A year earlier

Dean felt as though he was falling, and when his chin hit the rug near his bed with a "fuck" escaping from his mouth, he realized it wasn't an impression. His brain still clouded from sleeping he had to focus to make sense of what he was seeing. Considering that he was on his stomach, all tangled up in the sheets, his face on the floor, it took him a moment to understand what was happening to him.

"What the fuck? Why am I mowing the carpet with my teeth?", he tried to get up but his feet were still on the bed and he just managed to fall completely on the floor.

"Sorry man, I tried to wake you up, but you didn't react, I guess I had to take… stronger measures" Sam said, barely trying to hold his laugh. He was standing just above Dean, one of his big hands hiding his smirk.

"And why the hell would you do that? I was sleeping you bitch. Didn't you have something better to do? Who wakes up good innocent people like that?" Dean replied, anger blossoming on his face. He was now sitting in an awkward way, his hair pointing everywhere, sheets from the bed draping his body in a Roman way. As he didn't get a straight answer from him, he looked up and stopped wrestling with the blanket when he met his brother joyful yet anxious gaze. "What?" he jerked, furrowing his brow.

"Jerk. One, you are not innocent, and about being good… Well, we'll go back to that later. Two, I tried to wake you because, I was going out for a jog, minding my own business and I heard you whimpering."

"Whimpering? Uh?"

"Yeah. You were all curled up, whimpering on your pillow. And dude, you were crying." Sam explained, the sparkle of laughter in his eyes increasing a little bit more.

"Bullshit!" Dean said. Still, he lifted his fingers to his face. His cheeks were indeed wet, tears still rolling from the corner of his eyes. "What the f-"

"Don't know. You're creeping me out. Even though it was quite funny to watch. And cute. Definitely cute" Sam grinned, swiftly avoiding the pillow Dean had thrown at him. "Missed. And who's that Cas anyway? You kept repeating her name between sobs"

Dean didn't know any Cas, or Cassie. Maybe a Cassandra. Definitely a Cassandra he recalled with a small grin. Still, he wouldn't cry over her. So he just shrugged and closed his eyes to go back in time. He hadn't any accurate memories of his dream. The only thing he recalled was the color blue. As dull as it might be, whenever he tried to remember what he was dreaming about before being pulled out of bed by his 'idiot of a brother', he only saw this color. The bluest blue he had ever seen or imagined. It definitely came from his dream, because such a deep and mesmerizing color could not exist in real life.

With amusement tinted by worry still in his eyes, Sam nodded and got out of the bedroom. It was 6 in the morning. He had plenty of time to go for a jog but he still left the apartment in a hurry, mostly because he was worried about the retaliations his brother might be coming up with but also because they would reach a very high level when Dean was going too see what time it actually was. His big brother was definitely not a morning person, or to be more precise, Dean wasn't a 'waking up' person. Whether he woke up at 6am or 6pm, he would always be moody for an hour or so. But this time Sam believed he would be bad-tempered for the rest of the day. Not only for being woken up earlier than usual, not only for being woken up in a not so soft way but also for being attacked in his manliness. Dean. Crying. In his sleep. That didn't make sense at all. Sam closed the front door as slowly as possible.

At the exact same time, Castiel Seraph woke up suddenly, inhaling sharply between his teeth. His heart was racing in his ribcage. He felt dizzy and his vision was blurry. For a moment he thought he was having a heart attack, or at least a panic attack, but quickly enough the doctor in him took over and started to analyze the situation. His heartbeat was strong and quick, but his chest or left arm weren't painful. His head was spinning a little but he was surprisingly not shaking at all. With a tired sigh and a hushed laugh he diagnosed himself with 'waking up from a nightmare-itis' and laid down. He couldn't remember what he was dreaming about, but the color green kept coming back before his eyes along with an intense feeling of sadness giving him goosebumps all over the body. Whatever he had been dreaming about, it was surely not pleasant.

He glanced at the clock on the bedside table and let out an even more frustrated sigh when he saw that it was 6am. He was now fully awake, way too early in the morning, on one of the few days-off he allowed himself to take. He had been working very late in the ER the night before. Although he was a pediatrician, a huge accident on the most frequented highway near the city, involving several cars and trucks, dragged him out of the children's wing of St. Andrews's General Hospital to help the rest of the staff.

