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S8 - brothers-in-arms?
So, I was actually fairly excited about Jensen’s semi-recent quote about how Dean&Benny was exploring a ‘brother-in-arms’ relationship that the show hadn’t really done before – I’m pretty sure I reblogged it when it happened, but now I feel like expanding on my view of why I liked Jensen implying that Dean and Cas are decidedly not a 'brother-in-arms’ situation.
First off, what makes Dean and Benny brothers-in-arms – they spent weeks/months together in a dangerous (war-like) situation where they had to rely on each other and where they shared a common goal (getting out of Purgatory). So, why do I feel like this is not a sentence that could sum up Dean and Castiel?
I’ll begin with Season 4.
Castiel started out a parallel to Dean – they’re both dedicated soldiers who follow their (deadbeat) dad’s orders. But they’re not soldiers who are on the same side: Dean is Team!Human and Castiel starts out Team!Angel. Team!Angel got Dean out of Hell to serve their own purposes and Castiel is the agent that they use most often in S4 to attempt to accomplish this – he’s the point man when it comes to Dean.
So, Cas isn’t just a parallel to Dean: he’s also Dean’s Ruby. Cas and Ruby have the same goals – they’re each trying to get 'their guy’ to play on their team. The difference between Castiel and Ruby comes in the last episode of S4: while both Cas and Ruby feel affection for their charge, Cas is convinced by Dean’s arguments and flips on Team!Angel, while Ruby never wavers from her loyalty to Team!Demon. She is, as she herself says, the most loyal of all. Castiel, on the other hand, becomes a traitor to his team in order to help Dean.
Season 5 is the only possible season where Dean and Castiel might have forged a 'brothers-in-arms’ relationship – a place where we see that it has happened in one possible version of Dean/Cas is 5x04’s “The End”. Those two are soldiers in the same war and they both die for the cause.
However, back in the present/past, Dean and Castiel are on separate journeys as the season begins: while they both want to stop the Apocalypse, Dean wants to do it by killing Lucifer and Castiel wants to find God. In 5x10, Dean’s plan fails. In 5x16, Castiel’s plan fails.
That leaves 5x17-5x22 as the time period when Dean and Castiel were working basically for the same immediate goals. Except, of course, that Dean’s next plan is to try to say 'yes’ to Michael and Castiel objects rather strenuously to it. Okay, so we’ve got two episodes (since Cas isn’t in 19/20) – 5x21, 5x22. That’s it. Most of that time is occupied with dealing with Sam’s plan with Dean and Cas separated most of the time.
In Season 6, Cas decides to make plans to protect Dean and cuts Dean out of them. He does this in the belief that Dean has earned peace; he continues because he doesn’t want Dean to find out the truth – Crowley says that it’s because Cas can keep believing that he’s good only if Dean believes it and there’s an element of truth in that, I think. At the end of the season, they have opposite goals and Cas is so desperate to keep Dean out of things that he does something that might have ended up being unforgivable – breaking Sam’s wall, using Sam’s pain as a way to try to keep Dean safe and out of the way.
In Season 7, of course, Cas is 'dead’ for most of the season and Dean is dealing with the mess Castiel left behind – Levis, Sam seeing Lucifer, and his own aching grief. When Castiel comes back, he explicitly refuses to fight alongside Dean at first. While Dean does eventually coax him to coming along and Cas is impulsive in his instinctive defense of Dean, we see that again, in Purgatory, Castiel cuts Dean out of things in an attempt to protect him.
Dean, on the other hand, treats Castiel a bit like a quest object (verging on Damsel-in-Distress) in Purgatory and can’t handle the idea that Cas would choose to stay there rather than go with him, so much so that he rewrites the events in his own mind so that it’s not Cas’s fault after all. It’s not that the object of his quest didn’t want him; it’s that he failed to be strong enough. Post-Purgatory, Dean is reflexively protective of Cas – in ways that can come across as almost patronizing at times, which immediately gets a counter push from Cas (think “you’re not strong enough”) – and he’s also more gentle and open with him (in private).
There was a time, immediately post-S5, when Dean and Cas could have gone in the direction of a brothers-in-arms relationship, but when Cas decided to protect Dean rather than treat him like a fellow soldier, that option was taken off the table. Instead, s6-8 have been spent forging Dean&Cas into quite a different kind of relationship.
Whether that relationship is 'merely’ a very intimate friendship or a subtextual romance is something that the show is currently leaving up to each viewer to decide.