More about Cas and the bunker

7faerielights:

dotthings:

intelligentshipper:

dotthings:

While Cas hasn’t been around that much so far this season, I’ve noticed any time he is, that he comes and goes in the bunker without it being any kind of big deal. There’s no Event to Cas showing up.

It’s a safe assumption that Cas is around a whole lot more than we’re shown on screen. Yes I know, SPN needs to actually show it. But people are quick to slap the label on this that “Cas isn’t there” but he is. The bunker is now his stable point home base. He comes and goes. How many times do Dean and Cas sit down in that kitchen and it’s no big deal, or Dean goes to the bunker library and Cas is just…there…looking at some book. We know for sure Dean and Cas have conversations we don’t get to see because at some point, Cas told him about evil Cas from the AU because Dean knows about it. There are other examples.

We do need to get to see far more of that on screen. But in the build of Cas’s life right now, there has been a whole slow arcing over time about Cas in relation to the bunker, from the first awkward visits, to it being a space Cas only went to in a time of dire need of shelter, to Cas referring to it as “home” to the current era thing which started in early S12 where nobody is at all surprised that Cas is there. 

The fact that no one wrote what Cas was doing when Jack returned to the bunker and Cas didn’t, after Cas and Jack had been on a hunting trip together, but there is no mystery where Cas is. Team Free Will are in constant contact this season. So Cas just comes back to the bunker as he pleases, checks in, goes to do whatever thing he feels that needs doing.

I don’t think Cas is missing in Dean’s life, as part of his home, we just aren’t seeing their interactions and I don’t think, even off-screen, they’ve had any heartfelt discussions they need to have.

But to dismiss this as just “Cas isn’t there” is overlooking how this is being presented and filmed and written by canon. Not everything has to be bludgeoned over viewers heads, there is such a thing as context and inference.

We know for certain Cas has the bunker as his home base and is there frequently. There is zero ambiguity about that from canon.

I’m going to raise another point here while in complete agreement.

I’m curious.

Where do people think Cas stays if NOT in the bunker?

He can’t go back to heaven (yet; there’s always a plot hook about that but in general, it’s very clearly not his base of operations.) 

Do they think he just stands under a street light “wait(ing) here” then?

Even during times Sam and Dean were gone, such as the season 12 imprisonment incident, Cas was there. The bunker was the safe space to act and think, but without them, without any hint of where to find them, it was painted grim, dark, and lonely. Cas sat alone as a low, fading beacon of hope, face in his hands in frustration and I may argue near-tears, because the bunker did not have the life it needed as a HOME without them.

The bunker is absolutely Cas’ place to go back to. He just has other benefits, like not needing sleep or food so he comes and goes for longer periods and takes up more things outside the doors. On occasion we get a glimpse of what those are. Tada.

This exactly. Do people think Cas just goes into an interdimensional fold with his downtime? When we keep seeing him around the bunker on a casual basis? He knows where they keep stuff. I’ve also noticed a lot of Cas bunker scenes have been in the kitchen. It’s his safe haven now, his home, someplace he touchstones before wandering off again, as he does, because that’s still a component of the character (for contractual reasons that the writers have worked in as an arc).

SPN has given reasons for Cas’s disappearances where he simply can’t get back to the bunker. S13 locked him in a demon dungeon cell. But short of something that dire, it’s being made abundantly clear by canon the bunker is his home base and Sam and Dean just assume it will be.

This isn’t hand-waving or headcanon. This is what’s being shown to us on screen. Inference based on things canon has plainly shown is canon. It’s not not-canon. It’s season 14 and the bunker is Cas’s home and he hasn’t run off or vanished or abandoned or not been there for anybody. (He may wind up separated from his TFW family this season but as of now…no).

The kitchen is absolutely Cas’s safe space. That’s where he retreated to when he was possessed by Lucifer, after all. I think the kitchen means home and family to him. It’s where the more intimate conversation happen in the bunker. The War Room is for strategizing, the Library for research but the kitchen is where they talk about themselves. If the bunker were a person, the kitchen would be its heart.