Fic: Same song, different verse
Title: Same song, different verse
Author: brightly_lit
Disclaimer: These characters don’t belong to me, they belong to the wonderful creators of Supernatural.
Pairing: None--it’s gen. It skirts a few lines, but I tried not to do anything I didn't think the show's writers would do
Genre: Gen, angst, humor, fluff, action
Characters: Sam, Dean, Cas, Claire, Anna, and a couple of small surprises
Rating: PG-13 for violence, death, off-page sex, and language
Warnings: Minor character deaths, violence
Word Count: 14,000
Summary: Jimmy Novak isn't the only vessel Castiel could use. There is also his daughter, Claire, now 19, troubled, broken, in need of help only the Winchesters could provide. Castiel needs her for a vessel, but one thing's sure: she will never, ever say yes to him.
“We are not about to become three men and a baby.”
“Well, he’s ... not exactly a man, anymore ....”
“Dean, I need your help.”
Dean looked at Sam and rolled his eyes. “Oh, boy, here we go,” he muttered to his brother, then put the cellphone to his lips again. “Okay, what is it?”
“Meet me in the basement of the church you just passed.” Cas hung up. Dean was really going to have to give him a few lessons on phone etiquette.
“Um, we’re kind of busy right now,” Sam said testily when Dean told him what Cas had said.
“Don’t you think we owe him?” Dean replied, outrage creeping into his tone, as if he himself hadn’t ignored Cas too many times, after everything he’d done for them ... and paid the price.
“Fine,” Sam said, like he always did.
They didn’t see what Dean expected to see when they walked into the basement of the church. He’d been ready for anything--angels, demons, monsters. Instead, Cas stood behind a very young woman, blond and pretty, only with the coldest, hardest look Dean had ever seen on anyone’s face but his own. He and Sam fanned out uncertainly, eying the girl. “Okay,” said Dean, “what’s up?”
Cas looked down with an expression Dean had come to recognize as the way he expressed shame. “I, uh ... while I was ... otherwise occupied during the last couple of years, I ... broke a promise I made, a very important promise. I need you to help me rectify it.”
Dean stepped forward a little. “What promise?”
“Oh, my God,” Sam said suddenly. “Is that your daughter? I mean, Jimmy’s daughter?”
Was Dean the only one who heard the slight grating in Cas’s voice that indicated how difficult this was for him to say? “Yes. This is Claire.”
“What--?” Dean began, but stopped himself before he finished the sentence the way he was going to: ‘--happened?’ What happened to her? Four years ago, she had been a normal, well-adjusted 15-year-old. Now, everything in her dress, posture, and attitude screamed ... something. Actually, if Dean didn’t know better, he’d say she looked like a hunter.
Cas took a long time choosing his words, as he often did. “Claire ... as you know, is a vessel, my particular vessel being of great interest to demons and angels alike. After Jimmy relinquished his body to me and we let his wife and daughter go, I suppose we assumed they would be safe, but they ... weren’t. His wife Amelia was murdered last year. Claire survived--I’m not certain how--and ....”
“... And she became a hunter,” Sam finished softly.
“Same song, different verse,” Dean said. How many times they’d seen it.
“Yes,” said Cas. “But she is young and on her own and requires protection--”
Claire snorted. Cas had put a hand on her shoulder as he spoke, which she now shook off. “Get your mitts off me, freak. You took my dad, but you’ll never get me.”
“I don’t want you, Claire,” Cas said gently. “Your father gave himself to me so that I would never have to.”
“How do ya like that?” she said mirthlessly. “You think angels are all about protecting you, and instead they ride you harder than the biggest guy on the cell block.”
Cas looked down, pained, and said nothing.
Claire looked up at Dean with what he guessed he would call excitement, though devoid of any of the joy that would imply. “You never said yes, did you,” she said, “no matter what they did to you.” Dean nodded. She looked at Sam with even greater interest. “And Dumbasstiel here tells me you managed to shake off Luc, take control again.”
Sam nodded slightly. “I guess you could say that.”
“How’d you do it?” she asked, with keen interest.
“There will be plenty of time for questions,” said Cas, stepping away as if ... as if leaving her with Sam and Dean?!
“When?” Dean grunted sharply. “When will there be time for questions, Cas?”
“In your time together, as you ... look after her.”
“No no no,” Dean said, at the same time Sam said, “Wait a minute, you can’t just expect us to--” and Claire was saying shrilly, “I don’t need ‘looking after’!”
“Hey hey hey, Cas, whoa, can we talk about this first?” He managed to get Cas down the hall as Sam, keeping his distance, engaged Claire in some soothing conversation. “Are you crazy?!” he hissed under his breath, so Claire didn’t hear him. “You think anyone’s ‘safer’ with me and Sam?!”
“Safer than on her own. Her training as a hunter is ... spotty at best. You two are widely regarded as the best hunters in the nation, if not the world.”
“How ‘bout she stop being a hunter, huh? Ever think that might make her a little safer?”
“She seems to have made her choice, and in any case, hunter or not, she is perpetually in danger.”
“She’s your daughter; you protect her!”
“I am really ... not in any position to be able to at the moment.”
“Well, for how long?!” Dean said.
Cas looked off into the distance, and even in the fluorescent basement light, his eyes were shockingly blue. “As long as you can keep her alive,” he said sorrowfully.
“Wait, what?” Dean said, alarmed.
Cas turned in that deliberate way that made you know he wasn’t really human. “I made more enemies among the angels than friends. Claire is the last of her line. If they can kill her and destroy my current vessel, they will succeed in essentially relegating me to heaven, where I’ll be far easier to subdue and possibly imprison, as they did Lucifer.”
“Come on. You said it runs in families. Didn’t Jimmy have brothers or cousins or something?”
“They’ve been systematically murdered. Claire is the last.” He turned to face Dean straight-on, which was rare. He only did it when he was feeling something deeply, or when he wanted to emphasize the importance of what he was about to say. “She must be a skilled hunter if she is still alive. She will be useful to you and Sam. She prides herself on being self-sufficient; I doubt she will cause you trouble. Please. Please, Dean. If you can’t do it for me, then perhaps, as a fellow human, as a fellow vessel, you will find it in your heart to do it for Claire, or for Jimmy, or for--”
Man, when Cas wanted to lay on the guilt, he didn’t hold back. Dean said quickly just to shut him up, “Okay. But no promises. I mean, me and Sam, sometimes we have a hard enough time keeping ourselves alive. All I can say is we’ll do our best.”
“That is all I can ask.”
Well, at least he wasn’t lying when he said she was self-sufficient--a little too self-sufficient, actually. She refused to sleep in the hotel room with them; she slept in the Impala instead. She never asked for food, and when Sam and Dean realized she was never going to, for the first time in their lives, they made sure everyone got three squares a day. The only thing she was difficult about was her guns, freaking out if anyone but her touched them or even if she didn’t have enough of the cleaning product she preferred.
Cas wasn’t lying when he said she’d be useful, either: as a hunter, she was as relentless and stony as Sam was when he was without his soul, if too reckless for Dean’s taste. Better yet, she could kill angels by the dozen--literally: they came for her in sixes or twelves, and he and Sam only killed one each on a good day; she got all the rest. He couldn’t figure out how she did it; they would appear beside her with the angel blade already in their hearts.
