Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Dad’s on a hunting trip, and he hasn’t been home in a few days.”

These are the words Dean utters to his brother to explain why he’s in his living room in the middle of the night, unannounced.

“That doesn’t sound like my problem,” Sam replies snidely. 

Dean should have anticipated this reaction. Sam’s last meeting with their dad – years ago, now – wasn’t exactly warm and fuzzy. He holds his gaze for a couple of moments, trying to convey what can’t be spoken in front of the audience of one that he’s just noticed.

“Fine. I just figured you’d want to know. Who’s this?”

Sam turns to see his girlfriend standing in the doorway in her underwear.

“I’m Jess,” she answers. “You must be Dean – it’s so nice to meet you. Let me just go put some clothes on…”

“Oh, I wouldn’t think of it,” replies Dean with a predatory grin.

Sam shoots him a stern frown. “When are you leaving?”

He snaps his eyes back to meet his, and Sam tries to ignore the millisecond flicker of hurt that flashes across them, so brief it could have been imagined. Maybe it was the headlights of a car refracting through the window, instead.

“I was hoping to hit the road tomorrow,” he answers.

Jess has re-appeared wearing ratty gray sweatpants. They’re rolled down at the top, and a stripe of her lower midsection is on display as she crosses her arms and leans against the doorframe. “Why don’t you stay for a little while,” she suggests. “We’re having a big Halloween party here tomorrow night since Maus is still canceled. You could meet some of our other friends.”

Dean looks at his brother in surprise, not bothering to question what the hell Maus is. “You hate Halloween,” he tells him. In fact, he hates Halloween to such a degree that he’d made it a personality trait on more than one occasion. 

Sam shrugs cooly. “Halloween’s a pretty big deal in college.”

Dean considers Jess’s proposal and a picture of smoking hot college chicks in slutty Halloween costumes unfolds in his mind. He’s not so worried about his father that he can’t stand to take a little detour.

“Alright,” he agrees slowly. “Just for one night. Then, I gotta take off.”

“Great!” Jess exclaims. “You can crash on the couch. This is going to be so fun!”

Dean looks at Sam again, examining him more thoroughly. Apart from the familiar expression of chagrin on his face, he looks different than he did when he last saw him, when he was nearly still a teenager. He’s even taller and more filled out; less gangly and more sturdy, like one of the redwoods they supposedly have around these parts. It will be interesting to see what lies he’s cloaked himself in, to see him interact with people who don’t really know him at all. 

The party is pretty much exactly what Dean expected: loads of college students in slapdash costumes, kegs, and half-assed decorations. Some top 40s junk blares on a blown-out speaker, no doubt hooked up to someone’s computer that’s riddled with viruses from downloading this shit on Napster or Limewire. He half expects Bill Clinton’s “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” soundbite to come on at any minute.

Sam introduces him to many of his buddies, who are surprisingly not the bespectacled computer geeks he’d had in mind. However, there is one person in particular that he’s keen to get acquainted with, and that’s Jess’s best friend. The two of them are wearing a joint costume; Jess is an angel, clad in a skimpy white dress with a petticoat, wings, and a halo. Her redheaded friend is a devil, wearing a similar dress in red with horns on her head. He can’t help but think that even dressed as a devil, she looks like an angel, too – the type of person that dumb did it hurt when you fell from heaven pickup line was written for. She has a dazzling white smile and the apples of her cheeks are round and rosy.

Dean plays it cool and patiently waits for Jess to make the rounds, observing them from afar. Sam notices and eyes him with unease.

“Don’t even think about it,” he warns him.

“Whaddo you mean?” Dean replies with faux innocence.

“She’s too young for you.”

This gives him momentary pause. “How old is she?”

“She’s a junior.”

“So what, twenty-one? That’s fair game in my book,” he says with a relieved grin. “You know what I like to say – if they’re old enough to legally drink, they’re old enough to-”

“Dean-”

Neither get the chance to finish their sentence because by this time Jess has already made her way over.

“Dean, meet my little, Claire,” she says, presenting her as though she is a prize.

“I didn’t know you were a sorority girl, Jess,” he comments in a tone that’s verging on flirtation. “Nice to meet you.” He sticks out his hand.

Claire looks between him and Sam. “Frankenstein and…?”

“Indiana Jones,” Dean finishes. In reality, he’s dressed no differently than he usually is, wearing jeans and his dad’s beat-up leather jacket. “And let me guess. Angel and devil?”

“Not the most creative, I know. But this was the best Spirit Halloween had to offer on short notice.” She smiles widely, and he can’t help but think her crimson lipstick is going to be a nightmare to get off of his face later.

