Chapter Text
The vision hadn’t specified who the Witnesses were going to be or when exactly they would appear, but it did divulge that they would be ghosts and that they would face four of them. To Sam, Dean, and Bobby, ghosts are old hat – almost too easy to deal with, at this point.
So, in the morning, they equip themselves with what they’ll need: iron and salt.
Bobby shows them the panic room he’s built in the basement and says, “If things get too dicey, we can hide out in here.”
“When did you have time to build this?” Dean asks, looking around the room in amazement.
“That summer you had your head up your ass workin’ on that damned car all day,” he answers dryly. “Not surprised you didn’t notice.”
Dean rolls his eyes and angles himself to address Claire. “Alright, so, you stay in here.”
“What? You want me to just cower in this room like a baby?”
“No, I want you to be safe in this room and leave the heavy lifting to the professionals.”
Claire feels her temper bubble in her chest. “I want to help,” she insists. “How else am I going to learn how to protect myself?”
Sam watches the interaction with interest, weighing whether or not he should intervene. Dean has always been a protector first and foremost, so it doesn’t surprise him that he’s trying to find a way to keep Claire from getting hurt. What does surprise him is the way he’s going about it. Ordering her instead of gently suggesting, like he usually does with women on cases. It conveys a sense of intimacy that he finds confounding since, until recently, they’d gone years without even seeing each other.
It reminds him of that dream he’d intruded on. It was a shock to see her there, after all that time, in a position so domestic that there was no way that it could be based on any sort of real memory. And then it hits him. Maybe it wasn’t based on a real memory, but a fake one. The djinn’s spell – he’d always had the sense that there was something about it that he hadn’t been upfront about.
It makes sense now. Dean’s behavior is rooted in a history that only exists for him, not for Claire. It’s clouding his judgment, so he decides to step in. “She’s right, Dean. It’s good experience. We’ll stay close.”
Dean looks about ready to take Sam on, too, so Bobby interjects, “Four of us, four of them. Seems like a good idea to let ‘er help.”
Claire raises her chin triumphantly and sets her jaw. “You’re overruled,” she tells him, arms crossed over her chest. She tries to ignore seeing his eyes flash with some inscrutable emotion.
“Fine,” he capitulates.
“We need to figure out how to send ‘em away for good,” Bobby says. “That’s the hard part. Meaning, we need to hit the lore.”
“My favorite,” Dean drawls sarcastically.
They climb back upstairs and Bobby begins pulling books off the shelves, when all of sudden, all the doors to the house blow open. There are three access points: the front door, the garage door, and the side door, which is off of the kitchen.
Bobby takes the side, Dean takes the front, and Claire and Sam take the garage. Each of them has a shotgun filled with iron-coated rock salt aimed and ready. However, while they may be prepared to face the ghosts in theory, Claire is certainly not prepared to face them once she sees who they actually are.
It’s her family and Fletcher.
Bobby is facing her father, Dean’s got Fletcher, and Claire and Sam are face-to-face with her mother and Charlie.
Her first instinct is to deny what she’s seeing. “No,” she says slowly to the apparitions. “Castiel showed me – you’re supposed to be at peace.”
“We were ripped from our rest because of you,” her mother tells her angrily.
“All because you’re so special,” Charlie chimes in. “I was still just a kid. I never even had a chance.”
“You know I’m so sorry,” she pleads.
Sam doesn’t let the exchange continue and promptly fires a round into each of them.
“C’mon,” he says, pulling her back towards the library by her wrist. “That won’t hold them off for long. We need to figure out how to send them back for good.”
Meanwhile, Dean is still wrestling with Fletcher.
“I’m dead because of you,” the ghost snarls at him. “If Claire hadn’t left to go help you, we’d all still be alive.”
“She would’ve just died along with you,” he snaps back.
“No. She’s off-limits.”
Dean cocks his head to the side as his brows bend together. He should’ve dispatched him by now, but Fletcher seems to know something that they don’t. “Whaddo you mean?” he asks, taking the bait.
