Notes: Action Park was a real place, and there are six known deaths to have happened there, and they're all the kind of sketchy crap Dean and Sam might have researched. You can look it up on Wikipedia if you're curious.

Dean could only keep running for so long. His lungs burned for oxygen, and sweat ran down his back. Leaves crunched under his feet as he tore through a forest so dark he could barely see two feet in front of him. Not far behind, he could hear the excited barking and howling of an entire pack of hellhounds on his tail. He knew there was a river crossing a short distance ahead. Could those miserable sons of bitches swim? He fucking hoped not. He never found out.

Dean's foot snagged on a tree root and he went down hard. The hellhounds were on him like flies on crap. He shot a couple of them, judging by the startled yelps and leaf litter that was disturbed by them falling. With a grunt of pain, Dean tried to dislodge his trapped and probably broken foot from the tree roots. He had to get up. He had to keep running. He couldn't let them drag him back to Hell. Not again – anything but that. He felt hot breath on the back of his neck, and then there were claws tearing their way down his shoulders. He could feel his own blood trickling down his back, the stench of it heavy in the air.

Dean woke up screaming in agony, and rolled right off the edge of his bed as he jerked awake. He landed face-down with a soft thud, tangled up in a blue and white patchwork quilt that smelled faintly of cinnamon. Like Cas. Dean groaned in misery as the memory of Cas kissing him in the kitchen played through his mind. Absently, he touched his lips and shivered. It was just a nightmare, inside a fucking nightmare. Could it get any worse? At least he had clothes on this time – a pair of black boxer briefs and a white tank top. He had to find Gabriel and beat him into a bloody pulp.

"Dean?"

"I'm fine, Cas." It took every shred of self control Dean had to get up calmly instead of running to the bathroom. Maybe he should. He kind of wanted to hurl. He could still feel the hellhound's claws tearing him to pieces, and the last thing he wanted was for Cas ask him about it. He sat on the edge of the bed and took a deep breath. He wasn't being chased by hellhounds. He was in a brightly sunlit bedroom, surrounded by tacky abstract modern art and being watched suspiciously by a too familiar pair of deep blue eyes.

Cas sat up and stretched like a cat. "Tell me about it."

"What?" Dean replied, staring at him like a deer caught in headlights. "No, I don't want to talk about it. There's nothing to talk about."

"I didn't ask. I told you to. Tell me about your nightmare," Cas insisted, getting up from the bed to wrap himself in a fluffy white bathrobe that was hanging on the back of the bathroom door. "Everything you can remember."

"No," Dean said flatly, staring at the floor. Damn, he missed the normal Cas. Yet, this one seemed to know him just as well, possibly better.

"Dean."

"Jesus, okay. I was fucking Paris Hilton and her face melted off," He said, using the first stupid thing that came to mind.

Cas sat on the bed beside Dean and rested his hand on Dean's thigh in a comforting manner. Dean tensed and considered making a run for it. This couldn't be going anywhere good – not talking about feelings like a pair of girls at a slumber party, and little touches that were probably nowhere near as innocent as they seemed.

"Did you know that when you're lying, you look slightly to the left and bite your lip just a little bit." Cas leaned over so that their noses were almost touching, and fixed Dean with an intense stare. Dean swallowed nervously past a lump in his throat. Okay, so it was definitely Cas. No one could fake that creepy ass stare, or his complete lack of regard for personal space. If Dean leaned any further away from him, he'd be back on the floor.

"Hellhounds," Dean said quickly, his heart racing. What was he doing?

"Hellhounds," Cas repeated, raising his eyebrows and settling back onto the bed to sit beside Dean.

"You know what hellhounds are." Cas shook his head. So, that answered Dean's other suspicions about not-Cas. He wasn't an Angel. He was just a human. He ate, slept and slogged through a nine to five job like every other schmuck. He also drove a car to get there. He wasn't using some Jedi mind tricks to get to Dean. Okay, maybe he was, but it was all manipulative psychology bullshit instead of holy mojo – which only made it worse but it worked just as well, and this Cas actually seemed to get emotions. God, he was so screwed. Just as screwed as that time he actually started to question himself while he and Sam worked that case in the mental hospital. Except, he was able to escape then.

"Hellhounds are dogs, invisible ones that serve demons. They're big and mean, and will rip you a hole where the sun doesn't shine," Dean explained, feeling like a complete moron. "Well, you know, according to some really old Judo-Christian lore. They're not, like, real. It was just a dream, Cas."

"Humor me. What where they doing?"