Sensing that he was not going to be able to fall back asleep, Castiel got out of bed, but not without making a proper and annoyed groan. He put on an overside sweater and went downstairs. After having struggled with the Nespresso machine for the hundredth time, he flipped through his collection of vinyls, stopping now and then, his right thumb making small circles over his chin. After what seemed to be an eternity, he picked a record from Billie Holiday and carefully placed the fragile disc on the turntable. Soon enough her melancholy voice filled the living room and Castiel's dreamy sadness slowly faded away. Once again he thought about this odd habit of his. When he was sad, or feeling blue, or miserable after a particularly tiring day at work, Billie's expression of her own despair would soothe him. Cheery songs would do the exact opposite. Whenever he listened to music, the emotions expressed through it had to match his own. Plus, he didn't listen to new pop songs. They were too mechanical, too digitized for him. He was snobbish about them perhaps, but he considered that they lacked something. They could be great, funny, sad, entertaining but not as moving as Billie's, or Ella's. These new perfectly written songs didn't have a soul. He did love some modern artists, but they were not widely known most of the time.

His few friends and his sister always teased him about that, telling him that he was old-fashioned, that he didn't live with his time, that he was a poster boy of the 1960s. When he was a kid he was bullied for being different, for being the weirdo in class. He had psychologically suffered throughout his high school years. He could still perfectly remember Anna's horror pouring from her screams when she discovered him, on the floor of the bathroom of the family house, on a cold night of December. He had just turned 17 and decided that he couldn't live like that anymore. Softly and shyly as always, he had popped too many sleeping pills from his mother's cabinet. Quietly leaving the cruel world he thought he didn't belong to. His sister had just returned home for the holidays, and was concerned about her little brother. The silent questions in her eyes following him everywhere. He was a mess at that time. Dark rings under the eyes, bony features floating in clothes too loose for him and an uncommon disinterest for everything. He had always been a reserved kid for sure, but something was definitely wrong with him.

He kept telling her that he was fine, just tired from school, but as he told her this same sentence over and over again, she could hear the unconscious and untold cry for help laying under. That is why when she knocked on his bedroom door several times this dreadful night and got no answer whatsoever, she immediately opened it, scanned thoroughly the messy room and ran to the bathroom door, pounding on it like a maniac. Eventually her father came rushing up the stairs, yelling at her for making so much noise at an indecent hour of the night. When he saw his daughter as white as a sheet, tears already rolling on her cheeks, begging him to do something, he didn't think for a single second, and kicked the door opened. And here he was, sweet and innocent Castiel, laying on the cold tiled floor, his shallow breathing slowing by the minute, his blurry eyes looking at Anna without seeing her, his hands twitching.

They never talked about that night. About how his mother was screaming at the paramedics when they took him, about the judgmental looks his father gave him afterwards in the too sterile hospital room, about the anger and relief in his sister's gaze. No matter what happened, they did not speak about their feelings. It was sort of a family tradition. To keep on smiling even though your whole body is suffering. To keep the perfect suburban mask on while pretending that everything in your life is not a big joke, a cruel charade. Even Anna, who had been so worried about him, never asked him about what happened that night. She never asked him why he had decided to take the final plunge. And in a way, he was thankful for that. Because he didn't really know. Because he didn't understand himself. And because he didn't want to tell her that they were right, in a certain way. He was different, he was a freak (it took him several years to understand though, that the love he had in his heart was not a mistake, or a disease, or even something to be ashamed of). This desperate move didn't work, but it turned out to be a wake up call for him. He was still teased and bullied afterwards, but he stopped caring about it. He stopped worrying about what people might think or say about him. When he was all alone in the hospital bed, his parents sleeping in the hallway and Anna wandering god knows where, he made a promise to himself. He would live his life the way he wanted to live it.

He eventually graduated high school and moved to California to go to Med School. When they had to choose a speciality, he didn't have to think too much about it. He wanted to become a pediatrician, to take care of children and teenagers, to heal them, and maybe, just maybe, help them.

A few years ago he bought a very nice little wooden house on the coast, just outside of San Francisco. Sure it took him 30 minutes to drive to the hospital, but he loved being in the wilderness. Loneliness suited him, and the sight from the veranda was breathtaking. He didn't have to care about the music being too loud, about running into the same people all the time. On windy days, when not a single soul dared to go to the beach, he walked for hours by the water. Still, these past few months a feeling of emptiness had started to make itself at home in his heart. He had everything he ever wanted - the job, the house, the vinyls - but something was missing. The problem was that he couldn't put his finger on what exactly was missing.

When Billie started to sing the first words of My Man, an unexpected and already familiar green light flashed in front of Castiel's eyes. He sat up straight and gazed at the record player. Not realizing it, he started to smile softly. Today was going to be a good day after all.