Accidentally Wayward

sam glanced up, squinting at dean as if he were assessing his brother, before nodding. “call if there’s anything suspicious.”

dean nodded once, turned around, grabbed cas by the trenchcoat sleeve, and dragged the angel out the motel door and into the woods surrounding the building.

“sam’s smart, he’s going to figure out we aren’t out here keeping watch for werewolves. if he hasn’t figured it out already,” cas pointed out unhelpfully.

dean dropped cas’ wrist and turned around. “we can always go back,” he pointed out. “or…” he said, leaning his back against the nearest tree, “you could get your feathery ass over here and kiss me.”

cas hesitated for the briefest second, glancing back towards the motel room and furrowing his brows, before he was closing the gap and leaning in to kiss dean.

the whole thing was so high-school. sneaking out of the motel room to kiss anytime they could because they hadn’t told sam yet. it was all so new still and dean wanted to just enjoy this for awhile without sam peppering them with questions and knowing looks.

but there was a thrill to sneaking around that dean was addicted to. the shudder that raced down his spine as cas pushed him up against the tree, the angel’s fingers tugging at dean’s hair as dean deepened the kiss. the way his lungs felt like they were burning as he dropped his knees apart and cas slipped his thigh between dean’s legs. the stuttered little gasps cas uttered into the kisses as dean slipped his tongue into cas’ mouth and rutted against cas’ thigh.

the burn of the bark against the back of his neck, combined with the way cas pushed closer and closer into dean as if he wanted to climb into dean’s chest was intoxicating. he could spend all day with his lips attached to cas’; drinking in the taste of grace as cas let it bubble to the surface as tendrils slipped into dean’s mouth.

dean could get lost in these kisses for hours. how they’d only just started doing this when they could’ve had this years ago was beyond dean. but those thoughts disappeared from his mind as cas stuttered out a breath against dean’s lips and the angel kissed him harder.

slowing down the kisses, dean took his time chasing cas’ upper lip and licking his way along cas’ lower lip. cas let out a breathless sigh and dean pressed his smile against cas’. “we should get back,” dean murmured against cas’ mouth.

“yes, we should,” cas agreed, but he contradicted his words by stealing another kiss. and another. and another. quick presses of lips morphing into slow drags of their mouths against each other.

by the time cas pulled away, dean felt lightheaded. “sorry, too much grace in the kisses,” cas shuffled shyly.

“no such thing,” dean replied, snagging cas’ tie and tugging him into one last lingering kiss. when dean broke the kiss, cas looked a little starry-eyed, too. “c’mon, let’s head back.”

cas nodded, leaning in for one final kiss, which dean happily reciprocated.

they made their way back to the motel room, their arms brushing with every step they took. opening the door, sam glanced up from his laptop with a raised eyebrow. “take down a werewolf den out there?”

dean rolled his eyes at sam, but furtively wiped across his mouth with the back of his hand. “we did actually. you’re welcome, by the way.”

i’m fucking obsessed with this right now, so buckle in for a meta. a cool fun (horrible) thing about dean’s dialogue is that a good 90% of what comes out of his mouth is:

a pop culture reference (“you’re just gonna take some divine bong hit, and shazam, you’re roma downey?”)

references to real life phenomenon (“i don’t wanna wake up missing a kidney in a bathtub full of ice” “try new mexico, i hear he’s on a tortilla”)

these also often take the form of nicknames, and dean has a tendency to give people nicknames in general or call them something besides their given name, whether it’s affectionate or rude (“easy there, van damme” “so i’m girl interrupted” furthermore castiel = cas, ezekiel = zeke, etc, see also frequent use of “chucklehead” “asshat” and on the nicer/endearments end “buddy” “pal” “sunshine” etc)

an idiom (“a snowball’s chance” “if it smells like a duck…”)

slang (“drinking the koolaid” “jonesing for some hooch” not to mention the literal endless amount of words dean uses to refer to killing - gank, waste, juice, ice, etc)

a metaphor (“power up your batteries” “fly me back to my page on the calendar”)

a euphemism (“cloud seeding” “i’d have given you an hour alone with her first”)

sarcasm (his habit of replying “peachy” or “super” when asked how he is)

wordplay (see: the entire “vampirate” and “werepire” debacles)

completely nonsensical (guessing what happened to a magical artifact: “it was dug up by tomb raiders? it was seized by the king of the dead by warlords?”)

said at lightning speed - if you pay attention, dean actually talks a LOT, usually a mile a minute (this makes me feel a way when you recall him being nonverbal for a year at age 4 but that’s another post)

slang IN ANOTHER LANGUAGE (casual usage of “guano,” etc)

a lie, a deflection, a joke, etc

or worse, something dean’s NOT saying, deliberately, because he’s one of the most repressed people on earth

the end result of all this being:

dean winchester is utterly infuckingcomprehensible. 

