Archive of Our Own

There are wind chimes that knock together to create a song in Dean’s dreams, sometimes. They hang off the front stoop of some old rickety porch that he must know from another life because even though he’s never seen it in reality, it features in his dreams- only his dreams- and it looks the same every time that his brain conjures it up. The melody of the chimes is a steady one, higher in pitch where the pipes are tiny silver stars of things. He knows from past experiences of dreams just like this that the door to his left leads into the house and is open with only a screen cover to protect it from what is on the outside versus what is on the inside. It’s like that to let a breeze in. It’s like because it’s a wound.

He’s sitting in a chair staring out over the horizon line to a sun that’s just setting and throwing gray light across the front lawn. His eyes close against it. To his left through that screen door, there’s a shout of an angry voice. Dean doesn’t pay it any mind or bother to open his eyes. This part is familiar to him. Gets these dreams around Christmas time. The holidays always brought something irate out in John, and Dean wonders now if it was all the real snow and fake trees that made him reminisce on the happy days of a warm household that have long since soured into a reality where the wife that you love but also hate burns up on the ceiling and leaves you with two children that you love but also hate.

Right now inside the house, John definitely hates him more than he loves him. The version of Dean that’s inside anyway, probably six years old if he had to guess. Here on the front porch he’s thirty-seven but useless as shit. He’s tried before in this dream to stop the abuse from happening, but no one in the scene could see him- not his child self and not John- and it got too painful to watch the whole thing unfold up close so he just stopped trying to engage. It hurts more and less this way, to just stay out on the front porch. The dull ache of a phantom limb that reminds you that the limb is gone.

His eyes are closed. He bites his bottom lip. Inside John screams at a trembling child. At least the limb is gone.

There’s a creak of movement in front of him on the porch as one of the wooden boards shifts under some sort of weight. It makes Dean’s brow furrow and his jaw twitch in surprise. Only when he hears the noise again, a low groan like a harmony to the wind chimes, does Dean bother opening his eyes. He startles in his chair when he sees a wiry black dog pacing back and forth like an anxious gambling man who bet on red.

“Well you’re new.” Unsurprisingly, the dog does not respond, so Dean continues, “Are you sure you’re in the right dream, Balto? Rosy might need ya.”

The dog pauses then, only for a second of time where a swell of silence is left behind in the spot that the clack of its claws had just been occupying, before it resumes its nervous walk. The haunches of it move under the stretch of its fur, the slunk of an animal, and yet there’s the very real sense that something is present with Dean here on this porch. It’s not an omen or a symbol or something to look up on the internet when he wakes up. The dog is a… thing, the same way the Dean is a thing, existing like an extra layer separate from the scene of the dream still happening inside of the house. Notably the dog doesn’t look at him, keeping its eyes down to the wood of the porch as it paces. The hair on Dean’s arms has stood on end and his jaw has clenched around this strange awe that he couldn’t explain if he wanted to. Fascination that kisses fear. Not scared though.

“What-” Dean’s gaze narrows. “What are you exactly?”

There’s a bang and a crash as John throws something breakable across the room, and Dean has been so distracted by the dog that he jumps and turns his head towards the screen-door commotion for the first time since it started. He wants to get up but he knows better, so his knuckles just tighten on the armrests of his wooden porch chair. Before he even has a chance to look back at where the dog had been, it’s coming into his line of vision because it’s going to the door. When it gets to the screen, the only thing stopping it from getting in, Dean holds his breath to see what it will do. It growls under its breath, its top lip pulling back to reveal sharp, white teeth that look matte in the light of the still setting sun. A sudden clap like a slap across skin rings out from inside the house and Dean flinches. The dog goes- just fucking nuts.

It barks, snarls, and Dean’s eyes widen when it starts to tear into the screen with those canine teeth.

“Jesus Christ!” and he’s not really saying it to anyone in particular but not reacting at all would be crazier than talking to air. Part of him wonders if he should try to help. He knows that he can’t interact with the scene inside, but he’s always at least been able to open the screen door with his opposable thumbs. Doesn’t seem to matter much, because the dog has already chewed a hole in the thin wire large enough to fit through it. Just like that the dog disappears into the house.

