#emo castiel

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.

It’s my birthday, so I brought presents! This is an indulgent fic about the weird space between being “technically an adult” and actually feeling like one. (I still don’t feel like an adult half the time, even though by any reasonable measure, I very much am.)

This fic was born out of a conversation with one of my favorite people, @bethmints, plus our mutual love of early-2000s emo and the desire to see more emo Castiel fics.

Back in November, we were spitballing ideas for a bang, and I came up with Emo Cas. I liked the idea so much that literally the next day I messaged her, “So I’m working on my Emo Cas outline. This is all your fault.”

I was originally going to use this fic for a bang, then changed my mind. This is actually the second time I’ve done that with this same bang. 😂 The first idea was The Things We Learn to Live With. This was the second. The third (and final), you’ll see in June.

This fic is about figuring out who you are. The difference between growing up and growing older. How there's no magic line you cross where you suddenly become an adult. You just keep making choices, keep revising who you are, and then one day realize: 'oh. I guess this is adulthood.'

Posting plan: my goal is a chapter a week. I've got a lot of bangs and events coming up, so updates may pause on weeks when I’m posting for those, but you should still be well-fed fic-wise for quite awhile.