Wow, it's been a while and I know, I know, the nightmares thing has been done before. But I just have to get something out, even if it has been done better before. I've got a hard drive full of half-finished stories and a shit-ton of work and its driving me mad. So, maybe this will help unblock the flow and get me back into story-mode instead of just work-mode all the time.
Comments are always appreciated! Thanks! Also, I don't know if anyone's noticed but I am terrible at titles, apologies for this one and please take a look at my profile I'd love anyone's opinion.
Set in an AU season 6… Where Cas is mostly human and Sam is out of the cage and delightfully soulified.
**Warning for some gore**
#~#~#
Dean has nightmares. And they are always about death.
Not the horsemen Death but the incorporeal, painful, blood-and-guts death that happens to him and around him on an almost daily basis.
Most often its Sam, or Cas, or Bobby. They've all died at least once, sometimes twice, and in his dreams he can't make a deal, God doesn't step in, Cas' magic fingers don't work.
He cries out for them, screams himself awake. Or at least it feels like a scream, he isn't sure because he hardly ever wakes Cas and he never wakes Sam. Even his subconscious knows to keep his problems to himself.
It's Sam's deaths that repeat the most often. He watches Sam collapsing to his knees over and over again even as the pleased, relived expression he wears, the expression he makes as he sees Dean running towards him, dies on his face. It is the worst image Dean's traitorous mind can conjure and it never fails to chill him to the bone even as his heart drops into his stomach and panic overtakes him. It's not just nightmare; he relives the moment as he sleeps. The memory of Sam disappearing into a never-ending black hole comes less often, but the aching despair that thrums through his body as he kneels in the middle of that old boneyard never ends. Cas never comes and Dean sits there screaming for Sam until he's hoarse. When he wakes, and it always takes so long to throw off the memories, he lies for a long time looking at Sam sleeping in the other bed his chest moving up and down, up and down, up and down. It makes him feel better but the nightmares always come back.
Cas and Bobby's deaths always follow. Dean curses the fact that he has seen dead bodies in so many different states of decomposition because Cas doesn't burst, he falls apart. He bleeds from every orifice, his skin peels and his intestines slop to the ground. God, Dean always just wants it to end, wishes for a lesser nightmare where Cas just explodes and Dean ends up with teeth in his hair, but he never wakes until the very last moment; when he hears the echo of Cas' gravelled voice and his jaw drops from his face as the rest of him simply spills into the overgrown grass, only then is it finally over. Dean can never do anything to stop it, he can never look away and it never changes.
Bobby's death, in some ways, is worse than Cas' slow, piece-meal death. He is often woken in the middle of Cas' death, usually by Cas himself, and that always makes the nightmare less painful because Cas is usually glowering at Dean for waking him in the night and that always makes Dean feel better. Bobby's death is quick, almost too quick for him to actually realise he's dreaming. The snapping of bone is like a slap to the face; a short, sharp, shock that never fails to wake him, his heart pulsing loudly in his ears. Dean always has to stop himself from calling Bobby just to be sure he's still kicking.
It's not only the deaths of his family that Dean dreams about either. He sees faces he recognises but only vaguely, blurred by time and distance. He knows in his gut that these are people who died because he was too slow. He sees a woman with glasses and bruises on her wrists, he sees a man being flipped out of his boat on a lake and a young woman with all her blood drained. The kids are the worst, the remains of a young boy after a werewolf attack, the broken bodies of children who ended up on the wrong side of a poltergeist. Dean wonders if, after witnessing so many deaths, that he too is haunted. On so many occasions he has been the last face these people have seen, the last voice they'd heard. Who's to say that they don't stay with him? A procession of ghosts following him around everywhere he goes, invading his dreams at night, their numbers growing after every time he is a moment too late, after every time he cannot save them.
He dreams of hell little; almost never since that first painful year of return. After feeling real pain, real blood dripping down his face, real bullet and stab wounds; hell seems so less real and far less tangible and never as immediate as the deaths of his family and the ghosts that will never leave him.
He does hear hellhounds everywhere though. The barking of dogs, any dogs, and the shrieking of foxes in the night never fail to make his heart beat far quicker than it should. He might not dream of hell anymore, but he sure has nightmares of being dragged back down.
In his dreams Dean is different. In his dreams, his good dreams that is, he does not have his scars, his possession tattoo is missing, his is clean shaven and his clothes are not permanently blood stained. He still has Cas' brand of course, but otherwise he is free from hunting and all it's painful trappings. He dreams often of the world the Djinn had trapped him in; the world's most beautiful gilded cage. He dreams of visiting Sam and Jess at Stanford, he dreams of painting his mother's house and drinking a beer in a home that doesn't move. The change is that Cas is always there; a full blown human who watches movies and drinks beer and who glowers at Dean for stealing the remote. It is perfect and impossible and Dean thinks that these good dreams are the worst nightmares he has ever suffered.
"Dean?" Castiel mumbles in the dark, careful not to wake Sam. "Did you have another bad dream?"
"I'm fine, Cas." Dean says and takes hold of Cas' hand under the covers and tugs it up to his chest, encouraging Cas to lay over him. A warm and pliable and deliciously half-naked blanket.
"I wish I could still take your bad dreams away Dean. I'm sorry that I can't." Cas shifts his head on Dean's shoulder, rubs his ever-present stubble against Dean's sleep-warm skin.
"You being here takes my nightmares away Cas." Dean says. He can say things like this in the dark.
"That's not true." Cas replies as he kisses Dean's neck.
"No it's not, but waking up next to you makes me feel better at least." Dean sighs, digging his fingers into Cas' back, still in one piece, still whole, still with his skin and bones and insides, and that's all that Dean will ever ask of him.
He feels Cas smirk against his collarbone, "You're such a girl."
Dean chuckles, he tilts his head and kisses Cas' eyebrow because that's all he can reach. Cas laughs his low, gravelled laugh and tucks in closer to Dean.
"You two better not be having sex other there." Sam grumbles, shifting around in his bed and clearing his throat.
"Would we do that to you?" Dean smiles.
"Yes." Sam says and Dean just knows he's wearing a sleepy bitchface.
"'Night, Sam." Dean says and a moment later Sam is snoring lightly again, lying in his bed, breathing and breathing. He probably won't even remember this conversation in the morning.
"Give me good dreams, Cas." Dean whispers into Cas' thick hair.
"You're sitting on the end of little pier." Cas begins, clearing his throat a little and shifting to get more comfortable against Dean's shoulder. "On a green fishing chair. You've got a fishing pole in your hand and the sun is shining and the wooden planks of the pier are warm beneath your bare feet. Your jeans are rolled up past your ankles and you're wearing an old t-shirt, warm and soft against your shoulders and one of those floppy fishing hats."
Dean chuckles and turns his head more comfortably into the thin pillow.
"I'm sitting on the pier beside you, I'm reading." Cas continues.
"What are you reading?" Dean asks.
"Faust." Cas instantly replies, smiling against Dean's shoulder. Dean smiles too. "It's quiet; only the sound of the water lapping against the pier and the noise of turning pages is heard. Sam is sleeping on the bank of the lake, occasionally we can hear him snoring. Eventually you move, fold the fishing chair away and instead you sit beside me. We dip our feet into the water, it's cool and refreshing. We sit there for a long time and you don't catch anything. But that's OK, no matter how often we come here, you never catch anything."
Dean is too far gone into the early stages of sleep, a smile on his face as he dreams of that perfect, bloodless day– familiar somehow, has he dreamt of that pier before? – that he doesn't feel the damp of Cas' tears.
After all Cas has a worst nightmare too.
END.