He doesn’t answer his question. Instead, he lunges at him. He wraps his hand painfully around his wrist and forces him to lower the shotgun. Dean notices a strange brand burned into his flesh.
“It’s not enough that you got me killed, is it? Now you want to steal my girlfriend, too?”
Sam shoots him from the other room, and his form dissipates into a cloud of salt. He catches his brother’s gaze. Dean’s eyes spell Forget you heard that.
The four of them regroup in the library, taking full advantage of the momentary quiet.
“Grab these books and head down to the panic room,” Bobby orders.
They obey.
Once down in the basement, Claire succumbs to tears and sinks to the ground against the wall. “Why them?” she cries. “Why are they so angry? They’re supposed to be at peace.”
“Something rose them on purpose, made them rabid,” Bobby answers. “It ain’t their fault.”
“It’s because they think it’s our fault that they’re dead,” Dean responds darkly.
Claire brushes her hair away from her face, tears causing the strands to clump together. Sam crouches down and puts his hand on her shoulder.
“We’ll send them back,” he says. “Put them back to rest.”
“Claire, your boyfriend said something strange to me. He said you were off-limits.”
Bobby stops flipping through a large tome for a moment. “What the hell does that mean?”
Dean shrugs. “He wasn’t as forthcoming with that part.”
“She’s a prophet,” Sam reasons aloud. “Maybe that means she has some sort of built-in protection.”
“Why raise my family if they can’t even hurt me?”
“They can’t kill you,” Sam corrects. “But they are hurting you.”
“So to torture me, then,” she laughs bitterly.
“I think I’ve figured this out,” Bobby interrupts. “Someone used a powerful spell to wake them up. It’s gonna take another powerful spell to send ‘em back. The good news is I should have everything we need in the house.”
“Should? Great,” Sam says.
“Any chance you got everything we need here in this room?” Dean questions.
“So, you thought our luck was gonna start now all of a sudden? Spell's gotta be cast over an open fire.”
“The fireplace in the library,” Claire murmurs.
“Bingo. You’ll do the spell since apparently they can’t touch you. The rest of us will work on gettin’ the ingredients together. You add ‘em to a bowl, light a fire, and chant these words,” Bobby says, showing her a piece of scrap paper that he’s written the translation on.
She takes the paper from him, folding it in half and stuffing it into her back pocket. “Okay.”
They return back upstairs, each with an ingredient that they are instructed to find as part of the spell: wormwood, opium, and hemlock. Dean is mildly shocked to learn that Bobby has been stashing opium in his house without a word to them. He wonders what other substances he’s holding onto.
However, he pushes these thoughts aside to focus on the task at hand and bounds into the kitchen only to be confronted by Fletcher again.
“Stay away from her. You’ll just ruin her,” he tells him. “Like you ruin everything. You know that.”
Bobby sprays a round at the figure. “If you’re gonna shoot, shoot. Don’t talk,” he grouses.
The next few minutes culminate in each of the men dodging ghosts as they toss the ingredients to Claire. She eventually executes the spell with commendable ease and sends their souls back to where they came from. That same, clogged-up part of her brain led her through the turmoil, helped her ignore the taunts and jeers. Even though part of her wanted nothing more to talk to them, to get closure, reason told her that it wasn’t really them.
When it’s over, they sit in front of the fireplace passing around a bottle of scotch.
“Y’know,” Claire says eventually, “Fletcher kind of helped us.”
“You mean because he said you were untouchable?” Sam asks.
“Yeah.”
He stares into the flames as he considers this. “Maybe there was still some part of them that remembered how they felt about you.”
“Maybe. But they weren’t wrong. I am the reason they’re dead.” She takes a long swing of scotch, wincing as it slides down her throat. The burning liquor combats the scorch of a building lump. Tears are misting her eyes again, especially when she thinks about how, even in his twisted, deranged state, Fletcher tried to help her. She wonders briefly how much more painful this would be if Castiel hadn’t intervened.
“Demons are the reason they’re dead,” Dean responds firmly, taking the bottle from her. She tries to ignore the brush of his fingers against hers, sending electric currents up her wrist.
