Turns My World to Stone
Title: Turns My World To Stone
Rating: PG
Words: 2,419
Spoilers: s4e20
Summary: The aftermath.
When she’d heard the word mourning, before, Claire’s mind would fill with hazy images of women in black veils, dark surroundings, grey cemeteries under clouded skies; vague conceptions of death and, invariably, darkness.
At her grandmother’s house in Lexington, Claire sees her mother mourning at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee she never drinks, bathed in spring sunlight, sitting there for hours that stretch into days staring out of the window. The kitchen is a big, light room with pale yellow walls; Claire’s grandmother enjoys baking, and the room is usually scented with cinnamon; sometimes she puts on the radio and Claire’s mother obediently listens to talkshows punctuated with audience laughter and classical music that fills the room with bright, dancing arpeggios. Claire watches all of this, and understands that bereavement does not come colour-coded, and that, no matter how cheerful or comforting the surroundings, grief and horror can flourish anywhere.
Claire’s grandmother, Louise, asks what happened, at first. Why Amelia has turned up on her mother’s doorstep with her daughter in tow, incoherent and grieving for her husband almost a year after his disappearance. Claire refuses point-blank to talk about anything that has happened in the last few days, and Amelia only shakes her head and says she can’t explain. Eventually, Claire’s grandmother stops asking; she makes up the spare room for Claire and her mother to share, goes shopping and comes back with enough to feed three people, and tells Amelia that of course she can stay as long as she has to.
The first day after they arrive, Claire wakes up and realises that her mother is not there, and then looks at the clock and realises that it is nearly three o’clock in the afternoon. She still feels exhausted, and somehow empty, like a car that someone took and rode around in and left burnt out when they were done.
She gets up anyway, brushes her hair and dresses in the same clothes as yesterday, and goes downstairs. Her mother is at the kitchen table, cradling a cup of coffee in her hands, and her grandmother is putting away a bag of groceries. She spins around when Claire comes in, her dyed honey-blonde hair whipping around her face. ‘Claire, sweetheart! I didn’t want to wake you. Are you feeling okay?’
Claire takes the simplest option, and says, ‘Yes.’
‘You must need something to eat. I’ll make you some toast. Amelia, would you - ?’
Claire’s mother nods without looking up, and her grandmother makes four slices of toast, spreads them with butter, and watches her daughter and granddaughter eat in silence with worry creasing her forehead. After a few minutes she clears her throats and says, ‘Claire, baby, I know you must be…upset…but could you tell me - ’
‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ Claire says. Her own voice sounds wrong, ringing hollow in her ears. She can still feel the echoes of Castiel’s, traced on her vocal cords, humming in her throat, and hers is thin and weak by comparison.
Louise runs a hand through her hair and returns her attention to Claire’s mother. ‘Amelia, honey, should I call a doctor? Both of you are…I don’t understand what’s wrong.’
‘Nothing’s - ’ Claire’s mother starts to say, but her voice breaks on the second syllable, and she pushes two fingers against her forehead, the way Claire has seen her do when she doesn’t want to cry. ‘Mom, I really can’t tell you, but please don’t get a doctor. Just let us stay here for a little while? Please?’
‘Oh, honey,’ Claire’s grandmother says quietly, and crosses the room to slide an arm around her daughter’s shoulders. Claire watches.
‘I’m sorry, Mom,’ Claire’s mother says, not quite sobbing, but Claire can hear the tears pressing against her words like water behind a dam. ‘I wish I could tell you, but I can’t.’
‘Okay,’ Claire’s grandmother says quietly. ‘Okay.’
***
Amelia spends the first day sitting at the kitchen table, unable to quite summon up the energy to move. In the afternoon Claire gets up, at last, and comes downstairs; sits at the table with her mother and stares at the grain of the wood like it’s written in a language she used to be able to read. She won’t meet Amelia’s eyes, or her grandmother’s; Amelia sees her and thinks of that…of that thing, in her, talking to Jimmy with a voice that wasn’t Claire’s, and all the words she wants to say to her daughter freeze in her mouth.