They asked her how she’d become a hunter. She answered remarkably uninformatively. It seemed like she’d found some cache of lore much like Bobby’s collection of books and papers, left behind by a hunter who was there for some reason when her mother was killed--right in front of her, along with the hunter. “I kept expecting my da--Assholel to show up, but he never did,” she said impassively, “and they just--” she made a squishing sound effect “--killed her. Dead.” She stared through the floor of the Impala for like an hour after that with no expression on her face. Dean and Sam shared a brief glance and said nothing for the rest of the drive.
One night, they were zeroing in on a werewolf they’d been hunting for a couple of days. They cornered it in its house. Claire went straight to the basement before Sam and Dean had finished checking out the upstairs--like she always did, even though if she could just hold her horses for two minutes she’d have all the backup she needed. Sam and Dean dashed down the stairs when they heard the growling and crashing. Dean got to the bottom of the steps, gun raised, just in time to see that the werewolf wasn’t the mom or the dad like they’d thought; it was the kid. He and Sam looked at each other. Dean lowered his gun.
The werewolf rushed Claire. At first Dean thought she too was having second thoughts about killing a kid, though her expression was as blank as ever, but if she didn’t do it, it was going to gut her. He raised his gun again swiftly, but at this angle, he wouldn’t be able to hit it in the heart. When it was two feet away, she pulled the trigger. Its momentum carried it forward, and she barely sidestepped it, its teeth at her neck. Sam ran to her. “Are you all right?” he gasped.
“Did it get you?” Dean demanded. “Did it bite you?”
“If it was already dead, would it still turn her?” Sam asked anxiously.
“I don’t know,” said Dean grimly, but Claire wasn’t paying any attention to the conversation; she was peering consternedly in the dim light at her gun. For practically the first time, Dean saw some expression on her face. She made a noise of dismay.
“Look at this!” She showed them her gun. As often happened with werewolves, the pierced heart had splattered her with blood; the entire right side of her face was pure red with it, as was the side of her gun. “I’ll never get all of this out of the seams!” she wailed. “Do you think it’ll rust if I soak it?”
Sam and Dean stared at her for a long moment, baffled, then glanced at each other briefly, and Dean saw his own troubled expression mirrored on Sam’s face. Dean turned her to face him, examining her neck. He wiped away some of the blood with his sleeve. He didn’t see a wound. “Claire, answer me! Did it bite you?”
“Nah,” she said, still poring over her gun.
The nerves of the hunt, robbed of the catharsis of personally making the kill, undercut by Claire’s dismissive attitude, finally got to him. “You shouldn’t let ’em get so close before you pull the trigger!” he exploded.
“Yeah,” Sam backed him up. “If you missed, best case, you’d end up kibble.”
“Yeah, or it might have turned you!”
Claire smiled that mirthless smile she only trotted out when she’d killed something. “Whatever. You guys would’ve put me down if it did,” she said, carefully wiping her gun with the dead kid’s pantleg. She glanced up at Dean expressionlessly. “Right?”
Something similar happened a few nights later, and then a few days after that, when Sam and Dean ran to her side to help her when she was down instead of going after the ghoul they were hunting, she yelled at them. “What the fuck?!” she hissed. “You just let it get away?”
“You were hurt,” Sam said, bewildered.
“So?”
“So, we didn’t know how badly,” said Dean.
“So?”
“So, we had to help you!” Dean barked.
“Why?” she said, for all the world like they were making no sense.
“Because you could have died!” said Sam.
“So, you get the ghoul, then come back and see if I’m still alive,” she said, shaking her head at them like they were idiots--and they were idiots, Dean wasn’t going to disagree with that, but he’d never been called an idiot for something like this. She tapped her head. “You need to start thinking logically.”
The next day, as they watched her walk into the gas station convenience store from where they sat in the Impala, Sam sighed sadly and said, “She’s broken.”
Dean tried not to think about it. He and Sam had let Amelia and Claire go that day four years ago. Tons of people they’d saved were still technically in danger; what were they going to do, become babysitters? Amelia and Claire had lives they wanted to get back to. They had a right to them. Still, Dean had known in his heart that letting them go was stupid. He guessed he figured Cas would look out for them. To be honest, even when Cas was going nuts going after the souls from purgatory, and then was gone and presumed dead for months, Claire and Amelia hadn’t even crossed Dean’s mind, though they should have. They should have.
The only conversations Claire ever participated in were about guns or angels. They did indeed have plenty of time to talk, together almost 24/7, and Claire asked Sam detailed questions about how he’d overcome Lucifer.
“What was it like, to be possessed by him?” she asked, leaning over the backs of their seats so her head was between his and Sam’s.
Sam glanced at Dean out of the corner of his eye. This was something he’d never told Dean, and Dean could tell he didn’t want to talk about it now, either, but Claire so seldom got really interested in something, it was hard to refuse her. “Uh ... well, terrifying and helpless, having to watch and not being able to do anything. I mean, I thought I could fight him, but as soon as he was in there, I saw how stupid I’d been to think that.” He chuckled nervously. “It wasn’t all bad, I guess. He didn’t destroy me like Raphael did to his vessel; he tried to talk to me sometimes. He was more interested in, uh, talking me over to his side, I guess, than just steamrollering me.” He glanced at Dean again. Dean carefully kept his gaze forward and his expression neutral. He’d never known any of this. He’d preferred to think Sam was unconscious for most of it, like when he was possessed by Meg. Sam had to be aware for all of that? He couldn’t bear to think of all the things that had happened to his little brother, that Dean hadn’t been able to protect him from. “And powerful. So much power.”
“Yeah, not me. My stupid angel is a limp-dick nobody,” she grumbled, thumping back against the backseat.
“Could be worse,” Dean offered. “Could be a douchebag like Michael. Cas is pretty cool.”
“Fuck you,” said Claire. Dean only smiled. He couldn’t blame her for feeling like that. Cas had ruined her life, no doubt about it. “But you did finally take back control, right, Sam? How’d you do it?”
Sam didn’t look at him this time, but somehow that felt even more awkwardly intimate; Dean cleared his throat uncomfortably. “It was ... a lot of things. Cas was there, Bobby was there, and Dean, the Impala, just ... lots of things,” he finished unhelpfully. Why did Dean get the feeling he’d have said a lot more if Dean hadn’t been sitting there listening?
“So,” Sam said, turning to her with interest, “what’s it like to have Cas, uh ... in you?,” he asked, eying Dean, looking for the infantile smirk he knew he’d find on his face. He wasn’t disappointed. “You said yes to him once.”
“For like five minutes,” she said, rolling her eyes, but she answered. “Freaky and gross. Like you said: you just watch. You’re there, but you’re not the one in control anymore. But yeah, powerful.” She turned to Dean. “How’d you say no?”
“I just decide I want to say it, and the word comes out,” Dean said breezily, and was rewarded with a smack on his arm. “Nah, uh ... there was ... there was a time I might have said yes, if Cas hadn’t saved the day.” Sam looked away carefully, out the passenger-side window.
“How’d they get ya?” she asked knowingly, like she was well aware of the dirty tricks angels liked to play, even though he was sure Cas had never done anything like that to her. Then again, in her short life, she’d already met, and killed, more angels than Sam and Dean had ever seen.