“You guys don’t really look that much alike,” she remarks.

“Dean didn’t get the tall gene,” Sam jokes.

Dean rolls his eyes.

Claire, looking up at them both, replies, “You both seem pretty tall to me.”

Dean gives her a winning smile and switches gears. “So, what are you studying?”

“I’m a psych major. What do you do?”

Sam watches Dean formulate a response with rapt curiosity, weighing whether or not he should intervene.

“I’m in a family business with our dad,” he replies vaguely.

“Doing…”

“Handyman type odd jobs. A little of this, a little of that.”

Claire doesn’t seem fully satisfied with this answer, but doesn’t push the issue.

Jess interrupts, “Well, I’ve gotta keep making the rounds, but you two stay and chat. Sam, why don’t you come with me.” She gives him a pointed stare, and he looks like he’s about to protest before Dean nudges him with his elbow. Reluctantly, he follows Jess to socialize with the rest of their guests.

A Caribbean-style drum beat comes over the stereo and Dean visibly winces.

Claire laughs, “Not a fan of Pitbull?”

He doesn’t have the heart to tell her that to him, Pitbull is just a dog. “Not really my style.”

She shifts her weight from one foot to the other. Her red platform heels seem to be bothering her despite making her legs look fantastic. He can see the cheap, plasticy patent leather carving a wound into the top of her foot even through the fabric of her stockings.

“Can I get you another drink?” he offers.

“Sure!”

He hands her a solo cup filled with vodka, ice, and raspberry seltzer water. He takes care not to overfill the cup with vodka – he’s not a creep, after all. He’s merely trying to help her numb what appears to be quite a painful situation with her feet.

She asks, “So, are you just visiting for the weekend?” 

“Yeah, I’m trying to get Sam to go with me to find our dad. He’s been MIA on a hunting trip for a few days.”

Her features instantly rearrange into a look of concern. “Oh no, are you worried?”

“Not too worried. This isn’t the first time he’s done something like this. He’s probably fine, just on a bender with the boys. Still need to check in on him, though.”

Meanwhile, on the other end of the room, Sam and Jess are having a completely different conversation.

“Dean has a horrible track record with girls,” he tells her. “You shouldn’t have introduced them.”

“She asked me to – she thought he was cute. I told her he was just visiting for a couple of days, so her expectations are low.”

Sam shakes his head slightly. “Still…”

“You don’t need to be such a worry wart, Sam. They’ll be fine.” She gives him a pretty smile. “Do you wanna play beer pong?”

Many rounds of beer pong later, Sam and Jess and Dean and Claire are facing off after climbing to the tops of their respective brackets. How Dean got so good at beer pong without ever having gone to college continues to be an enigma to Sam. He supposes this must have been what he spent his time on in high school instead of studying.

By now, everyone’s feeling a little muzzy and, to Sam’s consternation, Claire and Dean are making more and more physical contact. What started as innocuous high-fiving has progressed into something more than simply friendly. Claire has since removed the medieval torture devices on her feet and is a full head shorter than Dean. She fits easily under his arm, which is currently draped around her shoulders. 

Jess, on the other hand, is almost as tall as Dean is, even without shoes. Her height gives her an advantage in beer pong and she performs better than Claire. However, Dean is able to bridge the gap in skill with his performance.

Eventually, around 2 AM, the game ends with Claire hitting a winning behind-the-back shot with a thinned-out audience to see. The lack of spectators doesn’t seem to matter and the two of them celebrate uproariously. Dean lifts her in the air and spins her around, and when he sets her down, she plants a kiss on his lips. Her red lipstick has mostly washed away in the beer cups and he’s grateful for it, but he still comes away with a faint red smear on his lips. They part to see Sam looking between them with a frown. 

Dean does not care one iota.

“It’s getting late,” Claire tells him dreamily. “I should probably be heading back home.”

Dean can easily read the subtext in her half-lidded eyes. “I’ll walk you back.”

He casts a fleeting glance at his brother on his way out the door, but finds that Jess is distracting him with chores. They lock eyes and he gives her a grateful smirk and wave.

Claire lives in the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority house, which is around ten blocks from Jess and Sam. She’s put her shoes back on for the walk home, and is clearly struggling. Beyond just that, the crisp California air has cooled substantially with the sunset. The cold prickles the vast amount of exposed skin across her body, and she begins to visibly shiver despite her heavy liquor blanket.

Dean drapes his leather jacket around her shoulder and she threads her arms through the sleeves.

“Thanks,” she says earnestly.

“Don’ mention it.”