Amelia’s mother offers Claire a book, which she accepts, and they sit like that for the rest of the day: Claire sitting and turning over the pages of the fifth Harry Potter at regular intervals without, Amelia suspects, reading a word, and Amelia staring out of the window at a blue spring sky, thinking of her husband’s eyes. She wonders where Jimmy is, and then she wonders whether he even knows where he is, and she squeezes her eyes shut and resolutely does not cry.
***
‘What did it feel like?’ Claire’s mother asks her quietly as they sit over breakfast the next morning. Claire’s grandmother has gone to work, with careful apologies for having to leave and a last worried glance at her daughter and granddaughter before she closed the front door.
Claire doesn’t have to ask what she means. Her mouth feels dry; she takes a sip of her orange juice and wonders how to describe it. Castiel burned, inside her, with a bright, screaming light; not hot, exactly, but like the feeling of being hot if the actual heat were taken away. He filled her up; she could almost feel him pressing against every inch of her skin from the inside, all that power and magnitude compressed within a body almost too small to hold it. She doesn’t know how to tell her mother. She doesn’t know whether her mother will want to hear it.
‘Claire,’ Amelia says, and she sounds close to tears again. Her voice is ragged at the edges, like torn paper. ‘I’m sorry, Claire, I have to know.’
‘I don’t remember much of what happened,’ Claire says quietly, which is true. Crammed down deep within herself while Castiel took her place, she was barely conscious of anything around her; it was like trying to pick out details of something spinning at an impossibly fast speed. She only remembers one clear image, and even that is blurred and distorted by Castiel’s white-hot light: her father’s face, smeared with blood and twisted by pain, as he gritted his teeth and asked Castiel to take him instead.
‘Do you…’ Claire’s mother looks up at the ceiling, taking a deep breath, and then back to the table, lips tightly pressed together. ‘Do you think your father’s aware of what’s happening?’
‘He asked,’ Claire says uncertainly. ‘He asked to be…’ Instead of me, she thinks, and feels something twist deep in her stomach; she takes another sip of juice, and tastes acid, burning her throat.
‘No,’ Claire’s mother says quietly. ‘I don’t mean that. I mean…do you think he’s conscious? Of what’s going on around him? Do you think he’s looking out of his own eyes while someone else…’ She tails off.
There is a silence. Claire thinks of that black-eyed thing with its malicious smile that looked so wrong on her mother’s face, and says tentatively, ‘Is that what it was like for you?’
Amelia closes her eyes and bites her bottom lip, and something happens to her face as though it’s all being drawn inward, crumpling like paper, and then the dam breaks and she’s crying, in a way that Claire has never seen her mother cry before, her whole body shaking with every gasping, tear-stained breath she takes. There is a horrible stretched-out second as Claire wonders what to do, and then she hesitantly gets up and hugs her mother the way Amelia used to do to her when she cried as a child over small concerns, and says, ‘That’s not what it was like, Mom.’ She casts around for a way to describe Castiel that isn’t actually a lie, while her mother sobs brokenly in her arms, and eventually says, ‘It was like dreaming.’
***
Amelia does not break down in front of Claire again, after that nightmare morning. She sits quietly and thinks of her husband, and feels impossibly tired, but she does not cry and she does not talk about what happened. Her mother is clearly worried, but she doesn’t push Amelia to tell her anything, after the first day or two, and Amelia is overwhelmingly grateful for it. She calls her office and Claire’s school to say that they will both be away for a week or two, a death in the family. Her boss is irritable at first - does it really necessitate weeks off work? - but he knows about Jimmy’s disappearance and when Amelia mentions her husband he connects the dots and says, more gently, that she can take as much time as she needs.
So Amelia is free all day, to sit in her mother’s house and stare out of windows, running over everything that happened in her mind: threatening to leave Jimmy, telling him he was insane, realising that he was gone, calling the police. Waiting for him to come back, then accepting that he wouldn’t, then opening the door to see him standing there. And then the nightmare that abruptly caught them up and spun them away, demons and angels and a gun in her hand, in her hand, that curled her finger around the trigger and shot Jimmy while, locked away in a corner of her head, Amelia screamed.
