For @samprincesschester, who asked for Sam, Dean, Gadreel, and “closure” for this prompt post. I’m sorry, I’m sure you wanted Sam & Dean closure for Gadreel, but that’s something that eludes me, so I’m afraid all I’ve got is Gadreel and making things worse.
Heaven’s prison had been narrow, a strait, unendurable corridor of time, stripped of the loops and folds and points his Father had created His angels to travel. That had been punishment indeed. Gadreel misses his brief guardianship of the wonders of Eden, he misses his even briefer return to Earth, despite his erroneous choices, and he misses the moment of certainty, sacrifice, kinship that ended it all. But this Empty with its featureless expanse is at least no prison. It is unconfined. It is not terrible. Gadreel is content.
He nods gravely to the shades of his brothers and sisters when he encounters them, but they don’t speak. It’s not that they shun him. He’s achieved that redemption. It’s just that there’s nothing to say. Even the arrival of two human souls excites no remark. The Empty is knowledge without contemplation. Everyone knows why Sam and Dean Winchester are here. It was a reasonable step. They need to be outside the reach of purpose, anyone’s purposes. The Empty is purposeless.
That decision must have been handed down from Death’s court. God would have gone with something personal and dramatic, reward, punishment, both.
But while God is free to be arbitrary in his partiality and Death in his justice, Gadreel is bound. Not by a prison, now, but by an obligation. He goes to find Sam and Dean.
“You!” says Dean. Sam is silent.
“I owe you a debt,” says Gadreel. He had betrayed Dean, with whom he had a bargain. Perhaps he had also betrayed Sam, even while he healed him.
“What do you want?” says Dean. He sounds angry, unfriendly. His emotions were always gaudy and easy to manipulate. The Empty hasn’t yet bled him grey.
Sam just watches.
“I want you to remember me kindly,” says Gadreel, because it’s the truth. Sam and Dean’s memories don’t mean as much as those of his brothers and sisters, but they still matter for his honor.
Sam stirs.
“You helped us,” he says, “I’m, uh, to be perfectly honest I’d rather not think about the whole thing at all. But I know you helped us. You don’t have to, like, apologize. Really. I’ve done stuff. I’m not out for revenge or anything.”
“I didn’t think you were,” says Gadreel.
“Why don’t you shove off, then?” says Dean. “No hard feelings, no offense, whatever, but you heard Sam. You’re not someone we want around here.”
“I apologize,” says Gadreel, though Sam had asked him not to. But Dean has a claim as well. “I’ll withdraw.”
And he does, to a careful distance. That encounter was less than satisfactory. But it’s hard to say what more he could have done. After all, he can’t sacrifice his life again. He doesn’t have the option of closure.
But he can still manipulate mortal memory.
The Empty has none of the warm pockets of heaven, or the cruel concentrations of hell. Sam and Dean’s memories stretch all around them on a level plain, none more important than another, without the inflections of landscape. But there are some that they would prefer not to have. And those are also things Gadreel would as soon see expunged from the record.
It will be a kindness — Sam has said he prefers not to remember.
Gadreel sets to his work of unmaking. He had charge of a garden, once. He still remembers how to weed.
You can whine all day about how sam stans are really angry and bitter, or about how we’re all taking this too personally, but I’m just gonna go ahead and say it:
An entire fandom vilifying a character for leaving an abusive home-life, spinning that act of agency as a betrayal or abandonment, affects me personally.
People loathing a character because he was an addict, as though that too was some kind of betrayal of trust, affects me personally.
Being told by the masses that someone shouldn’t stand up for himself, should be more considerate about the feelings of the person who violated his bodily autonomy, affects me personally.
Treating a character’s mental illness as a joke,affects me personally.
Dismissing physical abuse as ‘tussles’ and ‘banter’ and ‘not a big deal’, affects me personally.
Seeing an entire fandom vilify a character for trying to make a healthy choice by trying to move on and build something for himself, affects me personally.
And having to hear over and over that a character I identify with needs to ‘get over it’ after he’s been abused, berated and stripped of his bodily autonomy MULTIPLE times, affects me personally.
So yes. I take it personally. I take it really damn personally. I probably take it too personally. But don’t assume that I don’t have a damn good reason.
Hmmmm. This reminds me strongly of Sam’s old coping mechanism… pressing on a serious wound to his hand to ground himself in reality. So, how much of the strong, “I got it” Sam is his usual strategy of fleeing into an appearance of health?
Look, I haven’t seen so many episodes but am I correct here? One episode ago Lucifer told Sam that he’d redeem himself for his pesky moments of independent thought if he’d stay with Lucifer forever and in the last episode, Sam apologized for his pesky moments of independent thought and Dean said it’s fine because what really matters is that they’re together forever?
Like is this what happened here?
Because if so, that is BLATANT.
Seriously blatant. And this is just one episode after the mid-season finale, when Sam was lured back into the cage because ~it’s what I’m supposed to do and ~he made me feel at peace. Like……?????
mmMMM!
hopefully this also means sam gets to escape this cage as well with a resounding no. and the manipulation is so insidious, and so precise: berating sam for not doing/being something and then acting surprised when sam reveals himself resigned to the life/fate that he has been browbeaten into.
i think of the last conversation in 11.11 with that scene in 10.23 and i want to vomit.