The coat is warm with his body heat and smells like him – like gasoline and something else she can’t place. She tugs it tighter around herself. She can feel the source of the warmth radiating pheromones beside her, and excitement coils in her stomach. 

She wishes the walk back were shorter for two reasons. One, because she doesn’t know what to say to fill the void. All she knows is that she wants to put her hands all over this man that she just met, that she already spent the whole night talking to.

And two, because the searing pain in her feet is becoming unbearable. When they’re two blocks out, she stops to unfasten her shoes again. To her dismay, she sees vibrant red blood staining her opaque white stockings. 

“Need a hand?”

“What do you mean?”

“I can give you a piggyback the rest of the way, if you want.”

Claire considers what it’d be like to wrap her legs around his waist. She thinks briefly that this could solve both of her problems.

“Seriously? That’s kinda far.”

Dean shrugs. “You look pretty light.”

She smiles that luminous smile that he has begun to crave seeing. “Alright,” she agrees.

She hops on his back with a giggle and winds her arms around his neck, almost like a little girl. The feeling of the full length of her figure pressing into his is, however, not very girlish. Dean trots down the hill towards her house like a mule. She’s still wearing his jacket and holding her heels in one hand. He can feel her warm breath near his left ear. 

For one euphoric moment, he feels completely normal. He feels what his life could have been like if he’d decided to become a normal college student. And he’s struck with an electric realization that had evaded him for the past half-decade: why Sam wanted this all along.

Back in Claire’s room at her sorority house, they continue to get physically acquainted. They sit on the edge of her twin bed as Dean weaves his hand into her silky locks, tongues locked in a fervent battle. Somewhere along the way, they’ve lost a few layers, including her devil horns and his leather jacket. 

Faintly, he can hear his phone buzz in the pocket from the floor. He ignores it, pulling Claire onto him. She pushes him back into the wall that’s flush with her bed and disentangles his arms from the sleeves of his flannel before finally breaking apart to pull his t-shirt over his head. Her white stockings have ridden down and his hands are on her bare thighs. He dares to rove deeper under the hem of her fluffy skirt. He can’t decide if he wants her to keep this ridiculous spandex outfit on or lose it, so he just hikes it up further.

He’s already straining painfully against the zipper of his jeans, his body yearning for hers like a heat-seeking missile. Annoyingly, he can still hear his phone vibrating on the floor, but the sound of his pulse pounding in his ears mostly drowns it out.

Breathlessly, he asks, “Do you wanna…?” 

She nods yes. Her hair is wildly mussed, with several strands pasted to her flushed face. “But, there’s something I should probably tell you first,” she starts shyly. “I’ve never…”

His lust-hooded eyes round back to normal as he registers this new fact. Would he? Yes. In fact, it wouldn't be the first time. But should he is another question entirely. He runs a quick math equation in his head, trying to figure out what the odds of this getting back to his brother are. Jess is her best friend. Jess lives with Sam. He wagers the odds aren’t in his favor. A hookup is one thing, but a deflowering is another.

“We-we don’t have to,” he says eventually, despite his body screaming in protest. “There are other things…”

His phone goes off for a fifth time and he wants to chuck it out the window.

“Maybe you should get that,” she suggests, her tone landing somewhere between irritated and disappointed. 

His two brain cells that are still thinking logically, unfortunately, agree. Too much going on to ignore all those calls.

Claire slides off his lap to allow him to slowly pace across the room and extricate his phone from his jacket.

“Hello?”

“Dean, it’s me,” comes Sam’s ragged voice.

An icy jolt of adrenaline lances through his gut, smothering the feverish desire that had been brewing just moments ago.

“It’s-it’s Jess,” he continues through sobs.

“Where are you?” Dean demands.

“Outside the house, there-there was a fire-”

“I’m on my way,” he cuts him off, frantically pulling his clothes back on with the phone pressed between his ear and shoulder.

When he hangs up, Claire seems panicked. “What’s going on?” she asks.

“Some sort of fire at Sam and Jess’s place,” he explains. He’s already halfway out the door when Claire is scrambling to yank on some clothes and shoes to follow him.

By 3:55 in the morning, firefighters have descended upon Sam and Jess’s off-campus house. When Dean and Claire pull up, Sam’s standing on the sidewalk, his hands in his hair like some sort of tragic figure from Greek mythology. He turns to them, and in the glow from the blaze they can see raw streaks of red skin branching down his face.

“Is she still inside?” Claire questions frantically.

Dean grabs his brother as he mumbles, “Yes,” into the cold leather of his jacket. “It was the same thing that got mom,” he hisses into his ear.