“They basically killed Sam. They were always using us against each other. You’re lucky, that you ....” He trailed off. She wasn’t lucky that she didn’t have someone they could use against her, because it meant she had no one. There were very few times in his life Dean felt like one of the luckiest bastards around. This was one of them. He’d never had to say yes. He didn’t have angels trying to kill him all the time. His dad wasn’t still around talking like a robot like her dad was, whatever love and care he’d had for her now absent, swept away in the remote personality of the being who’d destroyed her life and broke every promise he’d ever made, letting her mother die right in front of her. He had Sam. He’d always had Sam. They lived however they wanted, went wherever they wanted, did whatever they wanted, and they were still happy to be alive. Yep, he had it pretty damn good.
Dean wasn’t sure if she actually had a deathwish or if she literally didn’t care whether she lived or died as long as she made her kill, but her recklessness finally caught up with her. She was only half conscious and the whole front of her shirt was soaked with blood by the time they got to her. She kept gesturing in the direction the shifter ran as Sam bundled her up, murmuring reassurances. She caught Dean’s eye, and gestured again. He shook his head at her.
The doctors weren’t sure she would live, she’d lost so much blood, plus the concussion and the internal injuries; she’d drooled blood down Sam’s neck the whole way to the hospital. They prayed, and Cas even turned up, but he only stood over her while she was unconscious, looking melancholy; he didn’t heal her or anything. When Dean demanded to know why he wouldn’t, he said sadly, “She won’t let me.”
“’Let’? What do you mean, ‘let’?” Dean hissed.
“As a vessel must consent to allowing her angel to come inside, so must she consent to healing, and she won’t.”
“Well, why not?” Dean demanded.
“She will consent to nothing when it comes to me,” Cas murmured, not looking sad in the way he should--more defeated and self-pitying, like he was calculating how this would impact his strategy. Dean looked at Claire and was suddenly glad Cas was almost never there. It definitely sucked to lose your dad, Dean knew that, but it would suck exponentially more for him still to be around and not see you as anything but a pawn for his machinations. No wonder Claire hated him so much; it was probably the only defense she had against not being able to help loving the person she still must, in some part of her mind, think of as her father. Her last living family member. John Winchester wasn’t up for world’s greatest dad, despite what the mugs Dean bought him for Christmas three years running when they were kids might suggest, but at least he was always ... himself.
They were able to take her home after three days, and then only because the hospital staff was finding inconsistencies in the insurance information and were getting nervous they’d never pony up, so they let them take her home, as long as they followed a long list of instructions.
Sam did all the nursing. He did more than that, actually; he sat by her bed reading her books all day. Dean thought she must be going crazy with all the babying, but she just laid there and listened, never saying anything.
“What’s with all the baby books, Sam?” Dean finally asked. He was reading her books Sam tore through when he was six: Charlotte’s Web and The Black Stallion and Choose-Your-Own-Adventures. He knew he’d gotten the books from the local library, but he figured they had to have stuff teenagers would like. Dean had been half tempted to buy her porn mags; that’s what he’d want to look at if he was laid up when he was nineteen.
Sam glanced back at Claire, and seeing her staring out the window, looking relatively contented, pulled Dean into the hall. Once they’d realized they’d be grounded a while until she got back on her feet, they’d rented a tiny house, which was actually pretty great, Dean had to admit: the same bed every night, a fridge to keep food in. ... They didn’t even have to keep setting up maps and reference materials on walls and tables in a new hotel room every night; they spread out everything they had on this shifter (plus something else that seemed to be brewing about fifty miles away) all over the livingroom and could just add to it as they came upon new information, which made tracking way easier. They couldn’t leave Claire alone now, helpless as she was; angels would come and kill her ... but maybe some night, if Sammy thought he could handle things here, Dean was thinking he’d go back and finish the shifter job. Still, it had just about gutted the most ruthless hunter he knew. Every time he almost went after it, he decided he should wait until Sam could come with him. A dead hunter was a useless hunter, which Claire had never seemed to fully grasp.
“I’ve been doing some research, Dean,” Sam said softly, so Claire wouldn’t overhear. He got his laptop and pulled up some website about child psychology. “When Cas first took her dad, Claire was basically just a kid. When someone’s traumatized, they tend to regress, which helps them heal ... but Claire was fighting for her life, so she never got to. There’s research that suggests if you kind of start all over, lead them back through their childhood and get them through it without anything real traumatic happening, they can heal. Maybe ... maybe we can unbreak her. I mean, since ....”
“... We helped break her in the first place?” Dean said brusquely, and Sam didn’t object. “Great plan, Sam, except what makes you think she isn’t gonna be traumatized again? The angels must be up to something, you know that’s the only reason they haven’t been back. They were coming like clockwork before this.”
“Yeah, well, if I don’t try, she’s going to end up getting killed one way or another.” So Sam had seen it, too, the way she threw herself at that shifter like she really didn’t care as long as it got got. “And I don’t know about you, but I don’t like the idea of Cas stuck without a vessel, for him or for us. I mean, if he ever had to get out of Jimmy’s skin for some reason, and Jimmy was killed ....”
“Doesn’t matter,” said Dean. “She’ll never say yes.”
“Yeah, but if she lives, if she heals ... maybe someday she’ll have a life, and a family, and ....”
“Squeeze out a few new vessels? Jesus, Sam.”
“Look, I’m just saying, if she can get better, that would be a good thing--for everybody. Everybody, Dean.” Dean frowned and wandered back out of the hall into the livingroom, such as it was. They needed to focus on getting Claire back on her feet. Keeping her alive was all Cas had asked them to do, all they had agreed to. The girl was there, she needed help and protection, and that’s what they were doing. They couldn’t afford to start thinking about how much it might benefit them if they steered Claire--in her state of perpetual, heart-rending vulnerability--to do things that might benefit him and Sam. That was the way angels thought, not people. Not him and Sam, anyway.
Nothing had ever seemed as sick to Dean or felt as awful as the idea of saying yes to Michael, even if it could have saved the world. That was, literally, a fate worse than death, especially hearing the way Sam and Jimmy had described what it was like. When it came to Claire saying no, Dean supported her 100% ... but what about Cas? What about his future, for the eternity he would hopefully go on existing after Sam and Dean were long gone? Wasn’t that pretty important, too? Claire could kill a few monsters, but Cas, however calculating he might be, was a truly good person, all the way down, and powerful enough to do something with it. He could do more to take care of humanity than Dean and Sam could ever hope to, no matter how long they lived. And Sam, in there working so hard to put back together something the angels seemed determined to break, which felt way too close to way too many things angels and demons and monsters and fathers had already done to Dean--and to Sam, too .... It was time for a beer. Nope, time for a few.
Claire healed physically, but as a hunter, suddenly she was useless. They couldn’t leave her behind at the house, but she freaked out so much whenever they tried to hunt something--screaming, running toward it or away from it or off in some random direction, shooting her gun at anything and everything--that they pretty much had to give up hunting completely. Then the nightmares started, her screaming “NO!” at the top of her lungs until he and Sammy ran in there and were able to wake her up. Even then, sometimes, it was like the dream didn’t go away; Dean could tell she was still seeing it long after she realized only Sam and Dean were there.
“Why is this happening?” Dean demanded in the hallway, more shaken than he wanted to let Sam see, after they finally got her back to sleep. “I thought your regression stuff or whatever was supposed to be making her better!”
“I think it is; she’s just got a lot of stuff she’s never had a chance to deal with, bad things that happened to her ....”
“If this is getting better, what does getting worse look like?” he said, trying hard to sound a little less hysterical. “I mean, seriously, Sam, how much worse can it get?”
Sam shrugged hopelessly. “Dead. That’s where she was headed.”
