A/N: Sorry this chapter is so short, but 23 will be pretty big! Please let me know what you think about this chapter! I want to know what your reactions were! Thank you for all the favs and follows! The reviews you guys send me are just as awesome as you guys! :D

Chapter 22 – Midnight Memories

Being awake at midnight was something Gabriel was used to. He liked to sleep in the morning and go to sleep late at night. Some call it being stupid. He called it 'being born in the wrong continent'. Additionally, for being awake so late, it meant that Gabriel needed food in his room- for a midnight snack that is… and a 1 am snack…basically they were snacks for whenever he felt like eating actually. Having a snack every day, and every night as many times as he wanted to was something that was nearly impossible. There were some nights, such as that one, in which he needed to go to their kitchen and get some food-actual food-and not just sweets, to eat.

Walking down the hall of the last floor without making any noise was easy; he was so used to it, that it wasn't even necessary to remind himself to be careful about it.

So there he was, at midnight, walking down the stairs without making a sound, looking at the walls he usually didn't look at during the day-mostly because he was used to seeing them. However at night he felt like he needed to see every little detail in them. Every photograph on those walls brought a different feeling to him, but there was one picture that he never looked at. Strangely enough it was the one where the three brothers looked happy. Once he found himself staring at that picture, he couldn't stop himself from going back to those times. The times where they were all genuinely happy.

~Twelve years earlier~

"Come on! Let's go!" Balthazar cried, taking Gabriel's hand in his and pulling him along.

They ran for a while until they reached the park. Wide smiles across their faces, eyes shining with happiness.

The older brothers were running next to each other, while little Castiel was walking beside their babysitter Naomi-Castiel didn't like her. While she let his brothers play around freely, she always tried to control Castiel, never letting him do anything by himself. The three year old was accustomed to such treatment, so he usually just obeyed.

As soon as they reached the park, Balthazar and Gabriel looked at the swing set and ran up to it. There were two sets of swings, and out of the four places another boy was occupying one of them. The brothers let go of each other's hands and ran up to the swings, jumping into them and kick starting the momentum.

Naomi and Castiel were a little behind Balthazar and Gabe, so they walked inside the children's park a little after the two boys. Naomi found herself a bench to sit on and took her magazine out of her bag.

A few seconds after she started to read the magazine, Naomi noticed Castiel was sitting beside her. She needed the money, so she started babysitting the boys, but she wanted to read her magazine for a while, without being bothered.

"Go play on the swing, Castiel." The babysitter told him, while flipping the pages of her magazine, trying to find the article the cover was talking about. As soon as she found it, she started reading it and stopped paying attention to the boys.

Whilst any other kid would be happy that he could be on the park and play around, Castiel wasn't. In fact, Castiel was afraid of the swings, but he went nonetheless. Slowly, Castiel walked in front of his brothers.

"Hey Gabe! I can reach higher than you do!" A five year old Balthazar bragged, with a huge smile in his face.

Gabriel grinned.

"You wish!" He told his brother, as his tongue darted out of his mouth playfully.

Castiel was all alone, while his brothers played with each other. The younger boy sighed and looked at the empty seat, and walked up to it. What Castiel wasn't counting in was for the other boy, the one who was in the swing set before they walked inside the park, to kick him in the head. As the unexpected happened, Castiel fell to the ground, and his head hit against a hard rock.

He didn't have time to scream in pain; he didn't have time to feel the pain, Castiel simply fell unconscious on the ground and didn't move as a puddle of blood started to gather near the young boys' head.

Yet the one who actually brought the others attention as to what had happened was the culprit himself. He was a bit older than Balthazar, but not more than seven. A he saw the blood, he let out a scream that made Gabriel and Balthazar look at him, wondering what had shocked him.

"OH MY GOD!" The boy yelled startling Naomi, who was still reading her magazine.

Both brothers looked to the ground, and shocked yelps left their mouths as they jumped from their seats and kneeled down next to Castiel. They were unsure as to what to make of the situation, their brains dimmed from the shock. So they used to the most logical tactic and tried to wake him up.

"Cassie?" Balthazar asked gently as he gently shook the motionless body of his younger brother. When his brother didn't wake up, he looked at Gabriel.

