Episode 2: His Mind is a Morgue
Dean has never found a place on earth he disliked more than this creepy place he went in his dreams. It was white: so blindingly white it usually took him a few minutes to be able to make out shapes amongst the wave of light rushing at him. Even when he could make out the forms of counters, doors, walls, a ceiling, everything was that same monotonous color. It was like being in an overly sterilized quarantined zone.
The light illuminating every corner of the place didn't seem to come from any specific sources, and it was eerily silent in there. His footfalls didn't even echo. It was deafening, how absolutely quiet it was. Quiet and white. Like milk. Deadly milk.
It looked like some sort of futuristic hospital, sans doctors and patients. As far as Dean knew, he was the only one who ever seemed to visit this place. For the weeks he'd been coming here in his dreams and visions, he'd never seen another soul. Unlike Sam, he'd never even seen any ghastly figures wandering the halls. It was a silence and solitude he'd never experienced before in his life. It really creeped him out.
Dean never really had much to do in the place of his visions. The hallways and rooms seemed to twist and turn into oblivion, never ending but uniform. Although there seemed to be an infinite number of rooms in the place, they were all identical; pristine copies of the morgue from his favorite TV show, Doctor Sexy. The rooms themselves were as nondescript as everything else there, all but what lay inside the morgues.
On his very first night spent in the morgue, he'd curiously swept one of the morgue rooms to see if there was anything of significance hidden within it. He'd expected to find nothing but the same emptiness, but what he saw was infinitely more disturbing. For some reason, it was also strangely addicting.
He decided to open one of the morgue drawers again. He never knew exactly why he had an urge to look at the horrifying contents of the drawers; he got enough of that when he was awake. It was like some strange, masochistic urge within him drew him to what lay inside the containers where dead bodies should have been. What was in there was much worse than a dead body, though.
Walking as if on air into the angular chamber, Dean wandered over to the rows of cabinets on the opposite wall. In a small white box where the names of the deceased were usually written was a random collection of numbers. Countless times he'd try to make sense of the algebraic jumble, but Sam had always been the numbers whiz, not him. Reaching out, Dean took a deep breath and yanked the drawer open.
It was like a bomb went off. Screaming, as though from a million tortured souls, exploded from inside the container. If pure agony were a sound, it would have been the cacophony erupting from inside the drawer. As the shrieking continued, charred, grotesque, decaying, clawed hands and faces stretched out of the box, groping towards him. They were like demons crawling from the very fiery pits of hell. When he gazed down into the depths of the drawer, there was a ceaseless flow of hands and arms and faces and bodies writhed before him.
The stench blasting out of the drawer was also worse than any formaldehyde he'd ever smelled, and he'd been in his fair share of morgues before. Still, he couldn't make himself look away. It was like witnessing a car accident—you couldn't just turn your attention to something else.
There was also something strangely familiar about the contents of the drawers. Every time he looked at howling creatures inside of them, he couldn't help but feel like he'd seen all of them before. Of course, they didn't look like any demons he'd ever seen, or even any of the other bastards he'd ganked during his time as a hunter. Ash didn't even have a clue what they might be, and he knew more about monsters than anyone Dean had ever met.
Dean had no idea how long he stood there, letting the desolate cries of the creatures pound against his eardrums. After a while, the sound almost became soothing to him in the way that the body eventually relaxes when you're drowning. Peaceful suffering.
Sometimes Dean would spend what in the waking world would have been hours staring into the depths of the misery that the drawers held. Each held a similarly disturbing collection of mutilated figures attempting to escape, ever struggling against their metal cage. Today, for some odd reason, Dean found that he wasn't really in the mood for watching a bunch of random monsters scream themselves to death.
With more force then he'd expected would be necessary, he slammed the door shut. Behind the metal, he heard the sound of a latch locking itself like an automatic safe. Somehow, the tangible silence in the room seemed to muffle the screams and slam that should have echoed in the empty space; as if the vibrations were traveling through water.
He turned and left the morgue without looking back, allowing his mind to wander past the hauntingly blank walls around him. Since the splitting headaches kept him from thinking when he was awake (though, who was he kidding, Sam was the brains of the operation), he tried to figure stuff out in this hauntingly quiet place.
However creepy the place was, it was also more peaceful than anywhere he'd been before. If he kept the drawers shut, there were no sounds to disturb his thoughts. Considering the difficulty of the case he and his brother had been working lately, he needed all of the thinking time he could get in this dream world. If they didn't figure out what was going on with the case soon, they'd lose it to some other half-assed hunters, and Dean couldn't stomach the idea of being outdone by someone else. They were the frigging Winchesters, for crying out loud.
Suddenly, all of the lights, wherever they came from, seemed to go out at once. Instincts kicking in, Dean dove in the direction of one of the morgue rooms and slid with a bang into one of the walls. For a moment, he swore he'd gone temporarily blind—because as silent and white the place had been before, it was now pitch black. Without his eyes, Dean knew that it would be suicide to try to get up and walk around. Besides, he was more than a little freaked. This place had been the exact same for weeks on end and now some unknown entity had thrown him into a world of darkness.
Due to the place's ability to absorb all sound, Dean also couldn't hear if anything was approaching. He felt more helpless than he could remember feeling since he was a child, and his family was still unbroken. Since he never brought any weapons to this world with him, he could do nothing but tense up and wait for whatever it was to come for him. He would sure as hell put up a fight when it did.
