Dean… Everybody you love leaves you in the end.

dean calling for help

i just want to spitball something here, feel free to add to it!

dean winchester has called both crowley and castiel for help many times. with crowley its a summoning/phone call, and with castiel it’s praying/phone call. 

by the end of season 12 (spoilers) dean says he has faith in both crowley and cas - and why not? they have both helped out multiple times. 

whats interesting to me is that dean and crowley have a sort of love/hate relationship where crowley is useful to the winchesters and sometimes helps them with no ultimate motive (ex. saving cas in season 12) and yet … we never get these scenes with crowley

( i own none of the gifs! )

of course, you could say that crowley is a demon and cas is an angel so of course dean would rather call cas over crowley. but …. would he? from the introduction of angels and from what we’ve seen - angels can be just as corrupt as demons. and vice versa, crowley by the end of season 12 just ends up helping the winchesters and not doing anything drastically evil. he was even killing demons himself!

idk i just love comparing dean/crowley relationship to dean/cas its so interesting!

@tinkdw @elizabethrobertajones @amwritingmeta

I remember the week before 9x23 (it was like… my 5th in fandom or something… lol) and there was a lot of discussion of this because Dean went and summoned Crowley to get him out of the dungeon, and comparing it to how in another time he would have been (not locked up by his family INCLUDING CAS in the first place) calling Cas for help by praying, but instead he’s summoning Crowley.

This was also in the time before anyone was 100% certain that Dean/Crowley wasn’t just more teasing, like, those last few episodes before it suddenly sprinted past DeanCas to the finish line and went canon first when season 10 started :P Pfft. Anyway, I do remember people making quite a lot of that  moment as a sort of dark mirror to how Dean does stuff with Cas.

I feel like the way he interacts with them is a mirror in the way he communicates and the reason why they interact, what it means for Dean, want v need.

With Crowley he begrudgingly calls him for help when he NEEDS it and doesn’t particularly WANT to be around him.

With Cas he begrudgingly DOESN’T call him when he WANTS to be around him (sublimation) and also calls when he NEEDS help, often using it as an excuse and hiding behind this the fact that he WANTS Cas around.

eg 12x19 - we lost Kelly because you were gone, but also he’s been out of his mind with worry and in pain, reverting to coping mechanisms etc because Cas was missing and not answering his calls. In his messages he stressed he NEEDED Cas, as a tool.

Then he reinforced it in the whole bunker scenes portion of 12x19. It was all about NEEDING Cas as a TOOL, Cas who already feels the Angels just want him for his hands and was useless as a tool to saving Sam and Dean in 12x09 and letting Lucifer in… Yes Dean said keep the gift but otherwise it was all about Cas being gone, being worried yes but mostly saying he was missed as a tool, the first lines and the last lines he says to him, outside of the gift thing are about Cas helping them get Kelly, how he failed in not being there before and can make it up to them by helping now. It’s the reverse of a shit sandwich, it’s 2 “needs” v 1 “want” and that ratio ain’t gonna cut it anymore with Cas in the depressed state he is in and feeling like even when he’s needed only as a tool he still fails.

Dean is hiding his feelings, heck Sam was more overtly happy to see Cas for the sake of Cas than Dean was if you just look at the words he used. I know he said “we’re family” in 11x23 and 12x12 BUT he hasn’t made it clear HOW and both times Cas looked saddened, both times it felt like Cas was being “family-zoned” and Dean was not being fully honest and Dean keeps using NEED (as a tool, not a need that equals want and love) as an excuse.

I can’t help but wonder if in his messages he has said he missed Cas and WANTED to speak to Cas, for CAS and not out of NEED for the case, if Cas might have answered sooner or just let him know he was ok…

Anyway, back to the difference in communication thing, not that Dean really dislikes Crowley these days, of course he’s grown fonder of him since he’s become more human and their summer of love… but yeah IMO the way he communicates with them and the opposite mirror of need +/ wanting to spend time when them is definitely there.

I still think part of the reason Dean continues to couch his “wants” as “needs” regarding Cas is because no matter how often in the last couple of years that WE’VE seen Dean going out of his mind when Cas has been in trouble (the back half of s11 after he said yes to Lucifer, the middle bit of s12 when he kept leaving to search for Kelly and Dagon, and then disappeared entirely to heaven without a word for weeks while Dean had no proof that Cas hadn’t already been booped out of existence by Dagon… even after Dean explained that he wasn’t angry about this but worried in 12.10). Cas hasn’t really seen this aspect of Dean for himself. All he sees is the stuff Tink mentioned ^^.

So of course Dean is afraid to REALLY put himself out there. If the idea that Dean’s worried about him isn’t enough to get Cas to reply to a freaking text message or voice mail, how much worse would it be for Dean to tell Cas he just needs (wants) him to stick around because he wants him to stick around, and then have Cas disappear again anyway?

So Dean “Abandonment Issues” Winchester says the “safe” thing. He knows Cas needs to feel useful, to feel like he has a purpose, so in Dean’s logic, he’s at least trying to offer Cas that. 

But while Dean does get Cas’s reasons for running off and trying to fix what he believes are his own mistakes, he hasn’t really shared what he’s going through with Dean. And every time Dean’s started this conversation with Cas about being family (like in 11.23), Cas hasn’t exactly seemed enthused with the idea. The Beer Run conversation always felt to me like Dean sort of easing in to it, testing the waters (and like Lizbob said, it was the end of the world, there were valid reasons for holding off on Major Life-Altering Confessions there). But then he was saved by the bell (or Sam’s phone call) from having to say anything more.

Miscommunication, on both sides. It’s not just Dean’s fault for not being emotionally honest here. It takes two to not-tango…

And Cas and Crowley (alongside all the other parallels between them this season), by the end of s12 they were both trying to fix the same mistake– Cas having said yes to Lucifer in 11.10 and becoming his vessel, and Crowley having hijacked Lucifer in 12.08 and shoving him into his own vessel. They both thought they could use Lucifer for their own ends, and they were both (in the end) proven wrong. Hubris is a terrible thing.

While Dean did include Crowley (sometimes) on the list of people he had faith in, it’s a little more situational than it is with Cas. He wants Cas around on general principle. Now he just needs to convey that to Cas…

Yep exactly ^^^

I said this a while ago and I'm going to shamelessly repeat it here and forever until it's fixed:

“Cas needs to learn to just STAY WITH DEAN DESPITE DUTY TRYING TO TAKE HIM ELSEWHERE and Dean needs to learn to ASK CAS TO STAY WITHOUT AN EXCUSE, then we will start getting on the right track.”