Gabriel's face displayed a clear look of horror. His eyes were wide and his mouth was open. He finally faced his older brother, trying to find the answer as to why Castiel wasn't waking up. Once he saw the desperation in his brother's eyes, Gabriel shook Castiel even harder than Balthazar had.

"Cassie!" Gabriel said, his voice starting to break with the tears that were threatening to fall from his eyes. Panic took a hold of him and made him fearful. "CASSIE, WAKE UP!"

As soon as his words left his mouth, Naomi raised her eyes from her magazine and saw Castiel lying on the floor, with Balthazar and Gabriel next to him. She rolled her eyes and called the boys.

"Boys! Get up from the ground!" when the boys ignored her, she huffed and raised herself from the bench. She started walking up to them. "Castiel! Get up from the ground right-"

Naomi didn't get to finish what she wanted to say. Her eyes saw the blood on the ground and she took her phone from the wallet. She called for an ambulance and told them all that she knew. She knelt next to the boy who started crying, the one who kicked Castiel and asked him what happened.

"I-I-It w-was… an acid-dent" The boy cried once finished telling Naomi what happened.

"You should be more careful." She told him as the boy cried and ran away from her, in fear she would get angry with him. The ambulance arrived soon after that and Naomi and the boys rode with Castiel on it.

For three weeks, Castiel stayed in a coma. His parents blamed Naomi for not doing her job as she should and fired her. However, Balthazar and Gabriel blamed themselves for what had happened; they thought it was their fault, since they weren't paying attention to their little brother, and so they thought they let it happen. It took them days to make them understand that Naomi was the one to blame, but they never fully believed it.

Those were dark times for the Novaks. No one knew if Castiel was ever going to wake up, or if was simply going to stay on a coma for the rest of his life. They all feared losing him, and they dreaded the moment whenever their phone rang and when they weren't in the hospital. They never knew if it was good news, or if it was just the hospital telling them that Castiel hadn't made it, there was also the possibility that it was another family member who heard about the situation and was worried about little Cassie. It was always the latter, and that thought made them more relieved about the situation. They didn't want to pick up the phone to explain –yet again- that Castiel hadn't woken up yet, and that he might not wake up at all, since the head trauma was a really bad one.

Castiel woke up when his brothers were visiting him, he heard them crying and asked them was wrong. The boys looked at their brother, surprised and cried louder, in relief to see their brother awake after three weeks of just his body being there not moving at all. Their mother –who had come to the hospital with them on that particular day - heard the boys crying and came from the hallway to see Castiel's deep blue eyes fluttering awake for the first time in almost a month. Tears of joy began to roll down her face.

The brothers made a promise that from that they on, whatever Castiel asked them to do was what they would do. They had been too scared of losing him, so they promised never to question his brother again, and to always, always obey his requests.

That was how things started to change. Castiel stayed in the hospital for another week, and when he went home, his brothers paid him far more attention and he loved it. Anything he asked, his brothers found a way of complying as soon as possible.

However, that was also when Castiel started to change. The taste of sweet power had driven him to ask for more and more. When Castiel fell into the coma was the moment Sweet Little Castiel died; and the one who woke up on that hospital room three weeks later grew up to become Castiel, the King of getting whatever he wanted, when he wanted it.

~Back to the Future~

The picture in the wall was from the Christmas before the accident. Castiel was just a two year old boy who had been content with his simple Christmas present and for being with his brothers.

Gabriel shook his head-the memories didn't seem to want to be forgotten. After a while of staring at that picture, he finally faced the stairs one more time and continued to walk down to the kitchen.

"That's what you get for being hungry at this insane hour." Gabriel reprimanded himself for his late night appetite. "You should have just let sleep take over when you decided to watch High School Musical one hour ago!" he said to himself as he grabbed a full pack of Oreos and got himself two large bottles Ice Tea to drink with it. "At least now that you have that one down… you have a reason to watch the rest of them." Gabriel continued talking to himself as he tried to shake the memories away. "This is what I get for walking around at midnight… Midnight memories." He said to himself, morose and reminiscent, as he walked up the stairs and back into his lair.