Interlude V:
Of all the new mortal habits he had acquired in falling, Castiel disliked sleep the most. Sleep meant the onset of dreams, which conversely meant surrendering his already spurious human control to the whims of his newly grown subconscious.
He could usually ward it off through brief dozing during the day, stealing moments of sleep that Dean or Sam would wake him from when he stumbled into the grasp of a troubling dream. But there were times, such as this night after the hunt for the witch, when even his carefully limited hours of slumber just couldn't stave off the bone-deep exhaustion. It was then that his mind surrendered to sleep without a fight, because he just didn't have the strength for anything else.
The dreams that plagued him presented themselves in several guises, tormenting him in their own way because his subconscious was, as Dean would say, a dick.
The nonsense dreams were the ones he grudgingly abided. They were harmless beyond the annoyance they caused when he woke, staring at the ceiling of whatever motel or hovel where he and the brothers slept in that night, trying to understand how his brain had created a scenario where a suit-wearing cactus chatted to a duck on a cellular phone.
Those types of dreams annoyed him in the way all illogical thoughts did, in the manner of there being no purpose to them.
Still, he would gladly experience nonsense over of the alternative.
The dreams based on memory which morphed into images meant to frighten, those were the ones he truly loathed. That brand of dream wasn't simply his human brain twisting together his experiences as a mortal, either, although those too were far from pleasant recollections. When memory elected to taunt him, it was with what little his human mind could comprehend of the awe he had seen since his creation.
It wasn't just his own recollections that provided fuel for his subconscious. Jimmy was no longer present in this body, but his memories remained locked within its hippocampus. Much of Castiel's experience in human matters came directly from his reliance on Jimmy's reminiscences. Still, even there, memories existed which he wished he did not have rely on or re-experience during sleep cycles.
Jimmy's experience of wetting himself when forced to give an oral presentation on the Declaration of Independence in the fifth grade was one of them.
As usual, Castiel didn't immediately realize he had fallen asleep. He could still feel the flat motel pillow beneath his head and the scratch of the comforter, could still hear the rhythmic breathing of Sam and Dean in their respective beds. Yet, in a seamless transition between waking and sleeping, he found his awareness drifting within a dream.
The room was brightly lit and familiar, the lingering smell of dinner not dispersed by the nearby air-freshener or the open windows. The curtains were closed, but shifted within the breeze, and he could practically smell the dusk on the night air. A television was on, depicting one of those ridiculous human dramas that Dean was so fond of, but the hunter was nowhere to be seen.
There was a body tucked next to him, a fact which his brain did not question, and he was inexplicably aware that it belonged to a woman. Her shorter, delicate form was curled into his side in an intimate and familiar manner. Her head on his shoulder, and it occurred to him that he had an arm around her. He could feel the soft texture of her clothing through his own, and the curvature of her shoulders against his wrist. Her hair tickled his face and he thought he could smell some kind of artificial strawberry scent lingering. Where strong scents normally tended to make his mortal stomach roil, this time it did not bother him.
For the first time since falling, outside of brief instances when Sam or Dean reached out to show him comfort, he felt warm and comfortable and safe. It was a shadow of what he had felt once with the Host, but such a welcome relief from the so-far lacklustre experience of being human that he allowed himself to bask in it briefly.
There was a trilling, blaring chime somewhere nearby, breaking the momentary spell of leisure. He turned toward it, his movements lethargic and too unhurried even for mortal slowness; a familiar telephone upon a familiar table, which the woman beside him stood to answer.
As she moved, her hair trailing over her shoulders like silk and a subtle sway to her hips, he recognized her. Amelia Novak looked younger than when he had first encountered her in person, but there was no doubt about her identity. She was a beautiful woman, Jimmy's memories told him, pointing out her symmetrical features, pale skin, red lips and long lashes; his angelic perception of the human form concurred with assessment, finding beauty in the shape that was his Father's image.
Castiel realized then that he was sitting in Jimmy Novak's living room. The familiarity he felt was due to the memories, not his own experience. Even when he had first visited Jimmy before claiming him as a vessel, he had not physically manifested in this house.
It was then that his brain told him that he was dreaming. His usual reaction to that knowledge was to try to break through the prison of sleep before the nightly terrors began, but right now he was too tired. His bones felt sodden and his eyelids seemed to be weighted with lead, and so he had no choice but to be swept back up in the dream.
Amelia-within-the-dream chuckled, and said something in a teasing, chiding voice, before hanging up the phone. She offered him a small smile. "Claire's staying at a friend's house."
He tilted his head to one side. "Is that a good idea? I mean, it's a school night."
The words were from Jimmy's remembrances, not his own, but he allowed them to escape his lips just the same.
"She's promised that they're working on their solar system project," Amelia assured him, approaching him slowly. "But you know what this means, right?"
