and 6.01, which we only saw in a few occasional flashbacks.

6.20 does kind of give us a vague timeline for events post 5.22, but not really. We don’t know how much time passed between Dean showing up at Lisa’s and Cas watching him rake leaves, for example. Cas only describes the time span as “those first weeks back in Heaven,” so it could be two weeks, or it could be twelve weeks, or more, before Raphael pulled him over and gave him his ultimatum.

We know Cas was building alliances with other angels at that time. They sort of hastily tried to show us the extent of that with Rachel, that Cas had other trusted angels working with him, but we also have been shown since s4 that… angels are difficult to keep in line. Uriel, Balthazar, and of course Cas himself. And a lot of others. We’re left to wonder just how “in charge” of the “rebel faction” Cas actually was in s6, especially when TWO of his closest generals? Commanders? Whatever, the terminology isn’t important here, but their PERCEIVED position of power is. But Cas was BETRAYED TWICE in s6 by angels he was supposedly “in charge” of– Rachel and Balthazar.

But what was the perception of all the other angels that were being told they needed to choose a side in this war? The angels who didn’t WANT to choose a side? Maybe they were fine with the status quo. Maybe they just didn’t want to fight. Maybe they wanted nothing to do with an apocalypse, but Raphael was demanding it, and Cas and his cohorts were trying to stop it. But when Raphael began laying down ultimatums, like the one he issued Cas to basically fall in line or die, I think Cas and a LOT of his cohorts were likely able to win the loyalty of angels who’d otherwise have had nothing to do with Cas, you know?

How many of Cas’s legions were converted to his side, to his cause, by angels loyal to Rachel, or to Balthazar, or to any of the other angels Cas had gathered to his cause? How many of them thought Rachel’s ideas were more compelling that Cas’s? How many of them actually knew about Cas’s ACTUAL plans to take down Raphael, and how many thought this was really a fight between the “foot soldiers” in each faction?

We know, for example, that Rachel was supposed to be one of his closest Lieutenants (THAT’S the word I was looking for earlier… >.>). Rachel… had no real idea what Cas was up to until she began to uncover his larger schemes in 6.18 (i.e. the episode we both meet her for the first time, and Cas kills her for challenging his plan once she begins to understand the reality of it).

But Carver era spent a LOT of time showing us just how little we actually understood s6. I mean, three episodes before 9.14, we hear it from Cas’s own mouth:

SAM [slaps his hand away]: You’re a terrible liar.CASTIEL: That is not true. I once deceived and betrayed both you and your brother.

He’s talking about s6. That season where he spent very little time in Heaven, despite constantly telling the Winchesters that it was Heaven and his troubles there that had been keeping him away from them all season. It sounds very much like his strategy in Purgatory, you know? At least on the surface, how he ran away from Dean to draw off the Leviathan… because that’s what he was doing in the Raking Leaves scene in 6.20, too… everything to keep Dean safe, to keep him out of it.

(meanwhile he’d unleashed soulless!Sam on the world, and didn’t seem to have any qualms getting Sam tangentially involved in his side quest with Crowley… which was his ACTUAL mission during s6.)

Back to the point, which was that Cas was deceiving BOTH his angel comrades in Heaven AND the Winchesters throughout s6. He wasn’t spending most of his time in the nitty-gritty fights in Heaven. In fact, we know very little about what those fights entailed, and really DIDN’T know there were “prisoners” involved on either side of that battle until s9. Well, we knew Cas-as-Godstiel intended to destroy Raphael’s followers, who refused to side with him during the war, but that’s ALL we knew until Bart told us about “prisoners” that had been taken, and apparently executed.

Because what Bartholomew’s little comments to Cas tell me is that Bart… really didn’t know what Cas’s real mission, his real plan, had been all along. The little scrums in heaven were a distraction for him, that he left to play out while he raced to find the power to kill Raphael and end the war himself.

But he apparently did occasionally peek in and lead a “mission,” or a “fight” or a “skirmish” in heaven, but then was sent away– or possibly not SENT away, but went back to his main quest for the Purgatory souls. Perception is everything here, and if Cas just.. left the fight, might Bart PERCEIVE him as having been sent away, right before “alternate orders” to kill the prisoners came from someone else?

Either that, or Cas did take himself out of the direct leadership of the rebel army in Heaven, and DID take orders from someone else while on that battlefield? We honestly do not know, and I don’t know if it’s even relevant now, because it’s all a game of perception.

Now that we know the full extent of Chuck’s involvement in arranging troubles all over creation, could Bart’s description and “recollection” of those events have even been “edited” after the fact? Heck, we don’t even need Chuck to explain this one… how about Naomi? The narrative has honestly never fully addressed it, and I don’t think it will be. Which is part of what makes it so interesting to think about, to me anyway.

Because what really was Cas’s role in the war in Heaven? Was he merely a figurehead who dared to challenge Raphael and then left most of the day-to-day running of the war to his lieutenants? Because that’s how his conversations with Rachel made it seem. And how s6 seems to make the most sense to me overall. Almost as if the war in heaven and those battles that had consumed Bartholomew’s entire perspective of that time… were barely even on Cas’s radar at all. He had so many other more important things to think about.

This is one reason why I found the whole “Cas as Commander” toward the end of s9 so fascinating. Because that was a role he was FORCED into by Metatron, and not something he was comfortable with. He took the responsibility seriously though, but I had seen it at least partly as more of his eternal penance for s6, and a chance to get a do-over on a lot of the things he always felt he screwed up during that time. And Heaven is near the top of that list– not because he directed the wars there, but because he’d neglected them.

The image of Cas as some great Leader Of Heaven’s Armies is just… not and never has been the reality of his character, despite being an incredibly popular fanon interpretation of his character. Even back in early s4, when he seemed to have Authority, he seemed so confident in the Plans of Heaven, seemed so in charge, the reality of that began to crack through by 4.07, and had completely shaken apart by the end of the season. I’ve applied that thematic to essentially everything having to do with Heaven and the organizational system up there ever since.

We like to think of Heaven as a military organization, and angels as soldiers with well-defined ranks and positions within a hierarchy. I think the reality is far more like Heaven is a bureaucracy, and half the people in the organization are scheming to overthrow the other half at any given time, there’s no clear leadership level by level and no clearly delineated pecking order or chain of command. More like a conglomerate of different divisions who each think their group is the one in charge, while getting very little input or guidance from the supposed leadership of the whole organization. A bunch of petty middle-managers scrambling for as much power and control as they could amass.

Heaven was made up of Zachariahs and Metatrons and Naomis, after all. 

eta: after I read the whole thing again :’D

Bart was just another low-level bureaucrat attempting to seize power for himself where he saw an opportunity. And like the vast majority of other angels, he died for it. And there’s now so few of them left and they’re STILL behaving this same exact way-- with Dumah having schemed her way into getting Naomi locked up in s14. I mean, nothing ever changes, right? Even when there’s only a handful of angels left, they can’t let go and work together. They’ll be the death of themselves.

(Except the few that seem to have realized there’s a better way-- like Cas, like Naomi who was at least trying to learn a better way, like Anael who would rather live a sham life on Earth helping people than return to Heaven even after seeing more sides of the bureaucracy than most other angels, and like Metatron who only learned better after he lost his grace and still ended up dying for trying to do the right thing... Chuck really is a jerk, you know?)