All at once, the lights came back, but only half so as though they were coming from broken light fixtures. Random sparks were jumping from miscellaneous surfaces around him. After a quick once-over, he couldn't see anything out of the ordinary in the corners of the morgue room, so he got shakily to his feet.
"Hello, Dean," a rough, gravelly voice said from somewhere beside him.
Dean snapped his neck around so hard, he swore he felt one of his vertebrae pop. Standing in the doorway was one of the weirdest people Dean had ever seen. Or, at least, he looked like a person. He had black flyaway hair, blue eyes and a tie to match, and…a trench coat of all things. He didn't look particularly dangerous. But then again, a lot of things he and Sam hadn't looked very threatening at first glance. Dean certainly wasn't stupid enough to let his guard down, even if this guy did look like a harmless puppy.
"Who the hell are you?" Dean asked, plastering himself against the wall.
The man tilted his head to the side, and the smallest of self-assured smiles flitted across his lips.
"I am an Angel of the Lord," he replied calmly, taking a few steps closer to Dean.
Dean couldn't help but let out a snort of disbelief.
"No really," he snapped, returning to attack-mode. "Who the hell are you?"
The man's smile faded slightly and he looked profoundly confused.
"I am an Angel of the Lord," he repeated. "My name is Castiel."
"I don't believe in angels," Dean retaliated, relaxing slightly and folding his arms across his chest. "Those are stories for kids. Who are you really? Are you some figment of my imagination?"
"Of course not," the man refuted, decreasing the distance between them even further. "I have been sent from Heaven to raise you from perdition. The life that you lead right now is only a shadow of what Heaven has in store for you, Dean."
This time, Dean burst out into outright laughter. Ignoring the completely lost expression on the other man's face, Dean walked right up to Castiel and stared at him straight in the eyes. At this point, he was pretty convinced that he was just some sort of concoction of Dean's subconscious and that there really wasn't a reason to be afraid of him.
"You're telling me that heaven sent some cute-cheeked little cherub down here to tell me that they want to own my ass?" he chuckled. "You're pulling my leg."
"I promise that my hands are nowhere near your limbs," Castiel said quite seriously.
"Look, I know you're just another thing this hell-hole's brought up to make me completely frigging miserable. I'm not going to talk to a figment of my imagination," Dean said, brushing past Castiel into the hallway where maybe he could get away from all the crazy shit for a while.
Not three steps out the door, Dean nearly ran into the man when he materialized out of thin air in front of him.
"I don't have much time," Castiel explained. "I need to explain a few things to you before I go."
Exasperated, Dean sighed and consented to listen to whatever this guy, image, thing, had to say to him. There was no point in arguing with his own mind, and he didn't have the energy or the willpower to fight with him.
"Alright, whatever," he said, waving his hand for the man to continue.
The same slightly egotistical smile spread across his face, and relief relaxed his shoulders. He seemed almost to deflate with reprieve.
"Excellent," he said in a much happier tone. "I will make this a very quick explanation. We will have much more time to talk later. For now, the important details. Your visions are, as you have already guessed, manifestations of your mind. Specifically, the section of your subconscious where you manage to bury your memories and feelings when you want them to disappear."
"So this is my emotional graveyard?" Dean asked, trying with all his might not to sound as cynical as he felt.
"Precisely," Castiel nodded, sounding excited. "I have been sending you here because I needed you to enter into this part of your mind so that I can understand you more completely."
"And all the other shit I've been going through?" Dean questioned in spite of himself. "The dizziness, the vomiting, the migraines that would make a normal man cry?"
"We have been preparing you and Samuel for our arrival. The physical symptoms are your bodies getting used to the vastness of our power," the man nodded.
"The whistling that practically drove me insane?"
"I must admit that my natural language may not be the most pleasant to human ears," the man consented.
Castiel proceeded to reach into the pocket of his trench coat and pull out a small glass vial on a chain. It was filled with what looked to Dean like gleaming black powder, though in grains so tiny it looked almost like a very thick liquid. Wrapped around the vial was a pair of metallic wings identical to the color of the powder inside.
"This is a small sample of the powder that coats my wings. If it is in any way in contact with your skin, a link will form between us. We will be able to communicate over any distance and I will know your exact location," Castiel said with a touch of pride
He handed the vial very gingerly to Dean. Instantly, Dean felt like he'd been electrocuted as a shock ran from where his fingers touched the glass through the rest of his body. At first, it hurt like a mother, and Dean nearly cried out in pain. However, after a few minutes, the pain subsided and Dean was left with little more than a tingling sensation emanating from the vial.
"Jesus, that's strong," Dean grumbled, stuffing the vial into his pocket.
"Very," Castiel agreed. "I have to go, Dean. Your mind can't tolerate my presence for much longer. You can expect me to introduce myself in person very soon."
Before Dean could react, there was a whooshing sound, and Castiel disappeared from sight. Remaining skeptical, Dean shook his head and ran his fingers through his hair, wondering what the hell the world had come to. Yesterday, life had been so simple; gank the demon, save a few people, make sure Sam didn't go off the deep end. Now his mind was creating angels and screaming people in morgue cabinets.
First thing when he woke up, Dean was downing whatever he could get his hands on.