“But they were trying to get to me.”
“Trying to get to you without actually being able to touch you,” Sam says. “It’s kind of strange, don’t you think?”
“I think everything about this is strange,” she scoffs. “What other reason would they have other than to hurt me?”
“Demons don’t need a reason to do evil,” Dean says, righteous anger infiltrating his tone. “That’s the whole point of them. They just bring senseless death and chaos.”
Sam's jaw works as he considers this, but he doesn't respond.
Later that night, Castiel appears to Dean upstairs while Sam’s asleep in the bed next to him.
“Excellent job with the witnesses,” he tells him.
“You knew about that?”
“I was, uh, made aware.”
“Well, thanks a lot for the angelic assistance.”
“We would have intervened had you truly needed it. But you have to understand, we had larger concerns.”
“Concerns? You let Claire’s whole family get massacred by demons and then come back from the dead to try to kill us. And, by the way, while all this is going on, where the hell is your boss, huh? If there is a God?”
“There's a God.”
“I'm not convinced. 'Cause if there's a God, what the hell is he waiting for? Genocide? Monsters roaming the earth? The freaking apocalypse? At what point does he lift a damn finger and help the poor bastards that are stuck down here?”
“The Lord works…”
“If you say ‘in mysterious ways,’ so help me, I will kick your ass. So, they were right. This is a sign of the apocalypse.”
“That's why we're here. Big things afoot. The rising of the witnesses is one of the 66 seals.”
“Okay. I'm guessing that's not a show at Seaworld.”
“Those seals are being broken by Lilith.”
“She did the spell. She rose the witnesses.”
“Mhm. And not just here. Twenty other hunters are dead.”
“Of course. She picked victims that the hunters couldn't save so that they would barrel right after us.”
“Lilith has a certain sense of humor.”
“Well, we put them back to rest.”
“It doesn't matter,” Castiel says with a tsk. “The seal was broken. Think of the seals as locks on a door.”
“Okay. Last one opens and…”
“Lucifer walks free.”
“Lucifer? But I thought Lucifer was just a story they told at demon Sunday school. There's no such thing.”
“Three days ago, you thought there was no such thing as me. Why do you think we're here, walking among you now for the first time in 2,000 years?”
“To stop Lucifer,” Dean says in realization.
“That's why we've arrived.”
“Well... bang-up job so far. Stellar work with the witnesses. That's nice.”
“We tried. And there are other battles, other seals. Some we'll win, some we'll lose. This one we lost. Our numbers are not unlimited. Six of my brothers died in the field this week. You think the armies of Heaven should just follow you around? There's a bigger picture here. You should show me some respect. I dragged you out of Hell. I can throw you back in.”
“What about Claire? She’s special to you guys – she’s gotta have some sort of guardian angel squad up there.”
“Indeed. We’re nearby, should her life come into danger. The demons know not to trifle with her because of what she is, though some are foolhardy enough to try to get close. But that’s part of why you’re here, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean?”
“To protect her. To keep her safe. Do you think she found her way to you by chance?” Castiel laughs darkly at his own question. “There’s no such thing.”
And then, he’s gone, vanished once more into thin air.
Dean sits back down on his bed, his head swimming. He flops against the pillow and stares at the ceiling. How is he supposed to make sense of this? On one hand, he has an angel telling him that he’s supposed to protect Claire. On the other, he has some sort of omniscient ghost telling him that he’s going to ruin her. Who is he supposed to believe?
As far as he can tell, angels lie, just like demons. Maybe they don’t lie outright, but vague half-truths can be just as destructive. And then there’s the whole matter of the impending Apocalypse brought on by Lucifer himself.
He digs deep into the recesses of his memory to recount the story as he knows it: Lucifer, a fallen angel, banished to Hell by the archangel Michael. That would mean that he has the same level of power as Castiel – probably more. How the hell are they supposed to face off against something like that? Why should they even be involved at all? He’s just a measly hunter. Sam, maybe, has some greater significance. Claire, too. But not him. So the question still haunts him: why was he brought back?