Now, it really is fear that overcomes Dean’s stomach and turns it into some snowy mountain range of cold desertion. Caught in a moment of unknowns. He feels protective of the dog in a bizarre way, and he thinks that no matter how fierce it seems, John’s gun will always be fiercer. Alone now on the porch, he didn’t realize how comforting he found the dog's presence in just the sense that he wasn’t alone with the terrible noises coming from inside the house until the company is gone, and he might be grown here as an external accessory to the domestic scene, but he feels like child. Not the same way he felt like a child when he was a child. This is the type of dissonance where you’re far enough removed from the original situation that you feel the sensation even more because it isn’t supposed to be happening in this time and place. A grown child, just minutes ago staring at the sky with a hardened chest. Suddenly he is terribly pliant and warm with youthful distress.

It’s a distress that grows when he hears more growling and barking from inside the house.

“Hey!” Dean finally stands so that he can reach the four pane window that’s behind his chair. He bangs an open palm against it. “Hey! Hey, what are you doing? What’s going on in there?” When there’s no response other than all of the commotion going quiet, he bangs against the window trim harder as if to fight the omen of what he knows silence can mean.

But just then the screen door squeaks at the hinges as it opens up, the width of it fully facing Dean for the first time so that he can see the ragged hole that now gapes in its center thanks to the dog’s teeth. He watches as both the child version of himself and the dog walk out onto the porch together, with the kid’s little chubby hand tangled into the black scruff of the dog's neck.

“You’re such good doggy.” Dean’s lip wobbles at the sound of his own young voice. This has never happened before. He never gets out of the house. So he watches with rapt attention as his child-self walks with the dog across the wood of the porch without any sort of acknowledgment of Dean’s grown presence. “Thank you for saving me, pup. You’re funny. Funny-looking pup.”

It’s strange because although the dog has a certain aura about it, Dean wouldn’t say it looks like anything more than a stray. The mystery of what his younger self is referring to is answered quickly when the dog raises its head as the two of them walk past the grown Dean in order to get to the stairs that lead down from the porch to the front yard.

It stares right at Dean for that pinpoint second. Its eyes are blue down the straight line of its muzzle. They pin Dean’s heart to the inside of his chest. A gaze that Dean knows as well as the back of his hand these days, yet even when they’re attached to their usual body they still stir something like nerves up low in Dean’s stomach. The intensity of them and the angel that lives behind them who Dean feels like he can never hide from even when all he wants to do is protect his soft flesh behind the stone of his hands. Certainly, out on this porch, there is no hiding now either.

“...Cas?”

The dog lowers its head in a way that is so reminiscent of the real Castiel’s apologetic mannerisms that it feels like the final confirmation of Dean’s hunch. It turns Dean’s stomach into knots, thinking about what Cas has just seen here in the privacy of his mind. Still, even when Cas is at his most apologetic, he has always had equal conviction to what he believes is justice, and so the dog of him turns back to the child version of Dean and bumps his snout into his short hip as if to say Come along now. He leads the six-year-old Dean, who is babbling some story to his furry rescuer as if what had just happened in the house with John hadn’t happened at all, down the stairs of the front porch. They walk out to the lawn together. Dean watches as Cas turns to throw one last look over his haunch, and this time his blue eyes do not look sorry at all for rescuing Dean.

…

His eyelashes are stuck together with residue from his sleep, and it brings resistance when he first tries to blink awake. The process is slow, dawning, the same way that his brain is trying to grasp back onto the dream he’d just had that slips from him as easy as a last breath. He flicks his head to the side while he frowns, trying to get rid of the ticklish sensation of something grazing his forehead. Eyes scrunching then blooming open, Dean is greeted to the sight of Castiel standing over him in his recliner, arm still outstretched with two fingers raised as though that was what Dean had been feeling in the center of his forehead just a second ago.

That blue gaze staring down the straight line of Cas’s nose.

Suddenly Dean is wide awake. He jerks himself upright in the seat but doesn’t stand because if he did he would practically be in Cas’s arms, the fronts of their shoulder cusps pulled together like magnets while the concavity of their chests force a valley between them like even that close they’d still know they shouldn’t touch heartbeats. That’s how it is with them these days.

“Cas.” Just the name is all he can manage at the moment, but Cas doesn’t seem inclined to give up any more of an explanation from that little prompt, so Dean finally adds, “What?”