Dean rolled his eyes and swore under his breath. "Chasing me through a forest. I tripped on something and fell. One of them got to me, and started tearing me apart. That's where I woke up."

"Okay, let me try to explain something. When you sleep, your mind is still active and all dreams really are is your subconscious still 'thinking' about something," Cas said, and ruffled Dean's hair. If he noticed the way Dean flinched away from his touch, he didn't say anything. "You see, the part of your brain that remembers nightmares is the same that stores real memories. And, in a sense they are real."

"Oh, they sure are," Dean said bitterly.

"Well, the meaning of them is real. Think about it metaphorically for a moment. You're running from some invisible thing that terrifies you. I bet those woods were very dark too, or at least unfamiliar, so the path ahead wasn't really clear to you," Cas explained. Dean caught himself thinking that he liked the way Cas voice sounded; it was oddly soothing. He shook his head and stared hard at the carpet.

"So, if you put that in perspective with your situation while awake, it makes more sense. You're desperately trying to avoid something, but you don't really know how so you keep moving forward as best as you can. It's something you probably can't actually run from forever, so you know it's going to catch up with you eventually. Still, you're afraid of facing whatever it is, so you – ...Shit. Did we pay the association fees this month?"

Dean burst out laughing and almost fell off the bed again. He wasn't sure what was worse – that Cas had actually managed to tell exactly what was going on his mind from a stupid dream, or that he was more worried about pissing off an HOA than he had been about Lucifer. It couldn't possibly get any more surreal. He was so fucked. Really, though. It was scary to think about it, if Dean was being honest with himself. Sure, he was intimidated by whatever this alternate reality was, but the real world terrified him. He hadn't talked to Cas since the angel had kicked his ass for trying to say yes to Michael, and dragged him back to Bobby's. He knew he couldn't avoid the real Cas forever, and he didn't want to, but what if he had pissed him for the last time? What if Cas wasn't willing to forgive him? In his shoes, Dean wouldn't forgive himself either. He didn't know what he would do if he lost Cas; he was the closest thing he'd ever had to a real friend other than Sam.

Dean counted it as a miracle that he made it to work that day without another awkward kiss. His job as a detective was the only not shitty part of the mess he was in. It was familiar territory, mostly, and enough to keep his mind occupied. Okay, the shower at the townhouse was pretty nice too, as long as he managed to enjoy it without having to share. Dean actually gagged at that thought and turned his attention back to the files open on the laptop in front of him.

The two victims were not only both organ transplant recipients, they also got their new parts from the same donor – a woman named Victoria Taylor. Victoria had been killed in a car crash, just outside the ski resort in the same town Sam and Dean had come to New Jersey to investigate - Vernon. Her kidneys, heart, and liver had been donated. Jo was working on finding the identities of the other two recipients, while Dean investigated the reports from the crash that took Victoria's life. What he found, only solidified his theory that the deaths weren't just some serial killer. It was definitely a hunt.

The official police report said that Victoria had been heading north towards the town of Warwick, when a ford pick-up in the oncoming lane swerved onto her side of the road and hit her head on. The cop that wrote the report assumed they were doing about sixty miles per hour, judging by the damage to Victoria's absolutely mangled Mazda Miata. Poor Victoria had been driving with the top down, and was decapitated by a piece of flying debris. The man driving the truck survived, and swore he saw a woman in a wedding dress standing in the road. However, a witness who saw the crash claimed that there was no one, and that he just steered right for Victoria at the last second.

Some more digging yielded police reports of the unsolved murder case of the man driving the truck. His name was Brian Finch. He was dead, obviously. The same night of the crash, hospital staff reported hearing screams coming from his room. Brian, who they assumed was not mentally stable, was yelling about a woman covered in blood in the room with him. The nurse in charge went to get help from the psychiatric department. When they got there, he was dead – and it looked like he'd been ran over by a truck. ...In a hospital room.

Well, at least it seemed like a simple salt and burn. The problem – Victoria was cremated. Still, it was easy enough. Dean assumed it was the car. It was probably covered in various... bits. And if not, if he was an eighteen year old girl that owned a tiny hard-top convertible, he knew what he would be haunting. But, Brian had seen something, too. Something that couldn't have been Victoria since she was alive the first time he saw it. He was dealing with two spooks.

"How the hell does Sam do this research all the time?" Dean complained to himself as started looking up deaths at the ski resort – Mountain Creek. And, well, there were a lot of them. Not the ski resort though, apparently in the 80's it had been an amusement park called Action Park, that had something of tragic past due to lax safety compliance. He shook his head in disbelief as he scrolled through the fatality list. Three people had drowned in one wave pool alone, and every single one of the deaths was definitely vengeful spirit material. The worst was the poor bastard that got electrocuted and died of cardiac failure shortly after – something Dean was a lot more familiar with than he wanted to think about. He guessed the guy didn't manage to meet a faith healer enslaving a reaper.

