A/N: short little thing I wrote to make this happy.
The dream world's still there, Cas still standing as it's only permanent resident beside Dean.
These dreams still hurt, but not as much as they once did. Not since Dean found out Cas was still alive. Without memories, but alive. Seeing a fake Lucifer, but a live.
Still so very alive.
A warm, solid alive.
And yet…Dean still has his nightmares, the ones where Cas is dead. At least now when he wakes up, it's not so painful.
-x-
Purgatory is a different story. Cas has left him once more, run off to who knows where.
It takes Dean a year to find the angel. One long, hard, grueling year. A year filled with the monsters lurking among the shadows in purgatory.
And then Dean's out of purgatory. Only now, he's tormented by nightmares of when he left. How he wasn't strong enough to pull Castiel through.
His dreams of the perfect world return, and they make his very essence ache for Castiel.
When Cas comes back to him, like he always seems to do, it's all Dean can do to keep from staring. Staring because he thought he'd lost the angel forever.
But he hadn't. And now, planting a kiss on Cas' lips, not caring that Sam is there, Dean is thinking about the perfect world of his dreams and how it isn't so perfect after all.