“Look, this psychology or whatever, it isn’t working! There is no psychology for people like us, angel vessels and hunters and pawns of the powers that be; we’re not like anybody else.”
“But they had videos on that site, of kids--little kids, Dean--acting just like her, all cynical and defensive and snide. If a kid doesn’t have a chance to be a kid, they can act like a grown-up, but they’re dying on the inside. They have no sense of self, they’re socially maladjusted, they usually end up some kind of addict, they’re reckless with a deathwish .... I mean, they had videos of six-year-olds who were like that, and when they started letting them be kids, when it was safe for them to, they were able to act like little kids again.”
“So what? There’s nothing wrong with that. I was cynical and snide when I was six.”
“Yeah,” Sam said, way too quickly. Dean’s eyes narrowed.
There was a long, excruciating moment. Finally, Dean spoke with a conviction that made his voice shake. “Maybe it’s better if she doesn’t get ‘better,’ Sam. Maybe that’s the last thing she would ever want.”
“Maybe,” Sam agreed, maddeningly rational, as always. “Or maybe not. Just because it’s not what you would want doesn’t mean it’s not what she would want. We have to let her decide.”
Dean stalked back to his bedroom and flung himself down on his back on his bed, still shaking with rage. It wasn’t fear; it was rage.
Sam finally started sleeping in the same bed with her, giant arms wrapped around her, practically mummifying her. It was more efficient for someone to be right there when she started screaming, and eventually, it seemed like just having him there, wrapped around her protectively, kept her calm most nights. Watching them together, more and more it was like Sam really was her dad, though he was only about a decade older than her. Dean guessed she must really badly need a substitute for the creepy, weirdo excuse for a father she had now. Who’d have thought it, but it seemed like Sam would make a good dad. It looked good on him. Dean could tell he felt good about helping her, too, so Sam was happy, and that made Dean happy. They had a pretty happy home, actually, fucked-up as they all were, especially since, for months now, no one had tried to kill them.
Dean had to admit Claire was finally getting better. It’s not like he’d spent time around a bunch of nineteen-year-olds like Sammy must have at college--he hadn’t even been around Sam when he was nineteen--but from what he did know about it, Dean thought Claire seemed to be acting a lot more like a normal kid her age. She did still have nightmares sometimes, always screaming the same thing, and Dean didn’t get why until one night when he went to check on them, through the door he heard Sam murmuring, “It’s okay, Claire, you never have to say yes. No one can ever make you say yes.”
There was definitely something going on in that town fifty miles away: weird signs and weather patterns and disappearances and sightings, but none of it added up to anything they could recognize. They finally decided it couldn’t hurt to take Claire on a little recon trip. Even she was stoked to get out of town for the day. Once they figured out what it was, they could decide whether one of them could take care of it on their own while the other stayed with Claire, or worst case, they could call in some other hunters and get them on the job.
Dean guessed he’d ignored the warning in his gut because he was jonesing so hard to get back to some kind of hunting activity, even something like this. It’s not like he didn’t usually have a bad feeling on a hunt; danger was the job. He’d somehow convinced himself the bad feeling was always this intense and unrelenting. He didn’t put two and two together until the angels--dozens of them--started popping into existence in the empty warehouse that, oh right, his intuition was never this bad unless catastrophe was imminent. His mind ran through the few times it had ever felt like this: when the hellhounds were coming for him, check. When Sam told him he was going to say yes, check. When Cas declared himself their new god, check check check. Why did he never remember this stuff until it was too late to do any good?
Sam had finally gotten the story on how she was able to kill angels so well: After Cas took her father and then she said yes to Cas briefly that day four years ago, she’d become so sensitized to angelic energy, she always knew when they were coming. They must travel like lightning, from their strike point first, drawing the rest of their bodies and energy to the location they meant to appear, so she could feel them coming, like St. Elmo’s Fire. Thus, they literally did pop into the space beside her with the angel blade already in their hearts.
Not today, though. She was fumbling to get angel blades out of Sam’s weapons duffle, but she was shaking so hard and her eyes were so wide, she was obviously a sitting duck. Trouble was, they all were. In a room like this, swarming with angels, they didn’t stand a chance. Then Cas was there, fighting for them, then--was that Anna?! How could that be?!--defending them, too, then more. Dean realized Cas had been busy while they were taking care of Claire, collecting more allies ... and maybe raising some from the dead. Cas shouted to them to save Claire, and Sam and Dean got her between them, Cas’s allies all around the three of them. Dean got his hands on an angel blade and tossed one to Sam, and they did whatever they could. Even Claire managed to pull herself together enough to waste one angel.
Dean started thinking they might actually survive ... then he saw something he never had before: The enemy angels held one of their own up against the wall and started cutting into him with an angel blade. Dean wondered wildly if maybe he’d disobeyed and they were punishing him for it then and there, until he saw the calm expression on the angel’s face, the way you imagine kamikaze pilots must have looked as they were about to hit their target. The angels collected the glowing stuff that oozed out and started drawing with it on the wall.
“No no no!” Dean shouted. He didn’t have any idea what they were doing, but even though there were dozens of the enemy, he suddenly knew this was what that bad feeling was about. All those months when they’d left them alone, this was what they were cooking up, something new and unexpected, something Sam and Dean had no idea how to fight.
Dean ran toward that group of angels to stop them, but Cas flung him back to Claire’s side without touching him. “No, Dean!” Cas said fiercely. “Protect Claire! I’ll stop them.”
Cas went for them, and Dean saw, too late, that this was exactly what they hoped for. The one who was drawing with the glowing goo smiled to see Cas, and flung a last handful of it against Cas’s chest. Cas looked down, uncomprehending, then looked up as it abruptly became clear. The disbelief on his face made plain the other angels had stooped to something even he never thought them capable of. “No!” he cried--too late, as his vessel disintegrated--no blood, no angel wings painted on the floor, no nothing, just a fine spray of glittery dust that faded instantly like smoke. Dean cried out--he didn’t know what he said--and went for him, but Sam pulled him back, pointing urgently at Claire, who was rising to her feet, staring up into the light that hovered above her, and then Sam and Dean were pressed down to the ground by the force of that presence and the high-pitched noise that accompanied it, covering their ears. Cas, Dean realized--it was Cas. Jimmy was gone, but Cas was still alive ... and circling his vessel, the only one he had left.
Dean tried to see what he could, shielding his face with his arm and squinting against Cas’s impossible brightness. Claire seemed to be listening intently, nodding a couple of times, her eyes wide. She must be one of the ones who could understand angels in their natural state, and Cas was talking to her--begging, probably, but Dean knew it wouldn’t do him any good. This girl had lived her life to say no to Cas. She was willing--eager--to die so she could refuse him. It had seemed to Dean all the time he knew her that she put a lot of energy into building up the strength to say no to him, if the time should ever come. It seemed like she practiced that every day. If Cas was ruthless enough to try to coerce her into doing it, it wouldn’t matter; Claire had nothing left to lose anymore, not even the body of her dad or the hope of his return. For her, there was no terror to equal that of becoming the new vessel of Castiel ... but then the angel blades were falling from her hands and she flung her arms up into the light. “YES!” she screamed. “YES!”
Dean ducked his head as the noise and brightness reached an intolerable level ... and then it was suddenly gone. Dean and Sam looked around. Dean looked up just in time to see Claire jolt sickly as if she’d been shot, and then Anna’s fingers were on his forehead, and he was somewhere else.