think about this. there’s an ENTIRE SECTION on EVERY SINGLE EPISODE PAGE of the spn wiki devoted to JUST explaining dean’s pop culture references, because the average viewer won’t have seen everything he’s talking about either. they have a whole page for this called “hunter’s lingo,” but honestly, it’s not all hunters, just sam and dean’s fucking batshit communication style. even i don’t understand dean half the time. SAM gets it, sam speaks it back to dean a lot in the early seasons, but that’s because sam and dean are 1. practically two halves of the same person 2. FREAKS. every time we get an episode that involves outsider POV is devoted to them going “what the fuck is WRONG with them?”

enter castiel. technically speaking, the show implies that angels are omnilingual. castiel should understand every language known to man, but knowing the meaning of words doesn’t help him understand the following:

pop culture references

references to real life phenomenon

nicknames

idioms

slang

metaphors

euphemisms

sarcasm

wordplay

you get the idea.

listen to me. look me in the eyes. castiel cannot understand a single fucking word that comes out of dean’s mouth. my guy laid a hand on dean winchester in hell and immediately fell in love with him and has no fucking idea what he’s talking about ever. because not only is dean winchester’s way of speaking CLINICALLY insane, and sometimes incomprehensible even to other human beings who are not sam, castiel is an angel, and someone prone to taking things even more literally than other angels do

go back and watch and watch seasons 4-5 especially. the reason cas does so much squinting and head tilting is because every time dean opens his mouth castiel has to open up his mental “dean winchester dictionary” and translate entire paragraphs on the fly, because again, dean never shuts up!

what makes this extra hilarious to me is this gem:

this line is from 5.13. at this point cas has known dean for AN ENTIRE YEAR AND A HALF. what you see here is my guy SNAPPING. cas made an EFFORT in this scene. he asked who glenn close was. he’s telling dean that he can’t understand him. he is doing his level best to have a normal conversation with this guy he has a crush on and for the life of him he cannot do it (equal but opposite energy to cas blowing up the gas station and motel room in 4.01, tbh)

yes, cas can understand dean’s tone. he can use context clues, and he usually gets the general idea. and when cas DOES understand dean’s jokes, he laughs at them. the first time we ever see him smile is during their 4.07 heart-to-heart when dean says “it was a witch, not the tet offensive.” since cas has knowledge of human history, he knows what the tet offensive is; he got the joke, and he laughed.

but as far as actual dialogue goes, he consistently struggles to keep up. even after metatron gives castiel the pop culture knowledge in season 9, cas struggles to put it to put it to proper use (dean: “you wanna just walk right into the death star?” cas: “what does a fictional battle station have to do with this?”). whenever he asks dean to clarify it’s always when he’s most annoyed, like most of the time he knows it would be futile but he’s too annoyed to care. (dean: “i don’t know who’s on first, what’s on second!” cas: “what IS second???”) i’m pretty sure he spends seasons 4-6 wanting to shake dean by the shoulders and ask him why he is LIKE THIS. 

it takes cas - who, again, is omnilingual - YEARS to begin to acclimate to dean’s speech and start speaking that language back to him. it’s season 8 before we start really hearing him use slang, season 9 before he begins to understand wordplay, season 10 before he starts using pop culture references (to other angels, who immediately fail to understand him, which disappoints him immensely), and season 11 before he really gets into metaphors. i don’t remember what season he started using “yeah” instead of “yes” but i do know it took a really damn long time. 

and honestly, i don’t think cas truly got the hang of it until at least season 11-12. that’s something like 7 or 8 YEARS. it’s more than half the time they’ve known each other at the point of the series finale. 

I know hobbies change and this is a pretty minor complaint but I wish they were more consistent. Because Dean was in a band, he has an interest in music and he plays multiple instruments and there’s never a real payoff for that. It would’ve been cute in Jack’s goodbye speech if he mentioned the stars. Cas doesn’t really do anything for himself tbh, it would be funny seeing him just reading Saturday Morning Post in the Impala while he’s waiting. Sam is a witch. 

“MY FATHER WAS AN OBSESSED BASTARD! All that crap he dumped on me about protecting Sam? That was HIS crap! He’s the one who couldn’t protect his family! He’s the one who let mom die, who wasn’t there for Sam, I always was! It wasn’t fair! I didn’t deserve what he put on me and I DON’T DESERVE TO GO TO HELL!!”

And

The narrative deconstructs each of these aspects of his personality. We get told that he doesn’t like these things because it’s a Manly Thing to do, or an American thing to do.

