IT'S THE GREAT PUMPKIN, SAM WINCHESTER
"Look," Sam's forehead crinkles. "It just starts with ghosts and ghouls. This sucker keeps on going. By night's end, we are talking every awful thing we've ever seen. Everything we fight, all in one place."
"It's gonna be a slaughterhouse."
Sam nods, seeing the lines between Dean's brows, thinking he looks exhausted."We'd both better get some shuteye, don't you think?"
Dean allows himself the luxury of a sigh.
"And take your shoes off, this time." Sam says.
"Yes, mother." Dean toes off his shoes at the foot of the bed as Sam draws the curtain. He hides his excitement - the last few times he'd slammed the lid of his laptop when Sam had walked in the room, it hadn't been Busty Asian Beauties he was concealing. He has been doing research. Not about a haunting or a demon, but about what Cas had told him, about lucid dreaming - how to become aware, how to take control.
He closes his eyes, absently wondering where this information has been all his nightmare-filled life, why no one had told him that he didn't have to suffer until now. He sets his intention. Tonight, he will fly.
The tie is choking him. Dean tries to swallow, but his adams apple feels stuck in place and his throat is gummy and dry. Why is it so hot in here? He looks around the boardroom, the table filled with snappy-dressed businesspeople whose faces he can't quite make out, but nothing seems amiss.
"Well, Mr. Winchester?" Says the droning voice of the CEO, a sharp-browed older woman with an uncanny resemblance to Dean's all-time least favorite vice-principal. "Please begin your presentation."
"I... Uh..." Dean stammers. His breath comes quick. He cannot recall the subject. If he could just remember what he is supposed to speak about, he's sure he could bullshit his way through it, but every time he thinks he's almost found the memory, it slips away like a slimy fish.
"Mr. Winchester. I am beginning to believe you don't take your position with this company very seriously."
Clamminess slips up Dean's face. He feels the flush of his cheeks and isn't sure whether it is more dignified to wipe the sweat from his forehead or to attempt to ignore it. "I just... I don't..." He starts to hyperventilate.
"Turn out the lights."
Dean looks down to see the gentle face of the co-worker seated beside him, hair mussed and chin dotted with stubble. All at once he knows the man - Why wouldn't he recognize Mr. Novak? They've worked together for years.
"You have to turn out the lights." Novak says again.
Dean swallows. "Uh. Okay. I..." He trails off as he steps gingerly to the far wall, where the cream-colored lightswitch that has always been there suddenly appears. He flips it from ON to OFF.
The flourescent bulbs that light the rooom resolutely continue to glow. Something stirs within Dean. He looks back to the chair next to his, but Novak is gone.
"Mister Winchester." His boss says again, coughing pointedly.
Dean flips the switch again, and again, to no result at all.
"Mister Winchester, need I tell you what will happen if this kind of behabis neevoo conmri hinuus trivunopa?"
The people in the boardroom are grayscale mannequins dressed in identical suits.
Not real. It isn't real. He looks back at the now-empty chair, consumed by the feeling that it is somehow important. He reaches through the mental fog, groping about for the truth, something about that chair... but it eludes him.
He looks back to the CEO. She is a blonde blow-up doll, mouth agape, seams crinkled at the sides of her head where the sheets of latex meet.
What was he going to do? He is transfixed by his own fingers on the light-switch.
His intention.
It isn't real, he tells himself. Tonight, he will fly. He starts to feel his heart rattle and the room begins to blur. No. Not yet. Don't get too like a crazy person, he closes his eyes and spins in circles - a trick he read about to hold onto a dream. It seems to work well enough, the room's edges sharpen again and he feels steady.
When he opens his eyes, he is standing on the window sill, and the pane is gone. The wind whips his hair and steals his breath away. He knows without checking that the boardroom is on the sixty-third floor, something that is only true because he knows it. A long stretch of highway leads away from the foot of the building. No one stands on the road below.
Here goes nothing.
He jumps.
It is only after he jumps that he asks himself, how? He is falling, dropping like a stone through the air head first, asphalt approaching alarmingly fast. Fly fly fly fly come on fly just fly. Just before he collides with the pavement, he slips forward, zooming like he is on wheels inches from the road. He isn't sure why he kicks his legs, but he does, and a slight change of angle sends him careening up into the sky like a hawk coming out of a dive.
Near the apex of the flight, when most of the energy from the fall is spent, he kicks his legs again, pushing down with his arms the way he would if he was trying to swim. He keeps his eyes fixed upward on the clouds. His progress is not as easy as he had hoped, but he is determined to break through them.
The clouds (cumulus, he thinks, in an unbidden memory of third grade science) are like a roof above him at first, but with one last push, he is up and up and above them.
The sky of his dreams is dark and star-filled. Here, hovering is effortless, if only because that is what he expects. The clouds blow fast beneath him like a conveyer belt of white fluff.
"Hello, Dean."
Sounds like the guy from the board room, Nov-Oh. Dean turns to see Cas. Suddenly he is deeply self-conscious regarding flight.
"Cas? You really here?" His eyes roam across the hills and valleys of Cas' face, and if he is not mistaken, he can find a hint of pride, like a teacher looking at a star pupil.
"Will you allow me to stay?" Dean's thoughts and feelings are like a mist in the air, and Cas endeavors not to interpret them, for the sake of courtesy.
Guilt eddies around Dean. He changes the subject: "You, uh..." he gestures dumbly to the area just over Cas' shoulder, where he can see enormous wings spreading outward from behind him, black as coal, the tips reflecting the starlight. "Did I do that, or did you?"
Castiel looks to his left, and then to his right. "You did."
"You don't usually have those?" Dean is a little breathless.
"Wings?" Castiel's eyes fall to the cloud floor below them. "In a manner of speaking, they are always present. Wings... are like dreams. You will see what you expect to see."
Dean remembers to inhale. Something about the wings is distracting, and he is having trouble maintaining altitude, little kicks keeping him up. He is more than a little annoyed that Castiel, who is having no such problem, either isn't noticing or doesn't care. Later, he will recall that the moment Castiel catches his gaze is the moment he stops struggling, and he will wonder if the two are related.
"We need to talk." Castiel says. The peace he had felt upon entering the dream melts from his face and tension takes its place. "Something is coming to this town - something dangerous."
"Yeah," Dean says, "Sam's one step ahead of you, he told me all about the Samhain thing."
"We will meet again soon, Dean. Things are..." He sighs softly. "Whatever I, or any other angel, says to you, do not forget yourself. Remember that which you value. I have to urge caution-About Sam, about everything. I do not wish you to be led astray."
"I don't understand." He wants to search Cas' face for understanding but Cas is gone. One by one, the stars go out.
Candy. When Dean wakes, his first thought is of candy. If he's going to have to spend half his Halloween sitting in the car outside razor-wife's house, he's calling dibs on that bag of candy.