There was a strange look in her eyes and an odd curve to her mouth, and Castiel felt his own mimicking the gesture. "We can skip town and head for Vegas like we planned?"
She reached out and smacked him lightly on the shoulder, the gesture playful and free of malice. She continued to watch him with that odd glint in her eyes, eyes crinkled with mirth while her pupils dilating slightly. Before he could react, she was straddling his lap and leaning in, her lips brushing his right ear. "We could have some fun."
He exhaled in surprise, the sensations of pleasing warmth and comfort at the familiar embrace marred by the knowledge that real or not, this was the wife of the man whose body he had stolen. He had no right to take comfort in it, whether subconsciously or not.
"Amelia…" he began, his words coming out with surprising difficulty. It felt like his brain and his mouth were disconnected.
"Shhh," she pressed a finger to his lips with one hand, while the other began to undo her blouse. At the first glimpse of cleavage, he felt warmth creep up the back of his neck and his ears.
"We shouldn't –" he tried again, willing himself to move her away from him, but his body was held immobile beneath hers and his eyes remained fastened on the work of her hand.
The kiss, when it came, was surprisingly demanding despite the softness of her lips, and yet he experienced it from an oddly distant standpoint. He dimly registered a pleasant pressure and the corresponding spread of warmth throughout the rest of his body, but it felt just as dampened as sensations always had when he experienced it through his grace.
'Perhaps the fact that this is a dream diminishes the impression,' he thought idly as the imagined version of Jimmy's wife finished unbuttoning her blouse and shrugged out of it, leaving her sitting in his lap in nothing but her pants and brassiere.
He once again tried to protest, but found himself distracted by the push of her breasts against his chest and the sudden sensation of her tongue breaching his mouth. His breath hitched in surprise, and the warmth that had been steadily spreading through his body began to pool in one place below his waist.
Castiel knew enough about human physiology to recognize the signs of arousal, but he had never experienced them himself, even the night that Dean brought him to a den of iniquity. This was the closest, this dream, and it felt confusing and not quite right. Muted, somehow, like he was still experiencing it through Jimmy's memory and not personally.
She moved forward with a rolling motion, and he held back a groan at the unfamiliar spark of something that went through him. While he attempted to categorize the sensation, he felt her fingers fumbling at his own shirt, undoing the buttons there with increasing impatience until the cold air of the living room hit his skin.
He gasped, and she was on him again. He could feel the slow drag of her tongue as it traced a path down the shell of his ear, making him shudder, then down his jaw and below, dipping into the hollow of his throat. His eyes shut as fingers dragged down his chest, and he had to bite his lips to keep from making a noise when that tongue flicked at one of his nipples.
And then the warmth moved away. "Are you okay?"
Castiel's eyes shot open and he stared in startled shock at the person that asked that, because it wasn't Amelia Novak's voice.
"D-Dean?" his tongue tripped over the word, and there was an infuriating crack in his voice.
"S'my name," Dean whispered, feminine voice low and laden with something unspoken. His green eyes crackled heatedly and his mouth was tugged into the familiar, sly smile that he only ever directed at Sam or Castiel. Only right now, instead of good-natured fun, there was something more primal hidden in it.
"Where did…? Why are you…?" Castiel wasn't sure if it was the thrall of the dream that was curbing his ability to speak, or the heated gaze that Dean had pinned on him. Whatever the reason, his mind remained too confused, and his body too warm and heavy, to worry about this sudden incoherence.
Dean's form remained in its current female incarnation, rendered the way Castiel knew it from the few glimpses he had caught over the past week when Dean forgot to cover up. Evidently they had been enough to allow Castiel's brain to make an accurate catalogue of it, and he discovered he was unable to look away from the upwards swell of Dean's breasts.
Unlike when observing Amelia, Castiel found himself breathless at the sight of Dean, like some part of him had been waiting for that all along. Female or male, Dean was beautiful to him, down to the last freckle. Castiel was filled for a fleeting moment with rage toward the pagan monstrosity that had destroyed the body he had reconstructed, and then with regret that he would never again see the radiant shine of Dean's soul.
Curiously enough, Dean was wearing the amulet Castiel had returned to him after the Winchesters' ill-fated trip to Heaven. It rested comfortably in the subtle dip of cleavage between them, and for a moment Castiel wondered what Dean had actually done with it.
Those thoughts were lost, though, when Dean expertly maneuvered Castiel's shirt off of him and then bunched it up, throwing it somewhere over his shoulder to be forgotten.
"Never properly thanked you…for what you did," Dean whispered, raising Castiel's right had to cup one of his breasts. "For everything."
