The demanding life of a teenager [Destiel AU]

Nightmare

Cas' eyes shot open like a frightened animal's. He could have sworn he was able to hear his own heart pounding all the way from his chest. Or perhaps it was his pulse he heard. He wasn't quite sure.

He tried to make himself unclench his fists as he closed his eyes again, slowly. Light managed to creep through the crack between the drapes and the wall, colouring the room in different shades of grey and casting scary shadows across it. That wasn't something Cas wished to see at the moment.

For a while, he lay completely still in his bed, not moving a muscle, just waiting for his breaths to slow down and for his body to finally stop shaking. The sound of his heart - or pulse, he still wasn't sure - was replaced with whizzing in his ears.

Cas brought a pair of trembling hands to his head, covering his face with them to shut everything out. They did a better job than his closed eyelids. His forehead was sweaty, he noticed. Warm. Clammy. It made him get some unpleasant flash-backs from when he had the flu last winter.

Slowly, almost as if a monster would appear and bite it of if he wasn't being careful, Cas moved a hand to his bedside table. After a little clumsy fumbling, he found his alarm clock and pushed the big button on top of it, and then the neon green numbers 03.16 successfully blended him.

Alas, a quarter past three. He had at least gotten a handful hours of sleep this night. Enough to function relatively normal for the rest of the day. He should be content. But he wasn't.

Cas had went to bed unusually early the previous evening, in hope of finally getting a good night's sleep. His parents had still been up, watching the telly in the living room, and Cas had fallen asleep with a smile on his face, listening to the occasional bark of laughter from his father, audible even from the other far end of the house. His father had a loud laughter, and it was not unusual that it was much louder than the TV program he was watching. As Cas had lain in his bed he could see his mother as clearly as she had been in front of him, shaking her head lightly from where she was sitting right next to her husband, but smiling fondly nonetheless. It was a nice picture. A big contrast to the bad dream Cas had only hours later.

When he had finally calmed down, relatively anyway, Cas stood up and walked over to the other side of the room where he had left his phone, plugged into the charger. He stared at the display for a few seconds, deliberating.

He wanted to text Dean badly. He wanted to talk to him. He knew it would calm him down - talking to Dean always relaxed him. There was only one problem: the fact that it was in the middle of the night, and let's face it: Dean was hopefully asleep at a quarter past three in the night. On the other hand, Dean was a fairly sound sleeper - if he wasn't already awake he would probably just sleep right through the text. And Cas would feel better nonetheless just having sent the text, knowing Dean would text him back as soon as he woke up. Knowing that Cas' text would await him, be the first thing he saw when he checked his phone in the morning.

Therefore he typed You awake? and sent it before his conscience - which told him not to disturb Dean's sleep - could make him change his mind.

Cas sat down on his bed, staring blankly out into the air. He knew he ought to go back to sleep: It was still in the middle of the night, and he would be exhausted the next day if he didn't get any more sleep. But he didn't want to. Going yet another day with too little sleep was still better than the nightmares he risked by going back to bed. Therefore, he turned on a floor lamp that was within arm's reach to make the room less dark and eerie, and waited as he watched his bedroom wall.

Cas jumped as his phone made a little noise and started blinking. He looked down and exhaled with relief when he realized it was just Dean who had texted him back. He was being abnormally skittish.