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Dean clutched his chest and curled his arms around himself. He couldn't breathe and the cold desolate wall he was bent against wasn't helping. He needed something, anything warm and soft. Dean reached his palm to the handprint on his shoulder, splaying out his hand to match it. The blood was still wet.
His phone started vibrating again but he had kicked it away earlier, and the distance to reach it was too vast. Dean ignored it and closed his blurry eyes, then exhausted, without really realising, he fell asleep.
When Dean woke up in the middle of the night, he had an idea, muddy and barely formed and largely without logic. He left his room quietly and searched the stash of potion ingredients. His head pounded and his eyes hurt, but he found the dream root, wizened and tucked away. Listened to the kettle bubble, pour, stew. Didn't bother with sugar. He nicked a scraping of dried blood from his jacket and added it in, took it to his room, and sat in the pitch dark on his bed, hands clasped around the warm mug. It didn't feel like enough.
Dean fumbled in the dark to Cas's room and switched on the harsh light. It was quite a simple room, too simple really. He hadn't made it home again after he'd left Dean a couple of weeks ago. There were only some photos the four of them had taken while having a boisterous pizza night, and one of Dean in his cowboy clothes, then one of them together. Dean looked away and rifled through his sparse clothes hooks. There was Cas's spare coat, mundane and monumental all at the same time.
Dean glugged the tea down all in one, barely really tasting it, then lay down with Cas's coat as a duvet. It didn't really smell like him, mostly just the stale stone smell that always came off the bunker walls, but there was a slight inkling of Cas's perfume that made Dean's eyes scrunch up, made his throat a tight cord. His knuckles only slackened on the coat when he fell asleep.
The dream was odd, autumnal. He wandered through suburban streets with leaves falling all around him, until he recognised a garden from wisps of an old memory, an almost-life. There he was, raking leaves, and looking vaguely surly. Dean remembered how he’d used the excuse of garden work to get some space, some air to breathe, to process.
Suddenly, Cas appeared. Dean waited for himself to notice Cas- maybe he misremembered? Maybe this was another suburban garden he had been raking leaves in?- but minutes passed and dream-him didn't so much as look up. Cas looked pained while he watched Dean. It almost seemed too personal and raw an expression to be allowed to see. Dean's heart was jittering, and he was just about to jump up and see for the sheer hell of it if the dream-Cas would be able to see him, when out of nowhere, Crowley appeared too. Before he could process how ridiculous this voyeuristic situation was, the dream changed, twisted.
He was in the bunker’s library, big splaying table, the smell of gasoline, a pile of books with an angel blade stabbed through one. Dean flinched at that. Thankfully Cas wasn’t lying bloody on the floor, but his Cas stood in a corner.
‘Interesting,’ Cas mused, ‘I’ve seen two Deans in this dream so far.’ He tilted his head slightly while surveying the room.
‘You’re able to dream in this place?’ Dean asked, incredulous. Cas shrugged dismissively. ‘It would seem so,’ he said, looking away. Dean hated how he was looking away.
‘I’ve come to get you out,’ Dean said. But Cas was walking out of the room, and in true dream-like fashion, when Dean ran towards him it felt like mud. Mist clouded his vision and he could feel himself being dragged back to waking.
--
After that cloudy vague experience, Dean realised he had to find a way to the Empty or there’d never be a chance. The dream world was not tangible enough. And he had a feeling he might’ve just been entering his own dreams anyway.
When it finally happened, Dean staggered through the darkness for what seemed like hours, until he saw, or maybe sensed, a blue light ahead of him. The closer he got to it, the more he realised how it loomed, a beam jutting up to nowhere and refracting out in all directions, and right at the bottom was Cas, curled in on himself with eyes half closed.
‘Cas’, Dean croaked. He kneeled down, feverishly tapped him, shook him. Cas roused blearily, and Dean tackled him into a messy hug which Cas vaguely reciprocated, tightened more fiercely once he got used to it. But suddenly, he let go. He stood up, and smiled good-naturedly at Dean’s questioning look. He looked tired and resigned.
‘I’ve come to get you out,’ Dean said earnestly. ‘There’s a portal nearby.. somewhere. We can leave.’ He stepped towards Cas, but Cas flinched away. His smile now had an edge of pain to it.
‘No thanks.’
‘What?-’
‘That’s not going to work again,’ said Cas dully, still trying to put on a smile.
Dean spluttered, incredulous. ‘We don’t have much time-’
Cas turned away dismissively and sighed. ‘Maybe you could try impersonating someone else for a change,’ he muttered.
Realisation hit Dean like a knife in the gut. ‘No, no,’ -he was getting desperate now- ‘No it’s really me, I’m real, I’m here for you-’ Cas was walking away, the beam around him refracting and pulsing, hectically blinding stars in Dean’s eyes-
‘You can have-- I want--’ he spluttered, and Cas kept walking. Somehow when Dean followed his legs felt like mud again.
He breathed quick and panicky, then-
‘How could you think you could never have me?’
Cas paused for a moment at that, but carried on walking. The light dimmed the further he went. Dean ran after him, his heart thundering, but he finally wrenched Cas around, grabbed hold of his trenchcoat and with one purposeful look into Cas’s eyes, kissed him. It was desperate and fumbling and over far too soon. Dean broke away and lifted his eyes to look at Cas, terrified of his reaction. Cas’s eyes were wide and his breathing hitched. But he wasn’t stepping away.
‘Alright?’ Dean breathed frustratedly, ‘You believe me now?’
Cas slowly nodded, dumbfounded. Dean sighed in relief, tangled his hands tighter in the front of Cas’s coat and pulled them together. He couldn’t help but glance down at Cas’s mouth again, and this time Cas closed the distance, shyly curling his hand into Dean’s hair, leaning in and kissing him once more.
--
The Empty understandably threw them out (they were making far too much noise). With a surge of brute force, it hurtled them into a forest and directly into a tree. Cas groaned on the ground and looked over to Dean. He was slowly staggering upright, wincing. His right hand had a massive gash from a sharp branch, and the bark had burned his palm so that it stung whenever he moved it. Cas stumbled over with a look of concern.
'I'm good, I'm good,' Dean waved him off, hypocritically checking Cas for injuries at the same time.
Cas smiled and held his hand out to Dean. Dean stilled for a second, looked up at him with wide eyes, then took his hand. The glow healed his stinging palm, and it was done but Dean looked down at their hands, almost hypnotised, and interlocked his fingers tighter with Cas's. He couldn’t help staring down at that, until he felt Cas's gaze dragging his eyes back up. Cas smiled hesitantly, stroked his thumb slightly against Dean's. Dean smiled his crow-feet smile back.