Chapter Text
More often than not, Dean found Castiel in his dreams. The first time, he hadn’t even been looking all that hard. Cas had just appeared there, rumpled trench coat and all.
It had been a disgustingly boring dream. Dean had been sitting on the hood of the Impala, staring out at a sea of endless junkyard. There were no sounds, no smells, and no sensation. Once in a while, a ball of tumbleweed would roll by and spontaneously burst into flame. That was about as exciting as it got.
Dean supposed it was a welcome relief from relieving his not-quite-memories-but-not-really-dreams of Hell. Still, his brain could have at least bothered to conjure up a hot chick or two.
Alas, no scantily clad women materialized.
An overdressed angel, on the other hand, did.
One minute, there was a smoldering tumbleweed in front of him. The next, there was Castiel. The angel did not appear to register his surroundings, never even blinking as he looked straight through Dean.
Now, that was just rude, even for a figment of Dean’s imagination.
The hunter slid of the car and marched up to the angel, idly marveling at his own lack of emotion. If this had been real life, Dean was sure he’d give Cas a hug or something. At the very least, he’d exclaim in surprise.
But dream-Dean seemed to be just as barren of emotion as the landscape around him.
“Hey Cas,” he said, coming to stand in front of the other man.
A few seconds ticked by in silence
“Hey! Earth to angel!” Dean raised his voice, hearing it echo oddly in his own head.
When that failed to provoke a response, the hunter flapped a hand in front of the angel’s face.
Still, Castiel remained as impassive as ever.
“Well, suit yourself,” Dean muttered in frustration, as he shoved his hands in his pockets and returned to his perch on the Impala.
********
For the next two days, Dean barely slept, as he and Sammy tracked a windigo across state lines. He had kept the image of dream-Castiel on the backburner of his mind, flipping back to it when there was nothing else in front of him but an empty road. But even with all of his emotional faculties present and relatively tuned in, Dean found it difficult to feel anything concrete about the dream.
True, he missed his best friend. Missed him more than he thought appropriate to admit. But a dream was just a dream – some clingy part of his mind trying to recreate the angel and failing miserably. The real Castiel was long gone, consumed by a biblical sea monster or - as Dean now referred to it – That Fucking Fish.
But, when he finally flopped down onto a bed, Dean realized that his brain was annoyingly determined.
He dreamed of a glade of pale green. The grass was crunchy under his feet, and the ground around him was obscured by a thin layer of fog. He was pretty sure he was surrounded by trees, though they may as well have been large bushes, or freakishly tall blades of grass.
Castiel was already in the glade when Dean became aware of it. The angel was leaning against something misty and undefined that may have been a tree trunk. His blue eyes were scanning the space in front of him slowly, as trying to plot points on a graph only he could see.
This time, Dean said nothing, deciding that if the stupid figment was going to ignore him, he could ignore it right back. Except, that’s not an ‘it’, that’s Cas, a treacherous part of his mind whispered.
Castiel’s eyes finally landed on Dean and widened slightly. Dean would have liked to say that it was in recognition, but for all he knew, the angel just got some fog stuck in his eye.
The angel’s brows furrowed and he gave Dean a long, assessing look. Then, rather haltingly, he said, “I – I do not believe you are very real.”
“Not real?” Dean echoed incredulously. “Me? You’re the one who’s hanging out in my grassy glade dream.”
Dean would have thought it impossible for the angel’s brows to come any closer together, but they just had.
“This is not you ‘grassy glade dream’, as you put it. It is my state of non-existence,” Castiel replied patiently.
“Bullshit. If you were in a state of non-existence, you wouldn’t be existing here. I made you up, or my stupid brain did, because obviously, it has nothing better to do,” Dean retorted, tone clearly implying that if he could wring his brain’s neck, he would.
“I don’t believe that’s possible…Dean,” the angel said, hesitating before tacking on the name at the end of his sentence. “If one of us has been ‘made up,’ it is clearly you. The real Dean Winchester cannot be here, not even in his dreams.”
It was the note of sadness in the angel’s voice that got Dean to reassess the situation.
“Well, hey,” he started awkwardly. “Whatever this is, let’s make the best of it, yea? We can just hang out here for a while. You, in your non-existence state and me in my dream.”
“That is not possible, Dean,” Castiel repeated.
And then Dean was awake.
********
“Dean… Dean! Are you okay?”
Dean shook himself out of his thoughts, realizing belatedly that his brother had been trying to get his attention for the past few minutes and
was now getting progressively more worried.
“Yea. Yea, ‘m fine,” he muttered, rubbing tiredly at an eye.
Sam didn’t look too convinced, but resumed eating his burger. Dean glanced down at his own food, idly twisting a French fry in his fingers. This place should have pie. Why didn’t it have pie?
“Thought you’d inhaled some crumbs and were silently choking to death,” Sam declared through a mouthful of burger.
“Just thinking, Sammy.”
“Oh, that’s new,” Sam replied, a corner of his lips turning up in a teasing grin.
“Get some new material, Bigfoot,” Dean retorted, narrowing his eyes and gesturing pointedly at Sam with his French fry.
Sam shrugged noncommittally and continued, “So, what has your neurons firing away overtime?”
“Cas,” Dean exhaled slowly, and he could practically see Sam’s expression changed from idle-conversation to concerned-brother mode.
“Dean-“ he began.
“No, Sammy. Here me out.” And Dean began to talk about the first two dreams – the latest of which he’d dreamt just the night before. Sam pressed him for more details than he had even noticed, and asked him to repeat his brief conversation with Castiel several times.
When it was all over, Sam looked more thoughtful than concerned. That, in itself, was a relief.