“Apologies. You fell asleep while we were watching Heat and developed a nightmare. I assumed it was about Hell. I do my best to curb those when I’m able, but it wasn’t… Well…”

“Hold- Just hold on a second. You’re saying you shazzam my Hell nightmares away?”

“Um. Yes. As I said, when I’m able.”

“Since when?” To anyone else Cas’s expression would look nonchalant, but Dean knows him well enough to call it sheepish and be right about it. Dean’s no idiot, and in the time it takes for Cas to come up with some lousy lie, Dean thinks back to that one case in Oklahoma where he slept like a baby for a week straight while Cas tagged along and kept lookout for any wayward angelic activities. “Two years?”

Cas’s eyebrows furrow, pissy. “It’s not easy to stand by and watch your discomfort when I know there’s something I can do to help.”

“So is that your excuse for the little cameo you made in my dream just now, too? I don’t need your pity.”

“As a matter of fact, yes, it was. And pity has little to do with anything.”

Again, Dean has to stop himself from standing, this time out of indignation. He feels trapped from this downward angle Cas has pinned him at, makes him bristle against the picture that his dream had painted while Cas looked on. “Well it was a little personal.”

At Dean’s waspish tone, he almost expects the argument to escalate for no reason other than they’re both old, stubborn bastards with fragile egos. Cas surprises him, though, when his jaw clenches around an emotional sort of swallow and he averts his gaze to the ground. “I know it was. I’m sorry.”

Dean slouches back into his recliner, a puppet cut from its strings as the fight leaves him at Cas’s unexpected understanding. “It’s- It’s fine. I mean, I guess I appreciate the thought. I guess.” He, too, avoids eye contact now, so that they both look like idiots having a conversation with the ground even when they’re right in front of each other. “So, what was with the dog? Why not just show up as you?”

“I’m capable of entering your dreams and altering them as I please, the same way an angel can warp time or influence a thought, but I try not to… I guess you could say, upset the natural balance, more than I have to. The nightmares of Hell, I was already there for them when I rescued you, so even though you may not consciously remember your raising, I have to change very little about how your unconscious mind recreates the memories. This was different.” Again, guilt crosses Cas’s voice. “Obviously. You had… I believe you had written a story for school when you were very young about how you wished you had a dog, both as a companion and as a protector. It was vague. The teacher you had at the time didn’t read much into it. You got a good grade. But it was about the abuse you suffered at the hands of your father. When I entered your dream, I was a dog because that’s what you wanted me to be.”

“Oh,” Dean says. “I didn’t- I don’t remember that.”

He finally looks up to find Cas gazing back at him looking somber, but there is no pity in his voice when he says, “It was a long time ago.” There’s a full and strange lull between them. “I can leave you be, if you’d like.”

“Nah. You don’t- You don’t have to leave, Cas.”

“Alright.” But Cas doesn’t move to sit back in his respective recliner, just continues to stand over Dean awkwardly, almost like he wants to shift on his feet. Dean’s eyes dart back and forth in question. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“What’s there to talk about?”

“Nothing, I suppose. Um. I’ll just-” Cas stiffly motions to his recliner and goes to move towards it.

The words bubble in Dean’s throat. “I’ve never really talked about it before.” Cas stops and recenters himself in front of Dean’s chair. Dean is grateful that he is still close but would never be able to figure out how to say that out loud. “Sam and I have sort of acknowledged it, with each other, but even that always feels off because our relationships with him- my dad, I mean- were so different.”

“I can imagine.” And then Cas does something so wildly out of character that Dean can’t even question it, just watch in confusion and odd security as Cas sits himself down on the arm of Dean’s recliner. It’s such a human sort of move, casual. He doesn’t turn fully towards Dean, but tilts his head down in his direction where Cas still has a few inches on him from extra height the arm gives him. “Sam wasn’t anywhere in your dream, either.”

Dean shakes his head. “He never is in dreams like that. Dunno why.”

“You’ve had that dream before?”

“Yeah, I always get nightmares about Dad around Christmas time. Always the same where I’m sitting out on the front porch and I can hear everything that’s happening inside, but-” He waves his hand in a helpless gesture- “I can never stop it.”

“Excuse me if I’m overstepping, but… was your father like that often?”