He pulls away and looks at him in shock. Sam’s hazel eyes are still swimming with tears, and something else – rage.

Dean’s eyes spell how do you know?

Sam’s reply I’m certain.

“Oh my god,” Claire chokes, her hands moving to cover her mouth in horror.

“She’s gone,” Sam tells her frankly, almost like he’s suddenly checked out of his own body.

Claire collapses against Dean’s chest and he can feel her tears soak through his cotton shirt. Initially, he stiffens; he’s only known her for a matter of hours. His body, however, seems to remember that they were about to have sex less than fifteen minutes ago and instinctively wraps its arms around her. Sam appears too distraught to clock what is happening right in front of him.

Dean’s mind briefly grapples with the fact that he’s somehow become the anchor in this situation, before churning into action. 

“We should go,” he says. “There’s nothing we can do. Sam, you should call her parents.”

Dean drops Claire back at her house to be comforted by her sorority sisters with an exchange of phone numbers. Then, he and Sam continue on to a seedy motel on the outskirts of town. When they arrive, Dean quickly books a room with the elderly man at the front desk. Sam waits for him in the parking lot, staring into the night sky like he can find the answers to his questions in the celestial expanse.

“We need to find Dad,” he tells him as soon as they’re inside. “He must be close to finding this thing if he decided to go dark like this.”

“I know,” Dean agrees. “And we will. But you need to take a minute to get your head on straight. Flying into hunting this thing when you’re this messed up is a recipe for getting yourself killed. You know that.”

“I’m fine,” Sam lies.

“You’re not. And that’s normal. It’s normal to not be okay after something like this. Let’s just take a beat. You heard her parents. They’ll be here in a few hours and then they’re going to want to start planning the funeral. You should be there for that. Jess would’ve wanted you to be.”

Sam briefly considers mentioning how ridiculous and heart-wrenching it is that they will have to bury an empty coffin because her body was completely burned to ash already. Is that closure? 

Instead, he bites, “You have no idea what Jess would’ve wanted.”

“I saw the way she looked at you, Sammy. She loved you. She wouldn’t want you to go on a suicide mission.”

“Don’t call me that.”

Dean lets out a world-worn sigh and sits on the edge of the bed, but doesn’t respond. He rubs the heels of his palms into his eyes, trying to divine what to do next.

“What were you doing with Claire tonight?” Sam interrogates, changing the subject.

“It’s not important,” he says, and it isn’t.

“Jesus, Dean, you can’t keep it in your pants for once?”

“She seemed pretty happy to participate,” he replies, sounding almost like himself.

Sam rolls his swollen eyes. “Stay away from her,” he warns. “The last thing I want is for another one of my friends to get swept up in this.”

Now, it’s Dean’s turn to change the subject. “Did Jess know?”

“Know what?”

“About what we do,” he elaborates pointedly.

Sam pauses for a stretching moment before swallowing heavily and hanging his head. Eventually, he replies, “No, I never told her. I just… I just wanted our lives to be normal.” His last sentence sounds like a plea, but it falls on deaf ears. “I should’ve told her. If I’d told her, maybe she’d still be alive.”

Dean’s features contort to a look of remorse. “Sam, that’s not-”

“I could have protected her better,” he cuts him off. “I was so naive.”

“It’s not your fault,” his brother states, leaving no room for argument. “Don’t you dare put that on yourself.”

Sam looks at him, eyes shining again. “Don’t you see, Dean? It is. It is my fault. She wouldn’t have gotten caught up in this if not for me, and now… Was I the reason Mom was killed, too? I seem to be the common thread here.”

“Whatever did this is the one to blame, not you. And we’re going to find it and kill it dead. But you heard me – you need to get yourself together first. Give it a few days, then we’ll pick back up looking for Dad.”

The next time Dean sees Claire again is at Jess’s funeral. She sits with her friends, dressed in a black knee-length dress with a clump of Kleenex firmly clenched in her fist. He sits beside Sam in the pew across from them, trying to avoid her.

When the service is over and Sam is ambushed by condolences from his classmates, Dean tries to skulk away. He’s barely out the door of the church when he feels a hand grab the crook of his elbow.

“Dean, wait.”

He recognizes this as her voice before he turns around. And there she is, staring at him with boundless cornflower eyes, made even bluer by the tears and streaked mascara. He’s never seen her in the bright light of the sun before, and he notices now what a vibrant, red-gold color her hair is.

“I tried calling,” she continues. “Why didn’t you answer?”

Dean hesitates and licks his lips. His gaze darts from her to the inside of the church, scanning for his brother. 