On to Part 2 ...
Author: brightly_lit
Disclaimer: These characters don’t belong to me, they belong to the wonderful creators of Supernatural.
Pairing: None--it’s gen. It skirts a few lines, but I tried not to do anything I didn't think the show's writers would do
Genre: Gen, angst, humor, fluff, action
Characters: Sam, Dean, Cas, Claire, Anna, and a couple of small surprises
Rating: PG-13 for violence, death, off-page sex, and language
Warnings: Minor character deaths, violence
Word Count: 14,000
Summary: Jimmy Novak isn't the only vessel Castiel could use. There is also his daughter, Claire, now 19, troubled, broken, in need of help only the Winchesters could provide. Castiel needs her for a vessel, but one thing's sure: she will never, ever say yes to him.
“We are not about to become three men and a baby.”
“Well, he’s ... not exactly a man, anymore ....”
“Dean, I need your help.”
Dean looked at Sam and rolled his eyes. “Oh, boy, here we go,” he muttered to his brother, then put the cellphone to his lips again. “Okay, what is it?”
“Meet me in the basement of the church you just passed.” Cas hung up. Dean was really going to have to give him a few lessons on phone etiquette.
“Um, we’re kind of busy right now,” Sam said testily when Dean told him what Cas had said.
“Don’t you think we owe him?” Dean replied, outrage creeping into his tone, as if he himself hadn’t ignored Cas too many times, after everything he’d done for them ... and paid the price.
“Fine,” Sam said, like he always did.
They didn’t see what Dean expected to see when they walked into the basement of the church. He’d been ready for anything--angels, demons, monsters. Instead, Cas stood behind a very young woman, blond and pretty, only with the coldest, hardest look Dean had ever seen on anyone’s face but his own. He and Sam fanned out uncertainly, eying the girl. “Okay,” said Dean, “what’s up?”
Cas looked down with an expression Dean had come to recognize as the way he expressed shame. “I, uh ... while I was ... otherwise occupied during the last couple of years, I ... broke a promise I made, a very important promise. I need you to help me rectify it.”
Dean stepped forward a little. “What promise?”
“Oh, my God,” Sam said suddenly. “Is that your daughter? I mean, Jimmy’s daughter?”
Was Dean the only one who heard the slight grating in Cas’s voice that indicated how difficult this was for him to say? “Yes. This is Claire.”
“What--?” Dean began, but stopped himself before he finished the sentence the way he was going to: ‘--happened?’ What happened to her? Four years ago, she had been a normal, well-adjusted 15-year-old. Now, everything in her dress, posture, and attitude screamed ... something. Actually, if Dean didn’t know better, he’d say she looked like a hunter.
Cas took a long time choosing his words, as he often did. “Claire ... as you know, is a vessel, my particular vessel being of great interest to demons and angels alike. After Jimmy relinquished his body to me and we let his wife and daughter go, I suppose we assumed they would be safe, but they ... weren’t. His wife Amelia was murdered last year. Claire survived--I’m not certain how--and ....”
“... And she became a hunter,” Sam finished softly.
“Same song, different verse,” Dean said. How many times they’d seen it.
“Yes,” said Cas. “But she is young and on her own and requires protection--”
Claire snorted. Cas had put a hand on her shoulder as he spoke, which she now shook off. “Get your mitts off me, freak. You took my dad, but you’ll never get me.”
“I don’t want you, Claire,” Cas said gently. “Your father gave himself to me so that I would never have to.”
“How do ya like that?” she said mirthlessly. “You think angels are all about protecting you, and instead they ride you harder than the biggest guy on the cell block.”
Cas looked down, pained, and said nothing.
Claire looked up at Dean with what he guessed he would call excitement, though devoid of any of the joy that would imply. “You never said yes, did you,” she said, “no matter what they did to you.” Dean nodded. She looked at Sam with even greater interest. “And Dumbasstiel here tells me you managed to shake off Luc, take control again.”
Sam nodded slightly. “I guess you could say that.”
“How’d you do it?” she asked, with keen interest.
“There will be plenty of time for questions,” said Cas, stepping away as if ... as if leaving her with Sam and Dean?!
“When?” Dean grunted sharply. “When will there be time for questions, Cas?”
“In your time together, as you ... look after her.”
“No no no,” Dean said, at the same time Sam said, “Wait a minute, you can’t just expect us to--” and Claire was saying shrilly, “I don’t need ‘looking after’!”
“Hey hey hey, Cas, whoa, can we talk about this first?” He managed to get Cas down the hall as Sam, keeping his distance, engaged Claire in some soothing conversation. “Are you crazy?!” he hissed under his breath, so Claire didn’t hear him. “You think anyone’s ‘safer’ with me and Sam?!”
“Safer than on her own. Her training as a hunter is ... spotty at best. You two are widely regarded as the best hunters in the nation, if not the world.”
“How ‘bout she stop being a hunter, huh? Ever think that might make her a little safer?”
“She seems to have made her choice, and in any case, hunter or not, she is perpetually in danger.”
“She’s your daughter; you protect her!”
“I am really ... not in any position to be able to at the moment.”
“Well, for how long?!” Dean said.
Cas looked off into the distance, and even in the fluorescent basement light, his eyes were shockingly blue. “As long as you can keep her alive,” he said sorrowfully.
“Wait, what?” Dean said, alarmed.
Cas turned in that deliberate way that made you know he wasn’t really human. “I made more enemies among the angels than friends. Claire is the last of her line. If they can kill her and destroy my current vessel, they will succeed in essentially relegating me to heaven, where I’ll be far easier to subdue and possibly imprison, as they did Lucifer.”
“Come on. You said it runs in families. Didn’t Jimmy have brothers or cousins or something?”
“They’ve been systematically murdered. Claire is the last.” He turned to face Dean straight-on, which was rare. He only did it when he was feeling something deeply, or when he wanted to emphasize the importance of what he was about to say. “She must be a skilled hunter if she is still alive. She will be useful to you and Sam. She prides herself on being self-sufficient; I doubt she will cause you trouble. Please. Please, Dean. If you can’t do it for me, then perhaps, as a fellow human, as a fellow vessel, you will find it in your heart to do it for Claire, or for Jimmy, or for--”
Man, when Cas wanted to lay on the guilt, he didn’t hold back. Dean said quickly just to shut him up, “Okay. But no promises. I mean, me and Sam, sometimes we have a hard enough time keeping ourselves alive. All I can say is we’ll do our best.”
“That is all I can ask.”
Well, at least he wasn’t lying when he said she was self-sufficient--a little too self-sufficient, actually. She refused to sleep in the hotel room with them; she slept in the Impala instead. She never asked for food, and when Sam and Dean realized she was never going to, for the first time in their lives, they made sure everyone got three squares a day. The only thing she was difficult about was her guns, freaking out if anyone but her touched them or even if she didn’t have enough of the cleaning product she preferred.
Cas wasn’t lying when he said she’d be useful, either: as a hunter, she was as relentless and stony as Sam was when he was without his soul, if too reckless for Dean’s taste. Better yet, she could kill angels by the dozen--literally: they came for her in sixes or twelves, and he and Sam only killed one each on a good day; she got all the rest. He couldn’t figure out how she did it; they would appear beside her with the angel blade already in their hearts.