It’s like Dean wishes he could be quick to reply, pull off the band-aid of the extremely nuanced answer that is somehow a blend of all the time, almost never, and when did he consider me enough of a person to waste his energy hitting me? But the sentiments overlap until they ball up and wedge in Dean’s throat like a lump of tears. He tries to clear it but all the action does is roughen his voice when he speaks. “I don’t think so.” He’s not sure if it’s a lie or not. “That kind of memory just tends to stand out from everything else.”

“I can see why,” Cas answers in this gentle sort of tone. He tilts his chin further towards Dean. “It was rather upsetting for me to witness, as well.”

“No kidding. You left a real hickey on that screen door.”

Cas laughs. “I feel protective of you. What’s that phrase you use? ‘Sue me’?”

Dean appreciates the joke and the way it defuses some of the tension his own honesty is starting to cause in his shoulders. But when he goes to chuckle at Cas’s lame humor, all that comes out of him is a gust of hot air. He doesn’t know how to explain it, really. Maybe that a laugh is just too close to a sob, and so the brain gets confused about exactly what sort of energy it’s supposed to be expelling. There’s a part of him that wants to pretend, and to flatten this whole thing out like a sheet of angry paper with a closed fist ironing every wrinkle, where he could punish his history back into place and not look too closely at it until next Christmas when he starts to get his dreams again. But there’s a separate, quiet, young thing in his chest that is begging to be heard. He chokes on it audibly enough that Cas’s expression turns to concern.

“Dean?”

“You hate him,” Dean says, feels his bottom lip tremble over nothing, “but you sort of love him, too. You sorta love how much you hate him and that- that rage that you feel in your stomach.” His hand moves down as if to mime the message, holding his palm over his abdomen like it's something swollen and unholy. “Like it’s the only way you’ll ever get back at him, and it’s the only way you can still have him in your life because Lord knows you don’t even like the bastard. But he always told you what to do, you know? And the worst part is that he was almost always right- with hunting, with taking care of Sammy- the results spoke for themselves. His orders were so calculated like that. And so-” To Dean’s utter humiliation, a tear falls down the curve of his cheek- “if he was right about all of that, how could he have been wrong about not loving me? How could I even question whether I was…”

The words leave him then, and Dean lets them. He scrubs his knuckles over his nose to stop its running. On the arm of the chair next to him, Cas shifts and then he puts the basket of his hands together in his lap, interlacing his fingers as though in very loose prayer. Not too tight. When Dean glances over at him, the stoop of his shoulders is tan from his trenchcoat and the line of his profile is strong from his nose.

“My father is… ultimate. All-knowing. Creator of this world with all of the… beautiful and complex things in it. I love those things very much, that my Father in his wisdom created, but I don’t think I love my Father. I know that my Father doesn’t love me.” At this, Dean finally turns to fully look at Cas just in time to see his lips purse and then curl up in a sarcastic sort of smirk. Maybe sarcastic is too strong of a word for how sad it seems. “So how do you stand it? The one who brought life to you looking at you with such disdain.”

It’s only when Cas moves his head to look directly back at Dean that Dean realizes he expects an actual answer from him. Sad blue eyes vulnerable in a way Dean has never seen before.

“I don’t know,” Dean admits while his heart breaks. “Is it bad that I’m happy he’s dead?”

Cas stares through him frowning, and then says with no judgment, no malice, “Are you happy he’s dead or are you just happy he can no longer harm you now?”

Dean tongues the inside of his cheek as another tear rolls down it. “They’re the same thing. I’ll never get me back. What he did to me… I’ll never get me back, no matter how much I hate him. Even if he were still alive, it wouldn’t change anything.”

“No,” Cas agrees, “I suppose it wouldn’t.” There’s silence then as both of them slowly turn away from each other to face back down at their shoes. Cas breaks it by asking, “What do you think you would be like, if it were possible to get ‘you’ back?”

“That’s a loaded question.”

“This is a loaded conversation, I believe.”

