i would love to read more destiel fics where cas and sam have a friendship/interact. not sastiel fics, just fics where they actually know each other and maybe help each other help dean? idk i just want good sam representation. if you want to self-promote PLEASE do

I combed through my bookmarks and here are some recs with either good Sam & Cas interactions, or Sam interpretations that really stood out.

Bunkers My go-to for positive Sam representation and an all-around excellent fic. No exaggeration: I have read all 277K words at least 5 times! It's my post-finale comfort fic.

The Cambion Cantrip It’s not that there’s a ton of Sam in this, but he is very much Cas’s best friend too. I wrote a rec of this on my side blog.

Redux (@valleydean) Another one for good Sam representation and a great story. I’ve read this one twice. It’s a future fic and I love Sam’s family; no blurry wife here!

Truth & Despair (@shallowseeker) Here's where I start veering into the interesting Sam interpretations category. This is the fic that opened my eyes to the concept of (as the tag says) 'Sam is a little gremlin who misses important things'. This story really influenced my own interpretation of Sam and this flavor of oblivious Sam is a lot of fun—and not mean-spirited at all: our guy is just doing his best!

And Then You Get Back Up Again Fair warning, this is actually the opposite of positive Sam representation at the start—he tries to murder Cas so—but then he gets better. (You might even say he gets back up again! 😊) I have so much affection for this Sam, and never miss a chance to rec this story.

Two Blades Series From the same author as The Cambion Cantrip (you can’t go wrong with Maldoror_Chant!) In this fic, Cas doesn’t care really care about Sam except as he relates to Dean. It's not mean-spirited—to Cas, we are all Sam: his world is divided into two categories: Dean and not-Dean. The 3rd and 4th fics are Sam-centric with the 4th fic basically Cas helping with Dean give Sam's new boyfriend (Mick Davies believe it or not!) the shovel talk, and it’s hilarious! (You really need to read these in order but, trust me, you won't regret it!)

And it turns out that I'm not above a little self-promotion: here's my crack fic where Sam's the one in the dungeon with Cas in 15x18 That Awkward Moment When, and it makes me laugh every time I re-read it so enjoy.

:3c

concept for a canon divergence in season four where the siege of hell goes on too long, Dean becomes a demon, and Heaven & the Archangels are forced to try to salvage their apocalypse with a stand-in righteous man: John Winchester.

this’ll go on too long if I let it so bullet points.

• Borrowing the idea that the siege of hell was designed to fail, when Heaven/the archangels realize that Dean is a lost cause, they let the siege continue while they figure out a backup plan. Ultimately they pretend that the invasion force was always a distraction (hence why they were given false information) and Michael goes in to “save” John Winchester (freshly plucked from heaven with altered memories so he believes he never escaped hell) having waited long enough that the invasion force is reduced to a handful of angels who are less likely to have seen anything to contradict the official story.
• Castiel is one of the survivors, because while he started the siege in the thick of the fighting, after breaking open yet another stronghold where the Righteous Man was thought to be kept and finding it abandoned, he was distracted by The Demon.
• To Castiel, he was always The Demon. You would seldom hear him refer to him by any other name. In his many eyes he eclipsed and predominated the whole of his foul species.
• There is just something about this demon that compels Castiel to pursue it, to the point that he forgets his duty and his mission, everything is eclipsed by the need to hunt and kill this demon from the first moment it slips through his claws. And yet, paradoxically, he keeps letting it escape. The first few times are down to the demon’s unexpected cleverness, and of course, even after he stops underestimating it it occasionally manages to outsmart him. But all too often, Castiel leaves it openings, lets it slip away, prolongs the chase.
• Likewise, the Demon fails to truly escape him, even when it clearly could. While at first it lead him into traps and seemed to attempt to hamper him, after Castiel devastated the first few attempts, the strategy changed. Soon he was lead into ambushes sideways and backwards, startling the waiting demons and turning their planned surprise attack against them, and then further away from the main battlefield, where the Demon twisted nimbly through infernal architecture that Castiel had to barrel through, burning and shredding it with wings and grace and claw to come out the other side and find that the Demon had always slowed enough to still be caught. Always stayed to watch. 
• Castiel knows on some level that they are playing with each other, but he’d rather ignore that in favour of indulging in the wild destructive abandon of it. Because while he is going to kill the demon eventually (and eat him, he decided very early on. It provided very little tactical advantage to dispose of him that way, aside from the obvious applications of psychological warfare, but he had quickly decided that that would be how this chase ended, the idea of having the demon inside him was too compelling to resist) the allure of that eventual culmination is matched only by the desire to have this back and forth continue into perpetuity. Castiel is for the first time in his existence confronted with the fact that he can’t have his cake and eat it too.
• Dean, because the demon is obviously Dean, is a little less aware of what’s going on. Sure he knows he’s playing, but Castiel’s true form, aside from being so bright and so burning that even getting close feels like it peels layers off his skin and boils his insides, resembles nothing he’s ever seen before and certainly nothing that could be called a person. Sure he thinks he understands what it’s doing, can predict it a little bit, and he thinks that it might be letting him get away on purpose. But he might as well be anthropomorphizing a thunder storm. It’s a burning vortex of fire and eyes and claws and the impression of wings, it takes him a while to really be sure it’s something that has a mind of its own, and not just some arbitrary force of nature. If it’s playing with him, then it’s playing with him the way a cat toys with a mouse, and if he’s not careful, when it gets bored this is gonna end the exact same way.
• But holy hell (heh) is it ever worth it.
• Dean, like most new demons, has a vicious hatred of hell. Few of them grow out of that, but most of them do grow into some sort of home team pride that compels them to defend it even though they all readily admit it sucks ass. Dean isn’t there yet. Dean was some kind of Holy Wrecking Ball the size of a building barrelling after him and cutting down everything and everyone in its path. It’s not long at all before he realizes he can lead it to every asshole who ever wronged him and through every twisted cavern that he has a particular spiteful dislike for and watch it burn and gobble them all up. The first uncomplicated experience with arousal he’s had in decades was when whatever this thing is shredded its way through his old torture chamber and absentmindedly snapped the wrack under one of its many massive clawed appendages. Sure it was a fear boner, but that was just a little bit of spice, comparatively speaking. He’s going to indulge in whatever mix of awe and terror and horniness watching it destroy all his comfortable nightmares inspires for as long as he can get away with it, thank you very much.
  
