lizbobjones

A hopefully one day conclusive study of these assholes, hopefully told as briefly as I can.

Written for the people in the fandom who care but sometimes need a pick me up on this, and not written to prove a point to anyone who doesn’t already care. <3
 

I love this moment, and Cas’s conflicted soft faces and harsh words in the following scene, an immeasurable amount. I said about how in 4x02 Dean showed some first sign of softness towards Cas, now Cas shows some serious softness towards Dean, almost as if having guided Dean through that “lesson” and “mission” in 1973, Cas himself got a lesson in Dean, and was finally able to see Dean’s humanity. He got to see Dean as something other than Heaven’s Weapon or whatever he’d been told Dean’s great important purpose was as the reason for resurrecting him.

He sees Dean witness a great family tragedy, but more than that - for the first time he is going against his programming. This was a recon mission for Heaven, to send Dean as their eyes on what happened in the past, something they seemed unable to snoop on without sending in their own agent. Whatever Azazel did to keep this all secret, finding out what he did to the Winchesters requires forcing Dean to go confront it himself and receive fresh trauma over a long-ago event. Heaven knows he is only a witness - something he struggles with even as far away as 11x14 when time travelling to the doomed submarine - and Cas was still sent with the motivating words of "you have to stop it" in order to get Dean to comply and be motivated enough to witness it all for them and to be on the scene. And at this point, when the game is over, Cas sees what this whole ploy has done to Dean, to have to witness such family tragedy at close quarters and his new understanding of just how much Azazel had messed with their family. And his helplessness that Heaven itself had come to him and told him to stop it and yet it still happened in front of his eyes.

But that is the first time we see, even in a microscopic way, Cas express any sort of doubt or anything other than an all-powerful and all-knowing front. Possibly one of the moments that saved Cas in Misha's performance of showing such compassion towards Dean and making Cas break from being completely indifferent. Showing that Cas had already begun to be invested, and that soon he will be confessing doubts in his next episode... It's one of those cracks that begin to show and which make both Cas and his relationship with Dean so compelling from the very very start.