Dean glances over at him in surprise and can’t choke down the incredulous laugh that comes out of him when he sees Cas smiling ornery. He schools his expression while he thinks of how to answer. “I’d be better. Kinder. Wouldn’t feel so much like I had something to prove to nobody and everybody all at once. Be able to look at myself in the mirror- be able to see a person standing there looking back at me. I’d let people in, let people hug me, touch me. I’d tell my dad that I hate him. That I always did, and that there was never one time in my life that I loved him more than I loved the way he abused me and called it love anyway. In the most- fucked up way- I’ll always miss that more than I’ll miss him.”

And he thinks he’s said too much, even just hearing it aloud himself really, but Castiel is nodding beside him. “The thrill of the challenge of winning his affection.”

“Yeah,” Dean whispers.

Cas faces him again, regretful. “The thrill never ends because the challenge never ends. Even in your father’s death.”

A nod.

“Dean… I don’t- I don’t mean to sound cruel, but there was no challenge because your father was never going to love you. And it’s not because you are incapable of being loved, but because he was incapable of being loving. And that is not your fault.”

The bluntness of the words slaps at Dean, has his hackles raising and his jaw ticking, and just when he jerks towards Cas to give him a piece of his mind, the biting words die in his half open mouth when he sees the tenderness and apologies in Cas’s eyes. He’s just like Dean, here, abandoned by a father who loved everything other than him. Or so it seemed, maybe. So instead of the lashing that Dean could so easily give, he just asks, “How can you know?”

“Know what?”

“That it’s his fault and not mine?”

“Because I love you. And so there is proof that you are capable of being loved in just that.”

Stopped in his tracks the same way his breath is stuck in his throat, Dean doesn’t know if he’s more shocked by the words or the casual way that Castiel says them. They do talk about their feelings, sometimes. It’s not that either of them are so extremely closed off that they can’t admit their weaknesses, when, frankly, Castiel is the only person Dean has ever felt like he could talk to with any sort of honesty. It’s just that they never talk about their feelings for each other. A steadfast and fragile no-no that hangs understood between them.

To be loved- Well. Dean wishes he had it in him to argue, because the truth is that the day Dean realized John didn’t love him was the day that he accepted himself as unlovable, where the power that his father held in his life might as well have been just as much a God as Cas’s own Father. God makes the rules, and Dean’s ruler had assigned him to isolation. But then something changed, in his life, when Castiel raised him from Hell. Suddenly John wasn’t the holiest thing Dean had ever known. Suddenly Dean had something else to believe in, something that usurped his father in the competition of deities so that there was never another prayer sent to his father when it could be sent to Castiel. It is Castiel, now, the divine creature of him, telling Dean that he is loved.

“What do I say?”

Cas tilts his head. “What do you mean?”

“Tell me what I’m supposed to say to that.”

“I don’t give you orders, Dean. You don’t need my permission for anything. I know that your father raised you to believe that obedience was love, but the words are not interchangeable.”

“Well- Well, then don’t give me orders. Give me advice.”

That makes Castiel crack a smile. His lips are pink and chapped in a way that has become so familiar to Dean that they’re lovelier that way than they could ever be if they were soft, the same way that the ugly wallpaper of your childhood home’s kitchen could never be ugly because it is part of your home. “You just listed off a series of attributes that you would give yourself if you were free from your father’s expectations. Perhaps you should be asking that version of yourself what ‘he’ wants to do.”

Dean stares up at the stubbled angle of Cas’s jaw, and his own mouth hangs ajar in confusion. Overwhelmed. He doesn’t know who he’d have been without John, but he thinks that version of himself would be thirty-seven and wondering if Cas’s skin is as warm as it seems. If that tendon in his throat would be as easy to show affection to as it seems, and if Dean would be just as scared to taste it, no matter what timeline he was coming from.

“He would…” Dean trails off. Cas just watches him with a patient and fleeced expression. It makes Dean queasy, nerves running through him and turning him child-like in his hope and his fear. “He- He would…” And before he can have another doubt, Dean pushes himself up so that his mouth lines up with the pink kitchen wallpaper of Cas’s lips.

The pressure’s only there for a beat before Cas gasps and pulls away. There are inches between their noses now, just enough for Dean to see the startled look on Cas’s face and the way that he blinks rapidly. Enough to see the shock in Cas’s eyes like even with the advice that he just gave Dean, he never would have guessed this would have been the outcome. Like Cas was expecting his declaration of love to just hang in the balance to get blown away with time, never to be acknowledged again. They’ve been doing this dance for so long now, with the cusps of their shoulders pressed together while their heartbeats have been kept very carefully apart. Dean wants to line the whole of their bodies up together. He reaches and pets his fingers through the hair behind Cas’s ear before sliding it down to cup Cas’s jaw as though to calm a stray.