There was one problem, all the deaths were males, under the age of 30. So who had the woman been? Another casualty of a car crash on what was obviously a high traffic area with a lots of tourists crossing the road without looking? How had he and Sam come to Vernon to hunt a maybe witch, and overlooked all of this? Maybe it wasn't part of the real world.

Dean sat back in his chair and ran his fingers through his hair in frustration. He didn't know what he was dealing with, but it sure was a hell of a mess.

"Hey, Jo?"

"Yeah?"

"Has anyone else that you know of died on the road outside of Mountain Creek?"

Jo chuckled and shook her head. "A bunch. Why don't you ask Sam? I don't think he ever got over what happened at the wedding reception."

"Huh?" Dean said, eyes wide. And thinking of Sam, where was he?

"Did you forget that he talks about her every time he gets a little booze in him? That's how you met Cas, remember? He was on the rescue squad while he was still working on his psychiatry license," Jo replied, looking at Dean like he had three heads.

Sam was a peon legal secretary, apparently, and worked as a volunteer EMT on his days off. Dean found him at the firehouse, lounging around with some other EMTs, and a few of the on-call firefighters. They were playing a hand of poker, and talking shit about the fire chief when Dean walked in. For a moment, he just watched Sam. He seemed happy. He smiled and laughed as he kicked the firefighters asses at poker. Something about him being there felt right, like he fit in perfectly. But, Cas had been an EMT? Dean was having a hard time believing that one. Still, it wasn't as bad as what Gabriel had done to not-Sam.

Dean cleared his throat. "Hey Sammy."

"Dean? Aren't you supposed to be working?" Sam said, looking up. He seemed surprised to see him, but not particularly bothered, which had to be a good thing.

"I am, technically. This case I'm working... I dunno Sam, it's weird," Dean explained. "Listen, we need to talk a moment."

"Yeah, okay." Sam followed him outside, and they sat together on the old wooden park bench outside the front door of the firehouse.

"So, I am really sorry to ask this, but I need you to tell me everything you remember about the day Jess died," Dean said, hoping he had asked gently enough. He had kind of wanted to crawl in a hole and die when he pulled up the coroner's report after Jo 'reminded' him of the date of her death.

"What does that have to do with anything?" Sam asked defensively. "I've moved on, Dean. It's been hard and some days I still wish that truck had taken me out, too. But, the thing is, she's gone and there wasn't a damn thing I could have done to save her. ...Or Cas, but God knows he tried."

"I know, trust me I know." As soon as he found whatever face Gabriel was wearing, Dean was going to smash it in with his bare hands. "But listen to me, something crazy is going on. You're going to think I'm nuts, but her death is connected to a case that I'm working now. I need to know everything. I mean, I know I was there too, but maybe you saw something I missed."

Sam sighed and ran his fingers through his hair. "We had just left the church, after the wedding. She got out of the limo ahead of me, but she dropped something – her bracelet I think. I don't really remember, just that she ran after it and a dump truck came out of nowhere, hauling ass on the wrong side of the road and..." He voice trailed off and he had a pained, faraway look in his eyes. "Well, the guy kept on going, and she was just laying there – broken and bleeding in the road. All I really remember after that was you dragging me inside where I couldn't see her. And, a little while later when Cas came in to tell us that she was gone. Jesus Christ Dean, there was so much blood and he was soaked in it."

"I'm so sorry I brought this up, Sam."

"I wonder if Cas still thinks about it," Sam said, managing a weak smile. "That was some shit, the way he called out that paramedic for not even trying to save Jess, and told the cop on the scene to go fuck himself when he got pissed because his statement wasn't good enough for him."

Dean tried hard not to laugh. None of it was real to him, but he could see Cas losing it in that situation. Even as an angel, he was passionate about doing the right thing and helping whoever he could. Sure, he made a few pretty crappy judgment calls, but his heart was always in the right place. In his defense, free will wasn't something Cas really understood, and he was definitely a more than a little naïve about just how horrible humans could be. Dean tried to ignore the pang of guilt that washed over him. He needed to get back to the real Cas, and try to make it up to him somehow.

"They never caught that dick, either. The truck driver, I mean."

Sam shook his head. "Anyway, you and Cas are coming to the cook out tomorrow, right?"

"Uh... Yeah. We'll be there."