rats are like the rats of the world

The original seed was emo Cas, the music, and the nostalgia of it all. Then the spine became a story about the liminal space between being an adult and feeling like one.

Cas walks into The Bunker telling himself he’s grown while lying to his parents so he can leave the house. He’s performing adulthood in front of Dean, Gabriel, and everyone else, trying so hard to be seen as older, cooler, desirable, certain. Meanwhile, he is very much eighteen and figuring himself out in real time. Who he is. What he wants. What parts of himself are performance and what parts are real.

And then Dean’s POV complicated all of it, because that’s one of my favorite things to do with close third-person POV: reframe what came before. You only know what the POV character knows. You don’t know what you don’t know.

For the first half of the fic, Cas thinks Dean has it together, and because Cas thinks that, we believe it too. Then we get Dean’s POV and realize Dean is also a mess, just a different version. He’s older. He’s responsible. He owns the venue. He knows how to do the job. But he doesn’t see the good he’s doing. He doesn’t understand that Open Mic Night matters, or that giving local bands a stage matters, or that paying attention to what some eighteen-year-old kid said about music matters.

He thinks he’s just doing the work.

And then Cas chooses him.

Over and over, Cas chooses him.

Dean keeps waiting for Cas to want something bigger. Something that makes more sense than a bartender. But Cas knows what he wants. He figured that out a long time ago. It just took Dean longer to believe him.

So yes, this is about that middle place between adulthood and feeling like one. But it also became about the things we don’t see in ourselves. The good we dismiss as routine. The way some people are better at faking stability than others. The way sometimes being loved means having someone call you on your bullshit and stay anyway.

I’m apparently not ready to let go of these versions of Dean and Cas yet, so I do have a few timestamp ideas. Subscribe if you want to be notified when those go up.

Thank you for being here. This story ended up resonating with more people than I expected, and I’m really grateful for everyone who read, commented, reminisced, or let themselves get tricked by the nostalgia.