Waking Life

Dean has weird dreams sometimes.

In the dreams, he's always in Hell. He knows, he can feel it: that gnawing in him to cut something open, to hear screaming and let it drown out his own, let all his pain float away as he tears someone to shreds. It's dream logic, of course: one minute he's watching himself from a distance, the next he's back in his body. Sometimes he's even looking up into his own sunken eyes. He always wakes up just before he feels himself tearing into his stomach.

That part doesn't bother him all that much, though…and how fucked up does that make him? It's when he's watching himself that it freaks him out. He feels this horrible sense of dread every time, this stabbing certainty as he looks on that he is not going to be able to do what he was sent here to do.

It makes no sense, and the feeling follows Dean for hours after he wakes up, clenching his stomach into knots.

He doesn't tell anyone about the dreams. Bobby would think they were just dreams, and Sam would say he was dealing with his trauma or some bullshit. He could probably tell Cas, but every time he tries something stops him, whether it's the impending Apocalypse or his own cowardice.

In the end he decides to just ignore the dreams. Maybe if he ignores them long enough, they'll go away.

When Dean turns to face him, hands dripping with blood and eyes dark, he hesitates for just a moment. Then he reaches out slowly, keeping his eyes on Dean's as he gently grasps the wrist of the hand holding a bloody knife.

"Dean," he says, in a voice that is familiar even if it's not his own. "Put down the knife."

Dean wakes with a jerk, eyes blinking at the ceiling for a few moments as his brain tries to resolve itself to reality. He isn't in Hell, he's in a motel room in a bed, with Sam conked out across the room, snoring. He settles back into the pillows with a sigh.

He knew the voice in the dream, but he doesn't understand its place there. Sure, Cas is the one who dragged him out of Hell and put him back together…but he hadn't been Cas, had he? Not the way Dean knows him. He hadn't been in Jimmy Novak's body, that was for sure. He was Castiel then, angel of the Lord, made of light and sound and so powerful that Dean couldn't be in the same room with him without being burned alive.

Either way, Dean's never remembered that part of Hell before. He'd always thought Cas just popped in, grabbed him, and popped out. The last thing Dean remembers was…

…that's when he realizes that he doesn't. He remembers the pain of being on the rack, and his years torturing to keep himself off it, and then…nothing. It isn't a cut scene, like he blinked and he was somewhere else; it's more like miles of blank film. He was in Hell torturing someone, cutting out her voice box and feeding her pieces of it until he got bored and tossed the rest aside. Then he was nowhere, doing nothing, seeing nothing for what felt like years before suddenly, he was in the ground, in a pine box, digging desperately toward light and air, and…someone waiting for him.

No one had been waiting for Dean when he crawled out of his grave, he knows that much. Well, no one except a disembodied Cas.

Dean closes his eyes. It's too early in the morning for all this thinking.

He's in Hell, but it doesn't feel like Hell. For one thing, there isn't any blood on his hands. He doesn't feel cold. He's sitting on a low stone wall—where did that even come from?—and talking to someone, laughing. They're sitting close together, closer than he typically allows, knees and shoulders brushing. He feels content. He feels safe.

"The poor dope didn't know what to do with himself. He kept stumbling over stuff and knocking his head on things. You'd never know it to look at 'im now, but that first growth spurt was a laugh riot…till he got taller than me. That kinda sucked."

The person across from him gives him a small, close-lipped smile. On anyone else it would look insincere, but on this face it's a thousand-watt grin. Dean grins back and leans in a little, pressing their shoulders more firmly together. He's quiet for a moment, and it feels okay. He thinks there must be no such thing as an awkward silence when it comes to Cas.

Cas.

Dean opens his eyes to another dark room, another shitty motel in another nowhere town. This time is different, though. Cas is here.

Dean can feel him. He's always been able to, and he's never found that strange. Never given much thought to it, really. Now, though, he begins to wonder if maybe he should. Maybe there are a lot of things he should be thinking about, like why he never can seem to get Cas to give him personal space (and why this doesn't really bother him all that much), or why he felt such a stab of disappointment when he crawled out of his grave into an empty grove of flattened trees. Maybe he should start asking himself why, exactly, he feels so comfortable with Cas. How did he start calling him Cas in the first place? It just rolls off his tongue like Dean's known him forever, and it's always been that way.