They asked her how she’d become a hunter. She answered remarkably uninformatively. It seemed like she’d found some cache of lore much like Bobby’s collection of books and papers, left behind by a hunter who was there for some reason when her mother was killed--right in front of her, along with the hunter. “I kept expecting my da--Assholel to show up, but he never did,” she said impassively, “and they just--” she made a squishing sound effect “--killed her. Dead.” She stared through the floor of the Impala for like an hour after that with no expression on her face. Dean and Sam shared a brief glance and said nothing for the rest of the drive.
One night, they were zeroing in on a werewolf they’d been hunting for a couple of days. They cornered it in its house. Claire went straight to the basement before Sam and Dean had finished checking out the upstairs--like she always did, even though if she could just hold her horses for two minutes she’d have all the backup she needed. Sam and Dean dashed down the stairs when they heard the growling and crashing. Dean got to the bottom of the steps, gun raised, just in time to see that the werewolf wasn’t the mom or the dad like they’d thought; it was the kid. He and Sam looked at each other. Dean lowered his gun.
The werewolf rushed Claire. At first Dean thought she too was having second thoughts about killing a kid, though her expression was as blank as ever, but if she didn’t do it, it was going to gut her. He raised his gun again swiftly, but at this angle, he wouldn’t be able to hit it in the heart. When it was two feet away, she pulled the trigger. Its momentum carried it forward, and she barely sidestepped it, its teeth at her neck. Sam ran to her. “Are you all right?” he gasped.
“Did it get you?” Dean demanded. “Did it bite you?”
“If it was already dead, would it still turn her?” Sam asked anxiously.
“I don’t know,” said Dean grimly, but Claire wasn’t paying any attention to the conversation; she was peering consternedly in the dim light at her gun. For practically the first time, Dean saw some expression on her face. She made a noise of dismay.
“Look at this!” She showed them her gun. As often happened with werewolves, the pierced heart had splattered her with blood; the entire right side of her face was pure red with it, as was the side of her gun. “I’ll never get all of this out of the seams!” she wailed. “Do you think it’ll rust if I soak it?”
Sam and Dean stared at her for a long moment, baffled, then glanced at each other briefly, and Dean saw his own troubled expression mirrored on Sam’s face. Dean turned her to face him, examining her neck. He wiped away some of the blood with his sleeve. He didn’t see a wound. “Claire, answer me! Did it bite you?”
“Nah,” she said, still poring over her gun.
The nerves of the hunt, robbed of the catharsis of personally making the kill, undercut by Claire’s dismissive attitude, finally got to him. “You shouldn’t let ’em get so close before you pull the trigger!” he exploded.
“Yeah,” Sam backed him up. “If you missed, best case, you’d end up kibble.”
“Yeah, or it might have turned you!”
Claire smiled that mirthless smile she only trotted out when she’d killed something. “Whatever. You guys would’ve put me down if it did,” she said, carefully wiping her gun with the dead kid’s pantleg. She glanced up at Dean expressionlessly. “Right?”
Something similar happened a few nights later, and then a few days after that, when Sam and Dean ran to her side to help her when she was down instead of going after the ghoul they were hunting, she yelled at them. “What the fuck?!” she hissed. “You just let it get away?”
“You were hurt,” Sam said, bewildered.
“So?”
“So, we didn’t know how badly,” said Dean.
“So?”
“So, we had to help you!” Dean barked.
“Why?” she said, for all the world like they were making no sense.
“Because you could have died!” said Sam.
“So, you get the ghoul, then come back and see if I’m still alive,” she said, shaking her head at them like they were idiots--and they were idiots, Dean wasn’t going to disagree with that, but he’d never been called an idiot for something like this. She tapped her head. “You need to start thinking logically.”
The next day, as they watched her walk into the gas station convenience store from where they sat in the Impala, Sam sighed sadly and said, “She’s broken.”
Dean tried not to think about it. He and Sam had let Amelia and Claire go that day four years ago. Tons of people they’d saved were still technically in danger; what were they going to do, become babysitters? Amelia and Claire had lives they wanted to get back to. They had a right to them. Still, Dean had known in his heart that letting them go was stupid. He guessed he figured Cas would look out for them. To be honest, even when Cas was going nuts going after the souls from purgatory, and then was gone and presumed dead for months, Claire and Amelia hadn’t even crossed Dean’s mind, though they should have. They should have.
The only conversations Claire ever participated in were about guns or angels. They did indeed have plenty of time to talk, together almost 24/7, and Claire asked Sam detailed questions about how he’d overcome Lucifer.
“What was it like, to be possessed by him?” she asked, leaning over the backs of their seats so her head was between his and Sam’s.
Sam glanced at Dean out of the corner of his eye. This was something he’d never told Dean, and Dean could tell he didn’t want to talk about it now, either, but Claire so seldom got really interested in something, it was hard to refuse her. “Uh ... well, terrifying and helpless, having to watch and not being able to do anything. I mean, I thought I could fight him, but as soon as he was in there, I saw how stupid I’d been to think that.” He chuckled nervously. “It wasn’t all bad, I guess. He didn’t destroy me like Raphael did to his vessel; he tried to talk to me sometimes. He was more interested in, uh, talking me over to his side, I guess, than just steamrollering me.” He glanced at Dean again. Dean carefully kept his gaze forward and his expression neutral. He’d never known any of this. He’d preferred to think Sam was unconscious for most of it, like when he was possessed by Meg. Sam had to be aware for all of that? He couldn’t bear to think of all the things that had happened to his little brother, that Dean hadn’t been able to protect him from. “And powerful. So much power.”
“Yeah, not me. My stupid angel is a limp-dick nobody,” she grumbled, thumping back against the backseat.
“Could be worse,” Dean offered. “Could be a douchebag like Michael. Cas is pretty cool.”
“Fuck you,” said Claire. Dean only smiled. He couldn’t blame her for feeling like that. Cas had ruined her life, no doubt about it. “But you did finally take back control, right, Sam? How’d you do it?”
Sam didn’t look at him this time, but somehow that felt even more awkwardly intimate; Dean cleared his throat uncomfortably. “It was ... a lot of things. Cas was there, Bobby was there, and Dean, the Impala, just ... lots of things,” he finished unhelpfully. Why did Dean get the feeling he’d have said a lot more if Dean hadn’t been sitting there listening?
“So,” Sam said, turning to her with interest, “what’s it like to have Cas, uh ... in you?,” he asked, eying Dean, looking for the infantile smirk he knew he’d find on his face. He wasn’t disappointed. “You said yes to him once.”
“For like five minutes,” she said, rolling her eyes, but she answered. “Freaky and gross. Like you said: you just watch. You’re there, but you’re not the one in control anymore. But yeah, powerful.” She turned to Dean. “How’d you say no?”
“I just decide I want to say it, and the word comes out,” Dean said breezily, and was rewarded with a smack on his arm. “Nah, uh ... there was ... there was a time I might have said yes, if Cas hadn’t saved the day.” Sam looked away carefully, out the passenger-side window.
“How’d they get ya?” she asked knowingly, like she was well aware of the dirty tricks angels liked to play, even though he was sure Cas had never done anything like that to her. Then again, in her short life, she’d already met, and killed, more angels than Sam and Dean had ever seen.