When they have been staying at her mother’s for five days, Louise comes down on Sunday morning in her best blouse and says, ‘Honey, I’m going to Mass, will you come?’
Amelia feels her body stiffen, without her conscious consent - and even that involuntary movement, small as it is, brings back those shuddering memories of feeling her body move under someone else’s control - and she says tightly, ‘No.’
‘Amelia, I know you’re…upset, but you have to leave the house eventually. And I think it will - ’
‘I’m not going,’ Amelia states, as definitively as she can when her voice is almost shaking.
There is a pause. ‘Shall I take Claire - ?’
Amelia stands up, tucks her chair under the table, looks her mother in the eye, and says, ‘My daughter is never setting foot in a church again.’
‘Amelia, what - ’
‘Never. Again.’
Her mother presses her lips together, and after a few seconds says, ‘Fine. I’ll be back around twelve-thirty.’
Amelia doesn’t sit down again until she hears the front door close.
***
Upstairs, Claire can hear her mother and her grandmother talking; she doesn’t know what about, but she hears the front door shut, and then the sound of her grandmother’s car.
She returns her attention to the screen in front of her. Her grandmother has two computers: her laptop, and an older PC which she never uses, and at which Claire is now sitting.
The page image for Angel, on Wikipedia, is a nineteenth-century painting of Mary sitting holding Jesus, while three winged girls in trailing white robes bend solicitously over her, their faces full of love and care.
One of them is playing a violin. Claire almost laughs.
Claire doesn’t know what she expected to find, but what she does is so…normal. The word, Wikipedia tells her, comes from the Greek angelos, ‘messenger’. Angels are ‘pure contingent spirits’, whatever that means; they are ‘an important part of all apocalyptic literature’; they are ‘the intermediaries between God and all the bodies here in this world’. The earliest known depiction of an angel is from the third century. A higher percentage of Americans believe in angels than in global warming. Near the bottom of the page a survey is mentioned, of people who claimed to have encountered angels, and described them as humans with wings, or as ‘extraordinarily beautiful or radiant’, or as beings of light. Claire reads this last and imagines someone writing on a survey that they had encountered a beautiful, benevolent guardian angel, then thinks of Castiel: his alien fire burning so fiercely she thought it would consume her from the inside; his voice - let me in, Claire, I can save them, say yes, let me in - like a thousand voices all singing at once; her father’s face a cool, impassive mask. She feels her face move involuntarily and for a second thinks she is laughing, until she realises that there are tears streaming down her face.
***
Amelia can’t bear to sit at that table any longer; when Claire comes downstairs she is standing at the counter, waiting for the kettle to boil for yet another cup of coffee she will hold until it cools, and not drink. She hears the door open and turns to see her daughter standing caught in the doorway, eyes red and tears shining on her cheeks.
‘Oh, Claire,’ Amelia says, and moves forward to hug her daughter. She wants to say, it’s okay; she wants to say all the appropriate empty, comforting lies, but she just can’t force them out.
‘I miss Dad,’ Claire says into her mother’s hair, voice trembling.
‘So do I,’ Amelia says, which is useless and stupid, but at least has some truth to it. ‘Oh, Claire, sweetheart, I miss him too.’
‘You couldn’t even tell Grandma,’ Claire sobs. ‘Nobody will ever understand.’
‘I know,’ Amelia says quietly. When Jimmy told me, I didn’t understand. ‘I know.’
‘Mom,’ Claire gets out, after a few moments, ‘can we go home?’
Amelia thinks of their empty house, of Jimmy standing nervously on their doorstep, of Roger and Lisa who…who weren’t Roger and Lisa any more, who were shoved roughly aside so they could watch helplessly while something moved them around like puppets, and has to suppress a shudder. She doesn’t want to see that place ever again.
But this is the only thing she can do for her daughter. She’ll bear it, for Claire’s sake; she’ll scrub the blood from their carpet, and sit at their dining table pretending she isn’t thinking of her husband close to tears, because I’m happy, he said. Jimmy gave up his life to save Claire. She can do this.
‘Of course, honey,’ Amelia says quietly, and strokes her daughter’s hair. ‘Of course we can.’