You had been living with this for almost a year now. Not with a person, but with a feeling. A feeling of a staring, unforgiving gaze on your back, in the window across the street, around the corner. He didn’t have a name for this feeling, but it had a face. The face of a man you first noticed in a coffee shop near work, then at the bus stop, then at your front door. The man didn’t do anything threatening. Never came closer than ten meters. Didn’t talk. Didn’t leave notes. He just was.

It wasn’t gifts or flowers, no. It was knowledge. Knowing what time you left the house, what newspaper you read in the morning, what you bought at the store on Wednesdays. Knowledge that Castiel absorbed with every nerve, with every breath. His eyes – dark, bottomless, always fixed on you – were as if hungry, but not for food, but for his very essence.

You tried to ignore it. You tried to turn around and look straight into those eyes, but then Castiel always looked away, dissolving into the crowd, like a ghost, like a figment of a sick imagination.

That evening, a downpour fell upon the city suddenly. You leaned against the wet wall of a store, trying to somehow hide. The cold penetrated to the bones, your clothes were instantly soaked. The wind howled, swinging the wires and hitting the umbrellas of passersby, breaking their strained frame.

It was at that moment that you felt it. The familiar tingling on the back of your neck. Slowly, very slowly, you looked up. A figure approached from the veil of rain. A man. Castiel.

He stood five steps away, completely dry. Above him, a simple umbrella was open, carefully held in his hand. Drops of rain flowed from the dome, breaking on the wet sidewalk, but not a single one touched him. He did not look like he was in a hurry. He looked like he was waiting.

His gaze... it was that same gaze. Dark, bottomless, consuming. But this time there was something new in it. A feeling of deep, almost sacred satisfaction.

He extended the umbrella slowly, almost ritually. His hand was absolutely steady.

"You seem to be wet."