He loves his car. The car is the only possession of the Winchester family that survived the fire that killed Mary and destroyed their house and all their belongings from their life before the tragedy. The car became the only stable element in their lives. It was the only thing they could call a home in a life of homelessness and motels. It’s where Dean and Sam grew up. Yes, Dean likes to drive fast and is proud of his big sleek car, but the car has a sentimental value that goes way beyond it being a big fast car.

Classic rock is the music Dean associates to his parents. He’s heard the story from John, how his parents bonded over Led Zeppelin. It’s a story that stuck with him, to the point it’s what he uses to prove to Mary that he is her son and is telling the truth. We could argue that Led Zeppelin are associated to romance and seduction in his mind, to the point the siren uses that in their (successful) seduction of Dean.

Unhealthy meat dishes are one of few memories of Mary he has. He remembers her meatloaf (and was heartbroken to learn that it wasn’t handmade) and of course the Winchester Surprise, a horrible concoction that Dean tried to replicate only to incur in John’s anger. Not even counting in the issue of Dean’s history with food scarcity, there’s an aspect of comfort inextricably tied to Dean’s relationship with food.

Comfort is also the fundamental thing Dean seeks in sex. It’s established that the casual nature of his sexual encounters is an obliged choice, and he actually longs for more stable relationships. The “adiós” is a bug, not a feature. Dean’s relationship with sex is actually very complex, it’s repeatedly suggested he’s into kink but also seeks gentle relationships with “safe” figures (think of the blonde waitresses that “smell like food”), and that’s easily explainable with the multiple emotional needs that Dean presumably projects in sex. Dean wants to fall in love (the siren is a dark mirror for Dean, representing what Dean is afraid of being for other people). Dean falls in love easily and gets attached easily, which is a problem for him. It’s also established that he has difficulties hooking up with people when he’s going through pericularly traumatic periods of his life, which makes his sexual activity pretty inconsistent, and proves the strong connection between sex and an emotional aspect.

• tics. a lot. it isn't exactly a constant thing (he can go days without ticcing at all). all of his tics are abrupt and unexpect. slamming his hand down on the table. throwing whatever is in his hand. (he once got threw at fork at the wall and it stuck. he only uses plastic now.)

• he's very crooked. his left leg is very slightly longer than his right, and you can tell that something's off by the way he walks.

• he owns a various assortment of knives. he doesn't use them, he simply likes seeing them. he'll steal knives off of those sam and dean kill.

• he cries a lot. he may not know exact what's going on but he knows that there is something wrong with him, something that shouldn't be there. eventually, it's cas that sits him down and tells him what he is.

YES!!

I wish CW (degregatory) SPN had more scars because after all these hunts and all their deaths you’re telling me they look like that?? nuh uh!

Sam’s got a long list of scars- a long scar along his cheek (thank you)- and he still has a gaping wide knife mark on his back from when dean made a deal for him. he’s like Frankenstein all, needled and stiched up. sometimes, he thinks he likes the scars because they remind him of everything he’s overcome. othertimes, it reminds him that he is a freak freak freak not normal. Even at Stanford, he hides his arms in sweaters to hid that long gash from his first hunt at 14. he has major head trauma and stitches on the side of his forehead that are only visible in bright daylight. but he cuts his hair so that no one sees them.

Okay I love this for a few reasons:

Sam has a shitty broken Motorola phone from when he was in college and he keeps using it because he bought it with money he earned himself and he’s petty about asking Dean or john for money.

It has a cracked screen, all sharp glass edges and if he puts it to his ear, sometimes it nicks him. he doesn’t mind. it’s not like anyone calls him much anymore.

dean on the other hand adores his phone, because he prizes all his possessions and this was the phone john bought him before he was headed out alone on his first hunt. it’s a little less cracked up, and banged up because dean is more careful of his belongings. after all, he doesn’t have many that are solely his. even his car wasn’t always his... the phone is.

sam loves to keep organised folders of lore on his laptop that he keeps on a drive and he’s obsessive about digitalising everything he learns because he has a fear of things burning down (material things go up in flames way too easily). but he’s also very paranoid so all of his research is always done on cafe and motel internets, and his cloud storage belongs to some 54 year old whos email he hacked a while back so that the piles of latin text wouldn’t be readily available to anyone but him.

Now onto tattoos!

Sam has many. so so many. around his ribs, like some sort of cage. and perhaps they are. it’s warding symbols and devils traps, and anything that will make sure that nothing could ever possess him. there’s nothing that scares him more than the idea of someone else waking up in his body. 

so he carves tattoos onto him since he’s twenty. and he looks up spells, and bindings at libraries solely to learn more protective sigils. dean thinks he’s obsessive about it, but he doesn’t mention it. he remembers when meg wore his brothers face, and dean thinks sam’s onto something.