"Yet today, my love has flown away
I am without my love"
The world is flashes of light. Screams of pain. And a word. No, a name.
Naomi.
"What did I just do?"
"You killed a traitor."
"Samandriel was good. And I was trying to atone for-"
Abruptly, a woman's face appears. Who is she? Is this Naomi? Dean groaned and thrashed about in his bed, his sleeping mind attempting to process the images within. The voices. One, the man's, was so familiar. Too familiar. The woman's, not so much.
The face fades away, replaced with nothing but blackness and static. Dean felt as though the dream had been garbled, distorted at some points. As if a file had been corrupted somewhere in his brain. Or perhaps as if a connection was lost before all the information could get through. Dean knew, somewhere in his gut, that these images, these dreams, were not his. That they belonged to someone else. Maybe Cas? Was this the angel version of a Vulcan mind meld? Cas might not understand the reference, but he probably grasped the concept behind it.
The next night, more of the same. Dean twitched in his sleep as the woman's voice sounded once again in his head.
"You killed a traitor."
"Samandriel was good. And I was trying to atone for-"
Some small part of Dean's subconscious expected to wake up after this. After all, this is where the dream had always ended before. But there was no respite to be had as the dream dragged mercilessly on.
"Samandriel was broken. He revealed the existence of what I would die to protect—what any of us would die to protect. The angel tablet, Castiel. Crowley knows."
Dean suddenly opened his eyes, and a look of stark realization crossed his face.
Cas? That voice. That was Cas.
"How could I forget his voice?" Dean thought to himself, ashamed. Another thought struck him, more painful than the first.
"Can I even remember his face?"
Pieces of the angel floated in Dean's brain. His ever-present trenchcoat. His deep blue eyes. But as Dean strained to put a complete image of Castiel's face in his mind, he realized that it just wouldn't come. But that woman's face, that was burned into his head for the time being. Dean wasn't afraid of many things, but he had a feeling that he had every reason to be afraid of her. Was she the reason Cas had cowered in fear?
The worst part of it was, Dean was fairly sure there was not a single picture of Castiel in existence, at least not in his possession. The group shot they had taken with Ellen, Jo, and Bobby had been torched long ago.
Guilt washed over Dean as he rolled over in bed, searching his mind frantically for any image of the angel's face. He smacked his head against the headboard, knocking an old cigar box onto his pillow. Frustrated, Dean grabbed the box, fully intending to fling it across the room in his frustration.
"Son of a bi-"
The box collapsed in Dean's grip before he could let it fly, and he stopped in mid-yell as fake IDs fluttered out onto his sheets. And there it was, at the top of the pile. Castiel's fake FBI laminate. Dean picked it up, thinking back on the angel's first bumbling attempt at being a hunter. Eddie Moscone. Ridiculous.
A small smile formed on Dean's lips as he realized what he needed to do.