Yeah, Dean should definitely be thinking about some of these things, but right now he has an uncalled-for angel in his bedroom, which means something is going on. He sighs and sits up.

"What is it, Cas?"

Dean is crying, and he can't stop. What's worse is that he's him this time, not Cas or some third party onlooker, he's Dean Winchester and his soul is flayed raw, open to the eyes of the angel looking on him with worry and so much compassion it makes him sick. He doesn't deserve that kind of understanding, but when it wraps itself around him he takes it anyway because he's too tired, too full of holes and too overwhelmed to do anything else.

"I want you to trust me," Castiel had said to him. And Dean does, he really does. Cas is hanging out with him in Hell, for crying out loud. He doesn't have to, he isn't doing it because he needs Dean's consent. He's waiting for Dean to be ready. Dean doesn't remember a time since he was a four-year-old with a mother still alive that he's felt so cared for.

Sheltered in Cas's arms—somewhere he never expected to find himself, by the way, no matter how touchy-feely they've been with each other—he feels so safe. And when Cas speaks, all he has to offer Dean is more patience, more understanding. Dean feels loved.

"Whenever you're ready. Even if you never are."

When Dean opens his eyes, he feels shaky and clammy all over. His sheets are soaked, and his body is still covered in a thin sheen of cold sweat. Grimacing, he drags himself out of bed and goes to take a hot shower. Of course, the motel room they're in can only manage lukewarm with the water pressure of a drinking fountain, but he'll take what he can get. It makes him feel marginally less disgusting, at least.

Stepping out and wrapping a towel around his waist, Dean stops and decides he might as well shave while he's awake. He hasn't had the time in a few days, and he's getting stubbly. Speaking of stubbly…

"Hello Dean."

"Jesus, Cas!" Dean whirls around and glares down at Castiel, heart hammering in his throat. "You scared the crap outta me. Whatever happened to calling ahead?"

Castiel tilts his head in confusion and looks up at Dean with a furrowed brow.

"I heard you call for me. I came as quickly as I could. Is something wrong?"

"I will always come when you call."

Dean doesn't blink. He doesn't twitch, or gasp, or show any of the emotions that are threatening to overwhelm him at the moment. What he does do is lean away from Cas slightly and give the guy his best stern look.

"Cas. We've talked about this. Personal space?"

Looking perturbed, Castiel steps away. He always looks a little confused, maybe even a little hurt, when Dean demands distance between them. For his part, Dean can feel a distinct cold spot taking up residence all along the shoulder Cas was just pressed against. He shakes his head minutely; this is too much to handle on four hours' troubled sleep. Unfortunately, Cas isn't deterred simply by Dean being too tired to hash this out. He just keeps staring inquisitively up at Dean, waiting for an explanation. Dean sighs.

"I…didn't call, Cas. I'm sorry. I must've…been dreaming." He really hopes the angel will leave it at that, but when has Castiel ever done anything to make Dean's life easier?

"I will wait as long as I am capable for you to be ready."

Well…yeah. There was that. Damn.

"I do not understand, Dean. I did not visit you in your dreams. How could you have called me?"

Dean sighs again, avoiding Cas's eyes as best he can in the small room. Why he hasn't stepped around the angel and moved to the less confining space of the main room, he has no idea. So that's what he does. With his back to Castiel, it's suddenly much easier to force out an answer.

"I think…maybe I said your name in my sleep or something."

"I don't understand." Anyone who'd just met Cas would think that statement was just as inflectionless as before, but Dean hears the tiny hesitation. He hears the catch in Cas's throat on 'don't' and he hears the hopeful little lift in 'understand.' It confirms something for him, and yeah…he most definitely cannot deal with this tonight. He was stupid to think he could.

"Look," Dean says, letting his slight panic come out as frustration. "I don't have any control over what I dream, okay? Apparently you were there, and I said your name out loud in my sleep, and you heard it and thought it was a call. But it wasn't so you can fly away now."

His only answer is the sound of fluttering wings in an empty room.

Three days without sleep, two nights of drinking himself under the table, and Dean still can't get the stupid dreams to stop.