Interesting thought, particularly since he’s still being surrounded by cage imagery.
Ok, seriously though, where does this idea that Sam was made to feel ‘important’ in his childhood come from. Please point me to one piece of canon evidence that says that Sam felt this, that Sam was made to feel that he had value or that his wants and thoughts and feelings were valued and important, please just one.
This is a child who thought he was dirty and unclean at a very, very young age – it didn’t just come from no-where, Sam didn’t make this up out of his head and I don’t buy that he ‘sensed’ the demon blood, this was a feeling that came from the environment in which he was raised.
And when this is then paired with so he still values himself (because someone who says “I’m the least of you” really sounds like someone who thinks they have value!) and “he takes care of himself” – like, does he? Because I’m fairly certain Sam really, really doesn’t….
Just….I’m sorry, but stuff like this makes me want to vomit…
It’s complicated and messy, I think. There’s a sense in which you could say that Sam and Dean were both made to feel important in their childhood, but in opposite and in both cases destructive ways. Dean had a job – looking after his brother – he was also a participant in the family secrets and the family mission. That is, in a warped way, a kind of importance. But not only was he given a completely inappropriate level of responsibility for a young child, he was also instrumentalized. He came to feel that he was his job, that he was “Daddy’s blunt instrument” in ways that feed into both his later self-identification as a depersonalized killer and the ways his relationship with Sam get twisted by defining Sam as his job rather than an equal and autonomous person. (ETA: and what happened with Lisa and Ben shows that this isn’t just a problem that obtains in his relationship with Sam; he extends the internalized model to familial relationships formed in adulthood.)
As for Sam, I think, again in a warped way, being the object of ‘protection’ (at this point in SPN I can’t seem to type that word without scare quotes) is a kind of importance in the family structure, but more destructive than constructive for self-worth. Sacrifice is an apt later illustration of that pattern: trying to affirm someone’s worth with “I do all these things of which you are the object” at once positions them at the center of something and denies their intrinsic value. And the sense of unclean otherness, whether it came from some perception of demon blood or from John’s suspicions about Sam’s place in the supernatural drama surrounding the family (I don’t think it makes a huge difference which it is, and it can be both; SPN is fantasy, its metaphors are literalized) also stages Sam as a central figure, but being the dangerous one or the freak (the one who in canon time becomes the one who by John’s rules might have to be put down) isn’t exactly an affirming importance.
I do think that Dean’s mediating position in the family structure was real, and that it did involve an element of being a buffer between Sam and John. The thing about that structure, though, is that Dean was also a conductor and mediator of the abusive structures of the family. THIS IS ABSOLUTELY NOT SOMETHING FOR WHICH DEAN SHOULD BE BLAMED; HE WAS A CHILD, IT WAS ABUSE OF HIM AS WELL AS OF SAM. But when he was thrust into the position of caretaker, while it did mean that Sam had someone giving him care, it also meant that the care Sam was getting was both only that which a child could provide and only that which a child whose primary model of parenting was John Winchester could provide. It’s an uncomfortable truth that child!Dean’s caretaking often echoes John’s. John abandons his kids; Dean leaves Sam alone (in the Something Wicked flashback, in the AVSC flashback, in the pattern of dropping him off at Plucky’s). Dean was a participant in gaslighting Sam about the truth of his life. (Again, not something for which Dean, a child, is ethically accountable, but it’s still a part of Sam’s formative experience.) Kid!Dean gets angry and physical with kid!Sam when Sam mentions Mary in the AVSC flashback. And there’s a lot of evidence (Bugs, for example) that Dean backed up rather than challenging John’s behavior to Sam. The ways in which Dean has become more and more John-like in many ways in his dealings with Sam in canon time are deeply rooted in their childhood patterns.
I would say that Sam developed some impulses of healthy self-care, though he also has rifts of catastrophic lack of self-worth and self-destruction. Being positioned as the outsider from whom secrets were kept within the family undermined him in a lot of ways (and it’s significant that his story both within and beyond the family often echoes the motif of having his sense of reality radically compromised), but it did also give him a kind of perspective and an impulse to question and investigate that stood him in good stead in striking out from the family pattern in healthy ways, though undertows within and without are always pulling him back. But I wouldn’t say that makes him lucky. People can get certain strengths from traumatic experience (Dean as well as Sam; Dean would never have survived purgatory without that ability to form small, cohesive us-against-the-world bondings that is very much related to the John Winchester model of family), but trauma is still a fundamentally destructive thing.
Yes! I agree, wholeheartedly. And long ago I agreed in many, many, many words. 😛
I’ve seen lots of speculation about the state of Dean’s soul. What does the bond with The Darkness mean who’s in the driver seat of his destiny. Like Castiel and the Attack Dog curse, he is a “puppet” under someone else’s control? I have to wonder if no soul among the members of Team Free Will is untouched.
We saw this:
and then this:
Souls escaping from a cage, huh? We’re definitely being teased with something. There’s the definitely the threat of Lucifer and Michael escaping from the imprisonment.
But I had to ask myself, when was the last time we saw snarky Sam, without a filter?
Was it here?
When was the last time we saw Sam indulge in a one-night stand?
Numbers were exchanged, or at least the attempt was made.
So, whose chain is being yanked, and who is doing the yanking?
Hearseeno 