“Cas,” he breathes, and then he doesn’t wait for a response before he’s doing what he should have been doing for years now, using his hand to guide Cas’s mouth back to his. Cas makes this longing, forlorn noise, and then Dean’s hand is moving from Cas’s jaw to fist in the fabric of his dress shirt instead and pulls until their chests connect. “Cas,” he mumbles this time into the wet of Cas's lips.

It’s a moment made desperate by love and not lust. As if to say I must tell you, I must feel this with you, to be close and cherished like Dean has never experienced with anyone before. A divine being who knew that saving Dean from his abusive father would make him defensive, but who did it anyway because he could not stand by while Dean suffered, even if it were just a dream.

“He’d say thank you,” Dean pulls back to say. Kisses Cas again. “He’d say I love you, too.”

“Yes?” Cas rasps like a feather.

“Yes.”

They kiss like that until Dean’s abrupt wake from his earlier nap catches up with him, like a sloping but determined animal. He breaks away one final time with a sigh. Cas’s nose is warm alongside his, and then even warmer is the way Cas starts to kiss Dean’s cheek. “Mmm, that’s real nice, but I’m still a little tired. Maybe we can put this in a tupperware container and fridge it for right now, take it out later when we get hungry at midnight.”

There’s a pause before Cas says, “I’m not following.”

“I’m gonna go back to my nap now, is what I’m saying.”

“Of course,” Cas answers, that easy, and leans out of Dean’s orbit. Still stationed above Dean on the recliner’s arm, Cas extends his right hand with two fingers aimed to the center of Dean’s forehead. “May I help expedite the process?”

“Be my guest.”

And then Dean’s body is as heavy as a stone.

…

When Dean gains awareness in his dream, his body is awkward in an inexplicable way. Too close to the ground, for one, and his limbs are centered under him, turning him into the world’s most bizarre table. Huh. He goes to speak only to realize his teeth are in the way, sharp and shining, while his tongue lolls from his lips. A whine comes from his throat and he feels what he assumes are his back legs shaking from the fear of being disoriented, but it’s like the world rights itself again when the dog version of Cas rounds the corner.

Dean yips- yips- and Cas wanders over to sniff at his cheek. They’re at the same eye-line, and it’s only then that Dean fully puts together that he’s also a dog. He wonders what he looks like in this body, what type of mutt he’d be, though he doesn’t get an answer before Cas is rounding him up like a sheepdog to its flock of one, nipping at Dean’s ankles to guide him towards what appears to be a fenced in backyard. Dean throws a look over his furry brown shoulder to see the looming two-story that haunts his usual Christmas dreams. For once, the house is silent.

In the yard ahead of him is a sleeping pack of dogs, seemingly four or so of them, though their bodies are tangled up and pillowed at such odd angles that it’s hard to decipher one from the other in some spots. Cas moves from where he’d been guiding Dean from behind in order to trot ahead of him, his scraggly black fur blending in with the rest of the hoard as he lays his chin over one of the dogs haunches. He peers at Dean with blue eyes and flops all the way to his side so that his belly is open like an invitation. A vulnerable soft spot for Dean to rest his head.

It’s warm when he sidles up to the pack and lays down amongst them. Like one big, breathing beast with six pulse points all undulating in different times. Fur tickles Dean’s nose and he sneezes, which makes Cas snort in what Dean can only assume is a laugh, which makes Dean retaliate with a nip to Cas’s ear that he licks afterwards in apology.

Dean tries with all his might to remember the story he’d written when he was younger, about wanting a dog to protect him, but even still finds himself coming up with nothing. That’s okay. It’s nice to think that Cas has retained some of his childhood for him, in just acknowledging that there was a point in Dean’s life when he used to be a child. Cas’s belly rises and falls under Dean’s jowl, and Dean thinks about that story, and what he would write now if he could go back and do it all over again.

There are wind chimes that knock together to create a song in my dreams, sometimes. And whenever I’m in trouble, my funny-looking dog is always there to help me. I love my dog.