For as long as he's known that Cas dragged his soul from Hell, he's never considered that they might have had even a single conversation before it happened, much less the dozens or hundreds of them he finds himself remembering. How long were we down there together anyway?

Long enough for Castiel to become so attached to Dean that it impeded his angelic judgment. Long enough for a flash of hurt in his eyes every time Dean asks him to step back.

Long enough for Dean to trust Castiel with his mind, body, and soul…and that's his limit, that's as much as he can allow himself to think about this without going crazy.

Unfortunately, his brain doesn't seem capable of processing anything else until it untangles this nasty snarl of confused emotions. Castiel came to get him in Hell, coaxed him away from torture, and sat talking to him for a literally untold amount of time. Meanwhile, he was putting himself and his all-important mission from Heaven in jeopardy…and all so that Dean would be happier, feel safer.

The feelings that well up in him at that last thought honestly scared the ever-loving fuck out of him.

He looks at Castiel, and he knows he's running out of time; they're running out of time. Maybe he's known it all along, but now he has to face it because it's not just some far-off eventuality. It's here. Cas is losing his powers waiting for Dean to be ready to trust him, and if Dean doesn't let himself take that leap soon, he's going to be the cause of both their deaths…or worse.

He can't let that happen, so he grips Cas tight and closes his eyes.

"Let's go," he says hoarsely. He has Cas's promise that he'll be waiting for him topside, and that no matter what, he'll be there when Dean needs him the most. It won't be like this, the strange peace they'd experienced in the last place in the universe you'd expect it…but it's Cas, and that's enough.

Whether he likes it or not, Dean Winchester has found himself one more person that he absolutely cannot bear to lose.

I hope I don't regret this, he thinks, just before everything goes black.

Dean keeps his eyes closed when he wakes up this time. The room is eerily silent; he's still not used to the absence of Sam's snores. Eventually he knows he's gonna have to talk things out and clean up the mess between them, but he's not ready to take that leap yet.

Regardless of his anger at Sam, the impending Apocalypse, being on the run from angels, all of it…he needs to do this one thing first. Dean is drowning in the impossibility of the days ahead of him, and he needs something he can be sure of. He needs the friendship he can see in his dreams to be real when he opens his eyes.

He gives himself just a moment, long enough to catch his breath and steel himself, and then he calls.

"Cas," he says hoarsely. "Castiel. I need to talk to you."

As always, he feels him before he hears his voice. It's a displacement in the air, a shift in gravity that seems to happen within him instead of the earth around him.

"Hello, Dean."

He opens his eyes.

"Cas, hey." He sits up, blinking at Castiel's silhouette as if he's never quite looked at him before. He can just make out the glimmer of his eyes and the line of his jaw in the darkness. Cas doesn't seem to notice anything different about the way Dean is studying him.

"Is something the matter?" He asks, all business. "Have you had news of your brother?"

"I'm sure Sammy's just fine," Dean says, a little bitterly. "That's not why I called."

There's an awkward pause.

"Then…why did you call?" Castiel sounds guarded but genuinely curious. Dean takes his time answering, takes in all the details as his sight adjusts: wide, questioning eyes, unkempt hair, and the familiar tilt to the head. He knows this can't be the face Cas wore in the pit, but it doesn't matter. The face he wore then would have tilted its head just that way, opened its eyes just that wide, asked exactly that question with just exactly that flat inflection.

"I want to talk about what happened between us…before."

"Before what, Dean?" Cas's voice flattens out just enough for Dean to tell that he knows exactly what Dean is talking about. Rather than waste valuable time calling him out, Dean just plows on ahead.

"Before I came back. When we were together in the pit."

Author's Note: So this is obviously a follow-up to "Once Upon A Dream." Not sure how happy I am with it but there you go. If anyone's confused about the timeline, it starts sometime near the end of season four and ends at the very beginning of season five, before Sam and Dean reunite. Despite that, plays with canon events and timeline a bit, so I'm gonna go ahead and say that this whole 'verse I seem to be working on here is a little bit AU.

Not sure if I'll write any more about this for awhile, or at all. If I do, it probably won't pick up with their conversation because I like writing dialogue about as much as Dean likes having deep, meaningful conversations with the people in his life. Anyway, thanks to everyone who responded to the last one and I hope those of you who asked about a sequel weren't disappointed!

-The Raisin Girl