While Castiel was sure that he had perceived a similar scene in one of those erotic displays that he had walked in on the hunter viewing more than once in the past two years, his body didn't seem to care. It didn't matter that Dean had never actually done this to him, or that Castiel had never consciously entertained any wanton thought towards his charge
And when Dean suddenly surged forward, clamping his hips down tightly on either side of Castiel's and ground downward, rubbing roughly against the growing hardness in his lap, Castiel couldn't help the shocked moan that tore from his throat.
It was difficult to catalogue the sharp mixture of pain and pleasure that radiated outward like an electrical current through his nerves. The sensation was far from muted, and he realized dimly that it was because this was his own experience and not a remnant of Jimmy.
"Seem to recall makin' you a promise a while back," Dean murmured, shifting his weight to one side. Before Castiel could protest, he found himself being pushed, and he was suddenly lying backward on the couch, with Dean leaning over him. "And now that you're human…well, it'd be a shame for you to die a virgin."
The kiss, this time, was more than just the lingering memory of another man kissing his wife. This was different, a myriad of sensations pulled together from what Castiel knew of human intimacy and what he knew of Dean. Half-formed thoughts and observations on how Dean smelled, how his skin and cells had felt as Castiel stitched him back together, how he tipped his head when kissing one of his many lovers…
Castiel couldn't breathe, but instead of a cloying discomfort of being without oxygen, he felt buoyed up on an unknown feeling. His hands twitched, like they wanted to grasp hold of something, but he truly had no idea what, and so they remained immobile beside him as Dean traced the roof of Castiel's mouth with his tongue.
When Dean pulled away, he was no longer in his borrowed form, but looked down at Castiel in the body Castiel had rebuilt. The hard planes of his chest were smooth, slightly sweat-sheened, and there was a flush across his cheeks and down his neck that Castiel didn't think had anything to do with the temperature in the room.
"Dean," Castiel said, the word a statement and a question and a plea all in one.
Dean's wide grin became more predatory, and he chuckled low in his throat. The sound made the hair on the back of Castiel's neck stand up, and something within him constricted –
And then Dean was once again a solid weight on top of him – warm skin pressed against his, heady scent of gun oil and leather surrounding him, amulet digging into Castiel's own chest – muttering words in his ear. Castiel couldn't understand them, but didn't care, because he felt teeth nipping at the corner of his jaw and scraping down his neck, across his collarbone, and he had never felt this before but he had seen it and, unknowingly, wanted.
He inhaled sharply and bucked upward as Dean worked a hand into his pants, curling his fingers around the length of him.
"Relax, Cas," Dean breathed into his ear, and Castiel shuddered –
Castiel gasped and opened his eyes, his body trembling as he awoke, staring up at the motel ceiling in breathless horror. For several seconds, his brain reeled from the sudden change in scenery, the dream falling away from him as realization and wakefulness took over.
He jerked his head to the left, both relieved and ashamed to find that the Winchesters were indeed still in the room. They slept deeply, unaware of his distress. They had probably believed he would remain awake as was his habit, and so neither had tried to stay awake for him.
In the bed closest to the door, Dean slept on his stomach with one hand beneath his pillow, likely clutching the demon-killing knife in his sleep.
Castiel swallowed and tried to sit up, and held back a whimper as the movement caused the ratty motel cover to pull across the hardness that remained between his legs. It seemed the arousal incurred by the dream would not fade as quickly.
Carefully and quietly, praying to an absent Father that neither Sam nor Dean would awaken to see him, he crept into the ensuite bathroom and locked himself in.
The onslaught of light when he turned it on made him dizzy for a moment, seeing stars, but eventually that faded. He stared at his reflection in the mirror, took in the wide eyes whose pupils remained dilated, and the way his shoulders shook with his rushed breathing. Then his attention moved downward, to the telling bulge in his borrowed sweatpants.
'Dreams are not reality,' he told himself, echoing Sam's words to him the first night he had experienced the ravages of his own subconscious. 'It's just this brain mixing thoughts and memories up due to the events of the last few days. It means nothing.'
The look in his reflection's eyes as he tried to will away the uncomfortable erection, though, suggested otherwise.
A huge 'thank you' goes out to those of you who have been reading along so far and who have taken the time to review, most especially: 222Raavens, Anna, ashwingsmokefeather, Blasphemoos3, Busie, Crimson Vipera, darkburning, darkphoenix2345, Effective Immediately, elenathehun, Fallen Seraphim, girlnineteen, Isis the Sphinx, Jade Chase, jazzy, jdluvva, justine82, kaddabo, kai, Kiyomisa, lasersforeyes (Shane) Leoooo, Lil Kitsune-chan, LonelyElf, Melacreature, mercurybard, Michele, netherlady, Omri00, pinkskyline, PopsicleOfDeath, primarycolours123, romie, Sadie, sonofafluffymuffin, vastrea and xoxo.
