The Mind Fuck. (2/5)

[amoama]

TWO. The Chapter of Simple Miracles

Dean is going crazy dreaming about Cas. He’s hiding it pretty well he thinks but he’s not really sleeping. He’s been calling, praying, for him for weeks now. Cas hasn’t answered at all and Dean is pissed.

Once, a little over a week ago, he’d been walking out of a diner, pie in hand, and he’d thought he’d seen him standing on the other side of the highway. It had been raining and Cas had looked really downtrodden and just overwhelmingly sad. The rain made it impossible to tell but he could well have been crying even. It was really worrying seeing him like that, Dean had moved his hand up to protect his eyes from the rain and began to move towards Cas, shouting his name. In that instant, Cas had disappeared and Dean felt stupid yelling Cas’s name in the rain to the empty street.

He’s dreamed about Cas every night since then. It’s fucking with his mind.

*

It’s not like it’s the first time he’s dreamed about Cas. For Pete’s sake, the guy’s dream-stalked him enough times, starting with that time Cas told him about Lilith and the seals and Lucifer being real and rising. But the apocalypse stuff isn’t what sticks with him now. It's the dream thing that stays with him.

Dean thinks about how he’d woken up that night (in his dream) and seen Cas casually leaning against the kitchen counter and how he had been drawn towards him, by anger and by the desire to provoke. Funny, he thinks now, his fearlessness in the face of this angelic warrior. Partly his usual cock-surety when trapped in a corner with some devil. His old demon-baiting dance of words hiding anything else he might be feeling. But it was also something else, like he knew already that he could say what he liked to this angel. That it was safe to rile and question and demand. To answer, Yeah, why didn’t you fight? When Cas growls, I’m a soldier.

That night Castiel (and really he was still Castiel at that point) hadn’t given an inch. He had listened to Dean like someone who knew what he would say before he said it. Who was perfectly willing to put Dean in his place, but was also enjoying the experience, enjoying Dean mouthing off at him, admiring his spirit while curbing his wilful misunderstanding. Dean replays it in his mind, I’m not here to perch on your shoulder and it makes him grateful for all the things this angel turned out to be that were more than he ever expected. Nothing fluffy, nothing docile or lap-doggy. Castiel was condescending, and fuming, and highly provokable. He was scruffy and intense. He was passive and powerful and amused all at the same time. Dean couldn’t help himself. He pushed and pushed, If there even is a God. He remembers spouting on and on at Cas and Cas looking away and holding his hands up in a shrug that was more to himself, perhaps reminding himself not to engage this time.

That night Cas had said just enough for Dean to make the leaps himself, understanding dawning about Lilith and the witnesses. Cas had told him what he needed to know. Something he had been doing less of lately. Perhaps now Cas really didn’t need Dean to know anything. But Dean wanted the conversation all the same. How was it possible that Cas could trust him with the apocalypse but not with what came after?

It strikes Dean that this is why he is having so many dreams of this first dream. The doors to Dean’s world had been blown open when Cas arrived; he was only days out of hell, unsteady on his feet and it seemed as though heaven was disclosing all its secrets to him. Now he wasn’t in on it at all and he was grateful and hurt at the same time. Besides why wouldn’t the dickhead just tell him what the hell’s going on up there?

He remembers how Cas had turned to him, right before the punchline, and Lucifer walks free, holding Dean’s eyes in his own, encompassing his disbelief and his panic. A stare that grounds him, Dean thinks. That allows him to think and feel in safety. Castiel knew how to hold him with his eyes from the beginning. Dean remembers clinging to his scorn in the face of that unblinking certainty. He’s still pretty proud of himself for it. Well, bang up job so far. Of course, Cas had wiped him off the map after that. You think the armies of Heaven should just follow you around? He had gotten so close into his personal space that Dean wanted to hold his breath just to give them that much more room. Yet even as Castiel had spoken, There’s a bigger picture here, Dean had loosened his grip on the rest of the world. Castiel’s body was so close, his eyes were blazing out two inches from his own, and Dean’s world seemed to be made up only of him and Castiel –and it seemed crowded. You should show me some respect. Dean remembers wondering momentarily how you could do anything but respect the fierce, unkempt being before him. And the moment he thought it, Castiel was gone and Dean woke up with a start.

That had been the beginning.

He’s dreamt of that night often since then. At first, just replaying it, pondering the significance of having an angel come and speak to you in dreams. Dean, who stoically refused to let people get too close, now had someone with access to his mind wandering in and out of his consciousness. Total fucking mind fuck. And the really weird thing was that he didn’t really mind about it. Apart from the odd, Get outta my head, you dick. He really hasn’t made much of a fuss about it. Most of the time he feels an odd kind of relief on seeing Cas at all. Like he’s been grinding his teeth without realising it and seeing Cas allows him to let up for a while. Whatever it is, Dean doesn’t like to analyse it. What is the point? It is what it is.

It happens so many times the same way. The flutter wakes him. He bats his eyes open, twice. And then he pauses. ‘Cas, am I dreaming you?’

In those early days he had always known, once he woke up, if it had been a Cas dream – there was a texture to it that felt like ‘more’ and it was just so beyond his experience or knowledge of Cas he knew he couldn’t have made it up. Now though, he’s less sure. Cas has been around for so long, has been through so much with them, Dean thinks perhaps he really could dream Cas was constructing the dream. Dean worries his mind is capable of concocting Cas’s presence in his dreams.