“They basically killed Sam. They were always using us against each other. You’re lucky, that you ....” He trailed off. She wasn’t lucky that she didn’t have someone they could use against her, because it meant she had no one. There were very few times in his life Dean felt like one of the luckiest bastards around. This was one of them. He’d never had to say yes. He didn’t have angels trying to kill him all the time. His dad wasn’t still around talking like a robot like her dad was, whatever love and care he’d had for her now absent, swept away in the remote personality of the being who’d destroyed her life and broke every promise he’d ever made, letting her mother die right in front of her. He had Sam. He’d always had Sam. They lived however they wanted, went wherever they wanted, did whatever they wanted, and they were still happy to be alive. Yep, he had it pretty damn good.
Dean wasn’t sure if she actually had a deathwish or if she literally didn’t care whether she lived or died as long as she made her kill, but her recklessness finally caught up with her. She was only half conscious and the whole front of her shirt was soaked with blood by the time they got to her. She kept gesturing in the direction the shifter ran as Sam bundled her up, murmuring reassurances. She caught Dean’s eye, and gestured again. He shook his head at her.
The doctors weren’t sure she would live, she’d lost so much blood, plus the concussion and the internal injuries; she’d drooled blood down Sam’s neck the whole way to the hospital. They prayed, and Cas even turned up, but he only stood over her while she was unconscious, looking melancholy; he didn’t heal her or anything. When Dean demanded to know why he wouldn’t, he said sadly, “She won’t let me.”
“’Let’? What do you mean, ‘let’?” Dean hissed.
“As a vessel must consent to allowing her angel to come inside, so must she consent to healing, and she won’t.”
“Well, why not?” Dean demanded.
“She will consent to nothing when it comes to me,” Cas murmured, not looking sad in the way he should--more defeated and self-pitying, like he was calculating how this would impact his strategy. Dean looked at Claire and was suddenly glad Cas was almost never there. It definitely sucked to lose your dad, Dean knew that, but it would suck exponentially more for him still to be around and not see you as anything but a pawn for his machinations. No wonder Claire hated him so much; it was probably the only defense she had against not being able to help loving the person she still must, in some part of her mind, think of as her father. Her last living family member. John Winchester wasn’t up for world’s greatest dad, despite what the mugs Dean bought him for Christmas three years running when they were kids might suggest, but at least he was always ... himself.
They were able to take her home after three days, and then only because the hospital staff was finding inconsistencies in the insurance information and were getting nervous they’d never pony up, so they let them take her home, as long as they followed a long list of instructions.
Sam did all the nursing. He did more than that, actually; he sat by her bed reading her books all day. Dean thought she must be going crazy with all the babying, but she just laid there and listened, never saying anything.
“What’s with all the baby books, Sam?” Dean finally asked. He was reading her books Sam tore through when he was six: Charlotte’s Web and The Black Stallion and Choose-Your-Own-Adventures. He knew he’d gotten the books from the local library, but he figured they had to have stuff teenagers would like. Dean had been half tempted to buy her porn mags; that’s what he’d want to look at if he was laid up when he was nineteen.
Sam glanced back at Claire, and seeing her staring out the window, looking relatively contented, pulled Dean into the hall. Once they’d realized they’d be grounded a while until she got back on her feet, they’d rented a tiny house, which was actually pretty great, Dean had to admit: the same bed every night, a fridge to keep food in. ... They didn’t even have to keep setting up maps and reference materials on walls and tables in a new hotel room every night; they spread out everything they had on this shifter (plus something else that seemed to be brewing about fifty miles away) all over the livingroom and could just add to it as they came upon new information, which made tracking way easier. They couldn’t leave Claire alone now, helpless as she was; angels would come and kill her ... but maybe some night, if Sammy thought he could handle things here, Dean was thinking he’d go back and finish the shifter job. Still, it had just about gutted the most ruthless hunter he knew. Every time he almost went after it, he decided he should wait until Sam could come with him. A dead hunter was a useless hunter, which Claire had never seemed to fully grasp.
“I’ve been doing some research, Dean,” Sam said softly, so Claire wouldn’t overhear. He got his laptop and pulled up some website about child psychology. “When Cas first took her dad, Claire was basically just a kid. When someone’s traumatized, they tend to regress, which helps them heal ... but Claire was fighting for her life, so she never got to. There’s research that suggests if you kind of start all over, lead them back through their childhood and get them through it without anything real traumatic happening, they can heal. Maybe ... maybe we can unbreak her. I mean, since ....”
“... We helped break her in the first place?” Dean said brusquely, and Sam didn’t object. “Great plan, Sam, except what makes you think she isn’t gonna be traumatized again? The angels must be up to something, you know that’s the only reason they haven’t been back. They were coming like clockwork before this.”
“Yeah, well, if I don’t try, she’s going to end up getting killed one way or another.” So Sam had seen it, too, the way she threw herself at that shifter like she really didn’t care as long as it got got. “And I don’t know about you, but I don’t like the idea of Cas stuck without a vessel, for him or for us. I mean, if he ever had to get out of Jimmy’s skin for some reason, and Jimmy was killed ....”
“Doesn’t matter,” said Dean. “She’ll never say yes.”
“Yeah, but if she lives, if she heals ... maybe someday she’ll have a life, and a family, and ....”
“Squeeze out a few new vessels? Jesus, Sam.”
“Look, I’m just saying, if she can get better, that would be a good thing--for everybody. Everybody, Dean.” Dean frowned and wandered back out of the hall into the livingroom, such as it was. They needed to focus on getting Claire back on her feet. Keeping her alive was all Cas had asked them to do, all they had agreed to. The girl was there, she needed help and protection, and that’s what they were doing. They couldn’t afford to start thinking about how much it might benefit them if they steered Claire--in her state of perpetual, heart-rending vulnerability--to do things that might benefit him and Sam. That was the way angels thought, not people. Not him and Sam, anyway.
Nothing had ever seemed as sick to Dean or felt as awful as the idea of saying yes to Michael, even if it could have saved the world. That was, literally, a fate worse than death, especially hearing the way Sam and Jimmy had described what it was like. When it came to Claire saying no, Dean supported her 100% ... but what about Cas? What about his future, for the eternity he would hopefully go on existing after Sam and Dean were long gone? Wasn’t that pretty important, too? Claire could kill a few monsters, but Cas, however calculating he might be, was a truly good person, all the way down, and powerful enough to do something with it. He could do more to take care of humanity than Dean and Sam could ever hope to, no matter how long they lived. And Sam, in there working so hard to put back together something the angels seemed determined to break, which felt way too close to way too many things angels and demons and monsters and fathers had already done to Dean--and to Sam, too .... It was time for a beer. Nope, time for a few.
Claire healed physically, but as a hunter, suddenly she was useless. They couldn’t leave her behind at the house, but she freaked out so much whenever they tried to hunt something--screaming, running toward it or away from it or off in some random direction, shooting her gun at anything and everything--that they pretty much had to give up hunting completely. Then the nightmares started, her screaming “NO!” at the top of her lungs until he and Sammy ran in there and were able to wake her up. Even then, sometimes, it was like the dream didn’t go away; Dean could tell she was still seeing it long after she realized only Sam and Dean were there.
“Why is this happening?” Dean demanded in the hallway, more shaken than he wanted to let Sam see, after they finally got her back to sleep. “I thought your regression stuff or whatever was supposed to be making her better!”
“I think it is; she’s just got a lot of stuff she’s never had a chance to deal with, bad things that happened to her ....”
“If this is getting better, what does getting worse look like?” he said, trying hard to sound a little less hysterical. “I mean, seriously, Sam, how much worse can it get?”
Sam shrugged hopelessly. “Dead. That’s where she was headed.”
