Castiel envied Dean’s ability to fall asleep quickly. Every night, long after Dean’s soft snores had started to fill the comfortable silence, Castiel would lay wide awake.

It wasn’t that he wasn’t tired; on the contrary, he most certainly was. But however hard he would try to get his mind to rest, he simply couldn’t shut off the little voice talking at the back of his head. And the more he started thinking about it, the more it bothered him.

That little voice…it hadn’t been there from the beginning. It wasn’t until his new life had begun as a habitant of Mr Novak that it had appeared. In fact, he hadn’t noticed it until that sunny day in the park.

As the years passed and Castiel made his way further and further away from his family, the tone of the voice had begun to change. It had become hostile, questioning his every move, filling him with guilt and regret, but he hadn’t listened to it until it was already too late.

Those first times when he had heard the voice, he had been so confused and distracted from what was happening around him that he had needed to focus on something else. Incidentally, the voice almost always made itself the most dominant in the presence of Dean Winchester. So Castiel had started counting.

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