*

Dean replays all of his Cas-engineered dreams in his head. He thinks a lot about the dream by the lake. He wonders if Cas found him by the lake or put him there. He thinks Cas took him and he likes the thought that the angel took him somewhere so peaceful even when he himself was in turmoil. This was the dream before Cas was ‘disappeared’ back up to heaven to be tortured into submission. He hasn’t talked to Cas much about what he went through up there, it is just another of the things Dean feels guilty about, another of the endless sacrifices Cas has made for him. He sees them together looking out at the lake, Cas talking urgently and firmly, and yet so calm, just minutes before being ripped from his vessel. Dean feels awe for his angel all over again.

Sometimes when he hasn’t been able to sleep he takes his mind back to the lake and pictures himself fishing silently for hour upon peaceful hour as he drifts towards sleep. Sometimes Cas sits beside him, sometimes he doesn’t. When Dean wakes up, if he remembers the dream at all, he wonders if Cas really did sit beside him, accompanying him in his dream or not. Then he remembers that he’s angry at Cas and that Cas is a dick.

*

Dean daydreams obsessively about yelling at Cas. It feels familiar and good. Fighting with Cas comes up there with hunting and getting laid, in the how-to-know-you’re-alive stakes. In his head, Dean is on a roll. He rants at Cas for being MIA for a whole year, for not coming to tell him about Sam being alive, for not coming to see him at all, for holding out on all the crazy that’s going down in Heaven, for being against Sam’s soul, for using him and Sam as pawns in his heavenly war games, for being a bad friend, for being a dick.

In Dean’s head Cas waits it out.

Dean. Dean. I’m a soldier again now. This fight you can’t be a part of.

Castiel’s eyes hold Dean, Dean feels the blood boiling in his hands and realises his fists are clenched. Had he really been about to hit Cas? Again. He flexes his fingers and breathes out.

You can tell me Cas, give it to me straight. Cas smiles at him, head tilting reflexively.

Try not to die, Dean, alright? I’ll try not to as well.

You still believe in free will don’t you Dean?

Don’t fight me Dean. Don’t dream of me in anger.

Take me out of the fight Dean. Dream me away. I’ll go with you.

Dean doesn’t know why he imagines Cas saying these things but they land in his mind fully formed and run in circles round his head.

*

The words linger in Cas’s head, soothing him. Everything here feels unreal. Like a dream, a nightmare. He sees himself more alive in Dean’s dream then he may ever be again. But angels don’t dream, surely. They use them, shape them but it’s not the same. How can you dream if you don’t sleep? For an angel to dream feels too much like falling.

Cas knows you don’t have to be asleep to dream – that is, to imagine, to desire – he saw it in Anna, saw her drift from the other angels, saw longing cloud her being. He didn’t know at the time how she could have done it, what could have called to her so strongly that she stepped off the edge. He didn’t know how easy it would be.

Some days he’s thought he would give anything to close his eyes and be lost to his dreams. In his dreams he would meet his Father once more and bathe in his light. In his dreams he would talk to God, tell Him about Dean, tell Him everything and laugh. He thinks sometimes that dreaming is the only way he will see Him again. But he doesn’t step off the edge because he fears that powerlessness and that brokenness.

And then there are the other dreams - which Cas knows are not called ‘wishes’ but rather ‘fantasies’. The things he catches himself imagining when they’re both fully awake, when Dean is standing right in front of him, grinning at his own inane quip, or frowning over some inner demon, or just bending over the boot of his car. These are the dreams where Cas suddenly feels that the twelve inches of space between them are an ocean and that this encumbering body he wears is the most honest thing about him.

At first the thoughts that came to him shocked him. He thought they were the reflexes of the vessel. Chemicals reacting, blood responding. But the tremble in his wings couldn’t be denied. He pictures himself running a hand down Dean’s arm, slowly, playfully. He thinks of back and chest and muscle. He thinks of eyes and neck and jaw. He sees his tongue roam slowly over them and wonders if he’d be allowed to bite.

Usually at this point he remembers that he’s day dreaming and that Dean may hate to think his mind even went there.

Cas hasn’t thought this way about other humans and he hasn’t wondered why not. This is how he was made. Fearfully and wonderfully and with a burning desire to extend his hand and touch Dean Winchester. He holds back because he’s an angel and because Dean is Dean -which means to say Cas is proud and scared and doesn’t know if reality matches the dream.

*

Dreaming should be just one more tool of communication for Cas. Like a radio or a TV screen - a way to reach out to the humans. He is not one of those angels who makes human dreams their battleground. He has brothers and sisters who have spent lifetimes in human dreams warring the demons there who seek to make it their domain. Cas never saw the appeal, never respected the danger until he saw how the nightmares clung to the waking Dean, how his eyes carried an anguish played out in his sleeping consciousness.

*

Dean doesn’t know what the hell’s going on in his dreams anymore. He stops calling for Cas in the daytime though. He no longer believes he’ll get answers that way.

PART THREE HERE

Comments

[aerilex.livejournal.com]

Awwww Dean. Awwwwww CAS! (clutches Cas)

Be whole again, my heart!

[amoama.livejournal.com]

*fixes heart with hugs*

(loving your chapter by chapter commenting, lol)

[vasiliki.livejournal.com]

He holds back because he’s an angel and because Dean is Dean -which means to say Cas is proud and scared and doesn’t know if reality matches the dream.

Loved it!

Don’t fight me Dean. Don’t dream of me in anger.

Oh Cas, my baby, you're breaking my heart! ;_; *screams again about the unfairness of the final eps of S6*