“Look, this psychology or whatever, it isn’t working! There is no psychology for people like us, angel vessels and hunters and pawns of the powers that be; we’re not like anybody else.”
“But they had videos on that site, of kids--little kids, Dean--acting just like her, all cynical and defensive and snide. If a kid doesn’t have a chance to be a kid, they can act like a grown-up, but they’re dying on the inside. They have no sense of self, they’re socially maladjusted, they usually end up some kind of addict, they’re reckless with a deathwish .... I mean, they had videos of six-year-olds who were like that, and when they started letting them be kids, when it was safe for them to, they were able to act like little kids again.”
“So what? There’s nothing wrong with that. I was cynical and snide when I was six.”
“Yeah,” Sam said, way too quickly. Dean’s eyes narrowed.
There was a long, excruciating moment. Finally, Dean spoke with a conviction that made his voice shake. “Maybe it’s better if she doesn’t get ‘better,’ Sam. Maybe that’s the last thing she would ever want.”
“Maybe,” Sam agreed, maddeningly rational, as always. “Or maybe not. Just because it’s not what you would want doesn’t mean it’s not what she would want. We have to let her decide.”
Dean stalked back to his bedroom and flung himself down on his back on his bed, still shaking with rage. It wasn’t fear; it was rage.
Sam finally started sleeping in the same bed with her, giant arms wrapped around her, practically mummifying her. It was more efficient for someone to be right there when she started screaming, and eventually, it seemed like just having him there, wrapped around her protectively, kept her calm most nights. Watching them together, more and more it was like Sam really was her dad, though he was only about a decade older than her. Dean guessed she must really badly need a substitute for the creepy, weirdo excuse for a father she had now. Who’d have thought it, but it seemed like Sam would make a good dad. It looked good on him. Dean could tell he felt good about helping her, too, so Sam was happy, and that made Dean happy. They had a pretty happy home, actually, fucked-up as they all were, especially since, for months now, no one had tried to kill them.
Dean had to admit Claire was finally getting better. It’s not like he’d spent time around a bunch of nineteen-year-olds like Sammy must have at college--he hadn’t even been around Sam when he was nineteen--but from what he did know about it, Dean thought Claire seemed to be acting a lot more like a normal kid her age. She did still have nightmares sometimes, always screaming the same thing, and Dean didn’t get why until one night when he went to check on them, through the door he heard Sam murmuring, “It’s okay, Claire, you never have to say yes. No one can ever make you say yes.”
There was definitely something going on in that town fifty miles away: weird signs and weather patterns and disappearances and sightings, but none of it added up to anything they could recognize. They finally decided it couldn’t hurt to take Claire on a little recon trip. Even she was stoked to get out of town for the day. Once they figured out what it was, they could decide whether one of them could take care of it on their own while the other stayed with Claire, or worst case, they could call in some other hunters and get them on the job.
Dean guessed he’d ignored the warning in his gut because he was jonesing so hard to get back to some kind of hunting activity, even something like this. It’s not like he didn’t usually have a bad feeling on a hunt; danger was the job. He’d somehow convinced himself the bad feeling was always this intense and unrelenting. He didn’t put two and two together until the angels--dozens of them--started popping into existence in the empty warehouse that, oh right, his intuition was never this bad unless catastrophe was imminent. His mind ran through the few times it had ever felt like this: when the hellhounds were coming for him, check. When Sam told him he was going to say yes, check. When Cas declared himself their new god, check check check. Why did he never remember this stuff until it was too late to do any good?
Sam had finally gotten the story on how she was able to kill angels so well: After Cas took her father and then she said yes to Cas briefly that day four years ago, she’d become so sensitized to angelic energy, she always knew when they were coming. They must travel like lightning, from their strike point first, drawing the rest of their bodies and energy to the location they meant to appear, so she could feel them coming, like St. Elmo’s Fire. Thus, they literally did pop into the space beside her with the angel blade already in their hearts.
Not today, though. She was fumbling to get angel blades out of Sam’s weapons duffle, but she was shaking so hard and her eyes were so wide, she was obviously a sitting duck. Trouble was, they all were. In a room like this, swarming with angels, they didn’t stand a chance. Then Cas was there, fighting for them, then--was that Anna?! How could that be?!--defending them, too, then more. Dean realized Cas had been busy while they were taking care of Claire, collecting more allies ... and maybe raising some from the dead. Cas shouted to them to save Claire, and Sam and Dean got her between them, Cas’s allies all around the three of them. Dean got his hands on an angel blade and tossed one to Sam, and they did whatever they could. Even Claire managed to pull herself together enough to waste one angel.
Dean started thinking they might actually survive ... then he saw something he never had before: The enemy angels held one of their own up against the wall and started cutting into him with an angel blade. Dean wondered wildly if maybe he’d disobeyed and they were punishing him for it then and there, until he saw the calm expression on the angel’s face, the way you imagine kamikaze pilots must have looked as they were about to hit their target. The angels collected the glowing stuff that oozed out and started drawing with it on the wall.
“No no no!” Dean shouted. He didn’t have any idea what they were doing, but even though there were dozens of the enemy, he suddenly knew this was what that bad feeling was about. All those months when they’d left them alone, this was what they were cooking up, something new and unexpected, something Sam and Dean had no idea how to fight.
Dean ran toward that group of angels to stop them, but Cas flung him back to Claire’s side without touching him. “No, Dean!” Cas said fiercely. “Protect Claire! I’ll stop them.”
Cas went for them, and Dean saw, too late, that this was exactly what they hoped for. The one who was drawing with the glowing goo smiled to see Cas, and flung a last handful of it against Cas’s chest. Cas looked down, uncomprehending, then looked up as it abruptly became clear. The disbelief on his face made plain the other angels had stooped to something even he never thought them capable of. “No!” he cried--too late, as his vessel disintegrated--no blood, no angel wings painted on the floor, no nothing, just a fine spray of glittery dust that faded instantly like smoke. Dean cried out--he didn’t know what he said--and went for him, but Sam pulled him back, pointing urgently at Claire, who was rising to her feet, staring up into the light that hovered above her, and then Sam and Dean were pressed down to the ground by the force of that presence and the high-pitched noise that accompanied it, covering their ears. Cas, Dean realized--it was Cas. Jimmy was gone, but Cas was still alive ... and circling his vessel, the only one he had left.
Dean tried to see what he could, shielding his face with his arm and squinting against Cas’s impossible brightness. Claire seemed to be listening intently, nodding a couple of times, her eyes wide. She must be one of the ones who could understand angels in their natural state, and Cas was talking to her--begging, probably, but Dean knew it wouldn’t do him any good. This girl had lived her life to say no to Cas. She was willing--eager--to die so she could refuse him. It had seemed to Dean all the time he knew her that she put a lot of energy into building up the strength to say no to him, if the time should ever come. It seemed like she practiced that every day. If Cas was ruthless enough to try to coerce her into doing it, it wouldn’t matter; Claire had nothing left to lose anymore, not even the body of her dad or the hope of his return. For her, there was no terror to equal that of becoming the new vessel of Castiel ... but then the angel blades were falling from her hands and she flung her arms up into the light. “YES!” she screamed. “YES!”
Dean ducked his head as the noise and brightness reached an intolerable level ... and then it was suddenly gone. Dean and Sam looked around. Dean looked up just in time to see Claire jolt sickly as if she’d been shot, and then Anna’s fingers were on his forehead, and he was somewhere else.
On to Part 2 ...