********
Dean entered his third dream with a plan. Well, to be fair, the plan was pretty much all Sammy’s. Still, the dream was his. That had to count for something, right?
They were in a park this time, sitting on a worn bench side by side. A dog was chasing its tail a few feet in front of them. It reminded Dean of the burning tumbleweed. He could have gotten up and shooed the dog away, or he could have just stood up from the bench and walked off. Apparently, he was pretty much in control of his actions in these sorts of dreams – something he hadn’t put much stock in before his conversation with Sam. His brother had called it “lucid dreaming.”
Regardless of the possibilities, what Dean wanted most was to stay on the bench with Cas. So he did.
Time to put The Plan into motion.
“Hey Cas,” he said rather awkwardly.
A messy head of hair swiveled in his direction and he found himself pinned by an intense, blue gaze.
“Dean,” the angel acknowledged.
They stared at each other for a while. When it became clear that Castiel wasn’t going to break the silence, Dean took a shot in the dark.
“So, this non-existence thing? Why is it happening?” the hunter asked, waving his hand arbitrarily, as if to encompass the whole concept.
Seconds dragged by and Dean was all but ready to give up, growing surer and surer that the angel wasn’t going to answer.
“It is an alternative to death of a sort. At the least, that is how I have come to think of it,” Cas began slowly. Dean gave a mental shout-out to Sam for telling him to ask that. Go along with the non-existence angle, his brother had said. If that’s what Cas believes, he’s not going to respond to you acting as if you’re dreaming. At least, this way, he might give you some answers. “God is punishing me for the grave mistakes I have made. It is a just punishment.”
“Come on, Cas. Everyone makes mistakes. We don’t all get stuck in some sort of weird, not-really-there limbo.”
“Does everyone put on the mantle of God and proclaim to be Him, Dean?” Cas retorted testily. At least he was being sarcastic. Sarcastic was a step above impassive, as far as Dean was concerned.
“Hey, we could have dealt with that. It was that fucking fish that we couldn’t deal with.”
“What fish?” asked Cas perplexedly.
“The Leviathon, Cas. The Leviathon. What other fish do you know?” Dean asked, almost rolling his eyes.
“Dean, the Leviathon is not a fish. It is-“
“Yea, yea. Biblical monster, ancient souls, blah, blah, blah.”
They lapsed into silence again. So, Dean found out what Cas thought was happening. A lot go good it did them.
“Hey, Cas?” Dean started. Then stopped, chewed on the inside of his cheek, and started again, “Cas, how dead are you? Are we talking angel-sword dead or ready-to-be-resurrected dead?”
“I am not dead, Dean. I do not exist,” the angel answered patiently.
Now that was just too much.
“What the hell, Cas! You’re right here!” Dean exploded. “You’re in my dream! Except maybe it isn’t my dream, exactly, but it certainly isn’t some stupid realm of non-existence. You’re not- I’m not just imagining you. And you’re not imagining me! Maybe this is some kind of bridge. That’s what Sammy said. That this is a bridge. And that maybe we – I – can pull you across. You know, to our side.”
Dean finished in a rush and glared at Castiel, daring him to even think of disagreeing. Cas did more thank think of it.
“No,” the angel said flatly.
********
“So what, he just refused and you woke up?” asked Sam for the second time.
“I’m telling you, man, he seriously believes in this punishment shit. It’s gonna be hard to convince him to try anything to get out of it,” Dean said, tipping back his head to let the last few droplets of coffee trickle from the mug and into his mouth.
“Two rams butting heads,” Sam mumbled from behind a stack of books, containing every obscure reference to dreaming that they could find.
“Huh?” Dean tore his eyes away from the splotchy stains at the bottom of his cup.
“Nothing. Just comparing you two to sheep,” Sam said – voice all perfect innocence. “Anyway, I think I found something.”
Just for that, Dean let the sheep comment slide. If there was one thing Sam was good at, it was research.
“Says here that there’s a rite that can be attempted ‘to solidify transient consciences’. In many cultures, it’s not uncommon to believe that ancestral spirits may communicate with someone through their dreams. But those spirits are usually remnants of lost souls. Cas is still all there,” Sam said thoughtfully.
“So, we’ll just have to tweak it a little, right? Four table spoons of salt instead of three?”
“More than a little. Because Cas never actually passed into the afterlife and is an angel to boot, we’d need something strong to pull him across into our reality. But even if we get everything done, the ritual wouldn’t be complete without what pretty much amounts to a divine pardon from God.”
“God? Is that guy back in the picture again?” huffed Dean. “He was the one who got Cas stuck in my dreams in the first place.”
“Not in your dreams,” Sam enunciated, as if speaking to a particularly slow child. “He is trapped in a state of non-existence.”
“Goddammit! You too, Sammy?” Dean groaned. “I see him in my dreams, so I’m just gonna keep on saying that he’s in my dreams. Common sense. Non of this existentialist crap.”
“Whatever, Dean.” Sam rolled his eyes. “Point is, we need to anchor Cas to something. And since you’re the only part of reality that is capable of crossing into this shared dream of yours, that’s going to have to be you.”
“You want me to hold on tight to the angel and never let go?” Dean muttered drily.
“Close.” Sam grinned like a cat about to slaughter a particularly juicy mouse. That’s when Dean knew this couldn’t possibly be good. “I want you to form a bond with him that’s going to be strong enough to reestablish his place on Earth. With everything you two have been through, I’m guessing that the emotional component is pretty much all there. You’ll just have to work on the physical.”
“The physical,” Dean echoed.
“Yep,” Sam just kept on smiling.
“And what does that mean, genius?”
“Oh, I think you know what it means.”
Sam’s grin couldn’t possibly get any wider.