• So Cas and Dean chase each other around hell until the retreat sounds, and Cas almost doesn’t go, before he realizes he’s genuinely considering disregarding orders and snaps out of it, joining the retreat and very much not killing Dean, because he’s been called back and doesn’t have time to continue to chase him and for no other reason.
• Dean makes his way out of hell on his coattails because angels in hell tend to punch holes in the world around them just by being there, and following the retreat is a great way for young demons who nobody wants out unsupervised to get topside without permission.
  
• Dean, who’s still fresh enough to remember his old life and even sort of care about it a little, and has heard enough snippets about the upcoming apocalypse to be concerned about his brother, goes to find Sam.
• Sam gets to juggle his Demon Brother and his recently resurrected father, the latter of which cannot know about the former, for obvious reasons. Also his Demon girlfriend, who he is wary about letting either of the others know about for similar reasons. He’s having a bad time.
• Cas has no reason to be on Winchester wrangling duty because he has no prior connection with them and no social skills. He doesn’t get involved with their end of things until Dean introduces him.
  
• The first time he sees Dean again he recognizes him instantly and like immediately slams him up against the wall. Dean catches on quick to who and what Cas is and goes “Hey there did you miss me?” All wink wink nudge nudge and Cas, surprising both of them says “Yes.”
• Of course he can’t play with Dean right now because he has important work to do. And since he’s decided that the solution to his problem of wanting to kill Dean but also not wanting him to be dead is to kill him slowly over a period of thousands of years to ensure he’s satisfied by the process (and then eat what’s left), he really can’t take the time to do that now. (He does not say that last part in so many words.)
• Somehow Dean manages to finagle this into being allowed to help him prevent the apocalypse. This can only go well.
  
• Dean is aware that Cas wants to fuck him, and is willing to use that for his own ends but also just thinks it’s fun and funny and is actively trying to entice him into doing so. However he has some misconceptions about angels and thus believes that Cas knows he wants to fuck him and is just repressed and attempting to restrain himself. In reality Cas has no idea he wants to fuck Dean, only that he’s filled with cavernous want, and the only solution that comes to mind is to kill and eat him. When Dean finally references sex in clear enough terms for Cas to understand he goes “We can do that?” And goes for it wherever they happen to be at the time. Cas has no idea what restraint is and this version of Dean is not about to teach him.
• There’s Winchester family drama in there too but I’m going to bed now so I’ll figure that out later
  

Things that got deleted or never aired

My phone keeps eating my quality holy moly😭

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❝ Prison. Upstairs. All the torture, twice the self-righteousness. ❞

I think this very much has to do with “heaven’s persuasion” as Cas calls it at the time. 4.20 “The Rapture” starts with Cas having learned that heaven will intentionally start the apocalypse and kill millions of humans in the process. He is so horrified by this that he decides to rebel. He enters Dean’s dreams, but says even Dean’s dreams aren’t a safe enough place for him to reveal the secrets he’s harboring, so he sends Dean to meet him at another location, and when Sam and Dean arrive there, the whole place is torn to bits. Cas fought multiple angels tooth and nail to avoid capture so he could tell Dean the truth—that the angels were going to start the apocalypse and let them all die. However, he was captured before he could pass on his knowledge and then he was brainwashed back into compliance with heaven’s orders.

