so i am thinking back on this conversation i had with @astermacguffin and the lads a few months ago. because aster's horrible version is fun but i also wanted to talk about the charming sitcom version that exists in my head. this may have been codeveloped with dizzy formerly lesbiansamwinchester but i honestly can't remember because we have like six aus that are exactly like this.
anyway the basic premise is, well, cas possesses kelly to help her survive jack's birth, right? and it works! and like, everyone is fine! no one dies! we all happily return to the bunker. except. well. the thing about jimmy novak is that he's dead, and famously, corpses cannot give consent. so cas is, well, stuck.
the solution that they find for this is that cas stays possessing kelly, but when she wants a break, he'll possess one of the other inhabitants of the bunker, that is, sam, dean, or mary.
(mary's living there partly because i'm a "what if mary was a shitty mom but she also was still their roommate" truther and partly for reasons that i will go into later).
anyway. cas spends most of his time possessing kelly, and he's pretty hands off. the thing about kelly is that she's a new mother with a superpowered baby in a bunker full of scary strangers. it's really helpful to have an entity in your body who can 1) make it so that you don't actually need to sleep or rest or take care of yourself, and generally provide you with boundless energy, meaning that the hardships of caring for an infant are way less hard, 2) telepathically commune with the baby to discover its needs and, more rarely, deal with any accidental use of its powers that may happen, and 3) be her friend and keep her company and provide a social bridge between her and the other people in the bunker, whom she is basically trapped alone with since this is the only place in the world safe for jack to be (lucifer is still out there!) and who are freaks that she doesn't know.
like, the toxic environment of the bunker is hugely ameliorated by the presence of kelly and mary as outside gazes, but she's still stuck underground with a bunch of weirdos. plus, cas and kelly can bond over being tradwives and reinforce their shared horrible and horribly romanticized concept of their place in the family. kellycas voice (unison, with absolute conviction) stand by your man <3 keep the family together <3 wives/angels are meant to obey their husbands <3.
(we are baby jack truthing in this one, sorry jack, you're fundamentally just funnier and more narratively uneful as an object in this specific situation. maybe he ages like amara but is still a baby for a while).
anyway, cas spends most of his time possessing everyone not actually controlling their bodies, just projecting a hallucifer style image of himself into their consciousness and hanging out with them. kelly's hallucifer of cas is always using the jimmy vessel, because that's how she knew him.
anyway, the person cas possesses the next most is sam. sam is usually the one to actually walk up to kelly and offer to take cas so that she can have some alone time. most of the time they just hang out together. cas makes it so sam doesn't have to sleep. they read in companionable silence. cas makes sam feel safe. protected. the fact that cas is possessing sam but sam is still in control is therapeutic. overall, sam is pretty much normal about the whole thing.
but he is working on a way to get cas back into his old vessel, because they all want that. sam generally sees cas as jimmy, because that's the vessel sam knew cas in for years, and also sam and kellycas just don't interact that much, because sam isn't really interested in doing much parenting of jack - jack being the son of lucifer still kind of freaks him out, even though sam doesn't blame anyone. plus, he's just better with older kids, and he's part of an entire flock of parental figures that jack has. his help isn't needed that often, so he's just working on getting comfortable with the idea jack so he can be the one to teach him to read.
the person who cas possesses the next most is dean. and he is. well. he is not normal about it. being possessed by cas makes dean go insane. you know how it is. and like, he sees cas most of the time as jimmy, but frequently as kelly as well, because, first of all, dean is probably the person who hangs out the most with kellycas, both because he just wants to hang out with cas, and because after cas and kelly, he's doing most of the childcare. but like. this whole situation is making him gender cas in a fascinating new way and he like. absolutely cannot deal. with that.
dean has a continuous crisis for a month before they finally manage to fuck about it (cas just point blank asks kelly if he can use her body to have sex with dean and she has to become cool with homosexuality really fast, but manages it and agrees because she cares about cas and they've bonded over being tradwives and it doesn't really count as gay the way they're doing it <3. also then she gets to fuck dean, who is hot, and it doesn't even make her a slut because it's not really her! remember, kelly is a republican). also when kellycas and dean fuck cas very much does project his hallucifer image into dean's mind as well so dean is sometimes hallucinating jimmy vessel cas instead of kellycas.
the person cas possesses like. least frequently, is mary. and that's because mary is like, really uncomfortable with it. she frames it to herself as being uncomfortable with being possessed. like, that's her rationalization, but the actual reason is much thornier.
ok so, start here: the reason mary is living in the bunker again is that she wants to be a part of her sort of adopted grandson's life. she misses her boys, little dean and baby sammy. jack is a kind of replacement for them. or, she wants him to be. she and dean do genuinely bond over coparenting jack, and she's happy to be part of his life.
but at the same time... mary has a deeply neurotic with being a mother (and really in the end with being a woman at all). because... she hates it! it's awful to her! and it's so hard! she doesn't want to stay up all night cleaning diapers and rocking away tears. she doesn't want to be trapped in the house all the time, with perfect makeup on for when her husband comes home. she doesn't want to circumscribe her thoughts to fit inside an issue of good housekeeping. and not only that, she's bad at it! when she tried, she constantly failed! the soup was from a can and the house was always a mess and sammy was always crying and she just couldn't get it right. she loved her boys, but they made her life a living hell. and she can't deal with it. not only did she fail as a woman and wife and mother, but she hated every step of the way so much that she didn't want to succeed. and this tortures her. she hates herself so much for this, and she can't even figure out what's wrong! like she doesn't understand why she can't just be a Normal Woman.
and then. and then there's kellycas. kellycas who is always freshly showered despite having a three month old and never looks exhausted and always seems cheerful and can always get the baby to stop crying and has probably never even once thought about drowning it in the bathtub. kellycas who is the Perfect Nightgown Mother that mary could never, ever be. and kellycas who, worst of all, seems to like it. and worst of all, cas isn't even a woman, and he's better at this than she ever was.
mary hates kelly. she doesn't hate cas, she doesn't know how to feel about him, but she projects her impulse towards feminine competition all over kelly. she can barely say two civil words to her.
and what's awful about this is that mary is comparing herself to an impossible standard. because like, yes, kelly and cas are a lot more cut out for parenthood than mary was because they both kind of chose this. they wanted it. mary only had children because it was expected of her. but also... they're cheating! not only do they have three other adults in the household ready and willing (and sometimes begging!) to help them, but cas is an angel! it's a lot easier to take care of an infant when you don't have to sleep! it's a lot easier to keep yourself looking presentable when you can do your hair with your grace! it's a lot easier to stay cheerful when you're incapable of getting hangry!
and so when cas is possessing mary, she swims in this background radiation of deep humiliation because she feels like he's judging her for her failed womanhood. and when he projects an image of himself, she usually sees kelly's body, not jimmy's, because she's had a lot more close contact with cas-as-kelly by this point, and this only makes things worse. so when cas possesses her, she just feels really bad in a way she can't unpack or articulate. so he doesn't do it very often.