One of the things I think it’s clear the higher ups told Castiel as part of the brainwashing process is that humans dying just means they go to heaven and live forever in peace where they are better off than on earth, so why even fight the apocalypse? Silly Castiel! There’s no reason to fret! Humans dying is a good thing! It’s a mercy killing! So when Cas returns at the end of 4.20, he is operating under this new worldview and the results are chilling.

CASTIEL
Of course we keep our promises. Of course you have our gratitude. You served us well. Your work is done. It’s time to go home now. Your real home. You’ll rest forever in the fields of the Lord. Rest now, Jimmy.

JIMMY
No. Claire?

CASTIEL
She’s with me now. She’s chosen. It’s in her blood, as it was in yours.

JIMMY
Please, Castiel. Me, just take me. Take me, please.

CASTIEL
I wanna make sure you understand. You won’t die or age. If this last year was painful for you, picture a hundred, a thousand more like it.

JIMMY
It doesn’t matter. You take me. Just take me.

CASTIEL
As you wish.

Cas acknowledges the suffering he’s put Jimmy through and in his own way, is trying to show compassion in this moment, but his thought process is absolutely alien. He sees the compassionate choice toward his vessel as 1) letting him die instead of healing him (drink the Kool-Aid type shit) 2) possessing his little girl to “spare” him the suffering of possession. He doesn’t really seem to understand why Jimmy would beg to be possessed again instead Claire. He’s completely lost perspective on human connection to the point he can’t grasp a parent putting their own child’s well-being above their own no matter the personal cost. This is another function of heavenly brainwashing/the cult mentality. The angels have a hierarchy in which everything is (allegedly) for their father and they sacrifice for him, not the other way around. They, in turn, intend to slaughter humans in droves for their own peace because they see humans as beneath them in the hierarchy. Cas has been re-programmed to believe this is how things should be, so he absolutely cannot understand in that moment why possessing Claire instead of Jimmy is an absolutely horrifying proposition to her father and not a form of mercy in Jimmy’s eyes at all. It doesn’t compute with brainwashed!Cas’s understanding of hierarchy.

We see Cas’s brainwashing in regards to death and ascension into heaven as the ultimate mercy again—two episodes later in 4.22:

DEAN
You know what’s real? People, families – that’s real. And you’re gonna watch them all burn?

CASTIEL
What is so worth saving? I see nothing but pain here. I see inside you. I see your guilt, your anger, confusion. In paradise, all is forgiven. You’ll be at peace. Even with Sam.

Note that Cas clearly didn’t feel this way before he got “sent back to Bible camp”. He fought violently to reach Dean and tell him the truth before he was captured.

So, it's been established that Cas doesn't like

Well.

Neither does:

HEY.

And neither does:

it will never not drive me crazy that the main knot of conflict in the Dean&Cas relationship is pure misinterpretation of each others’ intent and needs and priorities as opposed to any real conflict of belief.

like over and over Dean will run the very explicit complicated intense mix of emotions he wants to express through 7000 implicit ingrained filters in his head and then through gritted teeth spit it out as “man whatever none if it matters I need you (to just be here in the shit with me and love me and believe in me and trust me enough to keep both you and our family safe while we work [insert apocalyptic problem of the week] out together)"

and Cas will hear this and go "naturally yes of course. you need me (to get the fuck out of here and be useful by utilizing the specific skillset I have in order to invisibly prove my knight-like loyalty and worth to you + the fact that I will not fuck up like I have in the past. and I must do this by lone-wolf martyring myself in order to fix the [insert apocalyptic problem of the week] away from your eyes until I can finally come back and deliver that win to you like a dog who's just caught some game)"

and then they'll both nod and smile and go okay yes good glad we understand each other! and then proceed to break each others' hearts over a high-stakes miscommunication. and they do this over and over once per season for 10 years straight and THEN. they give them a fucking kid for some reason and it just makes it so so much worse

juts found this in my drafts from three years ago comparing mac from always sunny, gustavo fring from breakingbad, and castiel supernaturals. i don’t know where i was going with this. i’ve never seen supernatural

How. Do I know dean is gay well. Choose your fighter

• Jared padalecki can give half hearted endorsements to gender and sexuality sam headcanons. Jensen ackles cannot. Because. Well
• When cas was going to come out by saying dean winchester I am in love with you they said ooooooh idk we better run this past jensen first. Because. Well
• Lucifer who has only ever impersonated dead wives and girlfriends impersonates dead cas to dean becauzzzzzzzzz. Well
• When the cw paid people to ran the numbers on what People thought about dean being gay becauae. Because. Because. Well
• They brought back a sam love interest for the final season and ended up discarding her in favor of a different anonymous woman while dean sobbed on his knees about being sorry about letting cas leave. Before he dies a bachelor and goes to heaven where he’s a bachelor and the only smile he cracks is at cas helped because. WELL
• Guillermo Rojas said well yeah if you start looking at the show it’s obvious dean’s gay and in love with cas because. W

Dead, beaten, tortured, humiliated, faced with the most powerful ancient being, yet still annoying, still 100% bitch.