She registers this and continues, “I tried calling Sam, too. I-I want to understand what happened. The firemen, they said it was an electrical fire, but-”

“Sam has been through enough,” he tells her firmly. “Don’t ask him to dredge up what happened.”

Claire’s eyebrows bend to a frown. “But it doesn’t make any sense…”

Dean wets his lips again and leads her towards the parking lot, away from the crowd.

“Look, Claire, they said it was an electrical fire, so it was an electrical fire. There’s no need to go digging around,” he says quietly.

“She was my best friend.”

“Yeah, but it’s not going to help anyone to keep reopening old wounds.”

“Old? It’s only been like a week.” She shakes her head slightly, as though to reboot her thoughts. “I’m having a hard time…” she starts, voice breaking. 

To Dean, the five years between them suddenly feel as steep as the difference between twenty-one and sixteen. He puts his hands on the bare part of her arms and pulls her into an embrace.

“Hey, I know,” he mutters, not quite sure what else to say to comfort her. He pulls away and continues, “I know it’s hard, but the pain will fade with time.”

Her eyes continue to glint with unshed tears and he realizes that this is probably the first time she’s experienced any sort of significant loss. 

“Did Sam ever tell you that our mom died when we were kids?”

She nods.

Dean gulps heavily and mirrors her nod. “It still hurts. And I still think about her all the time. But it’s more of a dull pain, now. That will happen with this, too.”

He sees Sam approaching and looks back to Claire. “We need to get going,” he tells her.

She stares at him intently, as though weighing what to say next. Eventually, she settles on, “How long are you in town for?”

“Just a couple more days, then we’re hitting the road.”

“What about school?”

“I think you can understand that Sam needs a break.”

She nods again. “So this is it.”

He gives her a tight-lipped smile to confirm.

It’s a little after midnight when Dean’s phone vibrates stridently on the nightstand beside his bed. He flips it open to see a text from Claire, the third in a ladder of unanswered messages from the last week.

It’s different from the others, which were entreating him to talk. This one simply reads: Can you come over?

He glances at the bed beside him, where his brother is laying in some state between asleep and catatonic. He knows he should just turn his phone off and go to bed, but some seditious part of him wonders what she wants. Is she booty calling him? Normally, he’d be on board. But things are anything but normal, now, and Sam’s warning is emblazoned in his memory.

Another thing he remembers, though, are her pretty, doleful eyes from earlier today. Maybe she’s just looking for some comfort. Strictly platonic.

Either way, the mystery is now keeping him awake, curiosity snaking through his subconscious.

Dean was never very good at letting these things go.

When Claire greets him at the front step of her home, her lithe body is hidden beneath a baggy pair of flannel pajama pants and a t-shirt from what appears to have been her Orthodontist’s office. Strictly platonic it is, then, he thinks with just a mite of disappointment.

Back in her room, she seems to want to provide him with an explanation for her text. “I just… didn’t want to be alone,” she murmurs. It’s unconvincing given the fact that she lives in a house full of girls, and he can’t help but suspect that she herself doesn’t fully understand her own motives.

She sits on the edge of her bed, just like she did the first night they met. “Will you sit with me?” she asks.

Dean obeys, and she slumps her head against his shoulder. She works to decode the mixed signals she’s been getting. A week ago, his hands were up her dress and he was holding her as she wept. Then, radio silence. And now he’s here again.

“I’m surprised you came,” she says quietly.

“Me too,” he confesses.

She tilts her chin to look at him, their faces inches apart. He’s blindingly handsome. She can see a dusting of freckles across his nose and the sweep of brown lashes, clear at the ends. She feels the overwhelming urge to kiss him, to feel something pleasant.

He seems to sense this and murmurs, “We shouldn’t,” but doesn’t pull away.

She ignores him, pressing her plush lips to his, chastely at first. Then, not-as-chastely. He tastes different, this time. More like minty toothpaste and less like booze. Like maybe he thought this could happen.

This concept emboldens her, makes her bring her hand to the hinge of his jaw and deepen the kiss. They break apart for air after a few moments, but she keeps her eyes glued on his lips. 

“It’s not because I was saving myself or something,” she tells him. “I mean, when I was younger, I grew up religious, but not anymore…”

His brain struggles to piece together the context of what she’s saying.

“Then when I got here, it just never happened,” she goes on. “And the older I get, the more of an albatross it becomes.” She moves to take his jacket off. “I’m not some blushing virgin…”

“But you are a virgin,” he points out, the phantom of a smirk drawing lip upwards.

“It’s just a technicality.”

“Look, I don’t think you’re in the right mindset to-”

“I want this,” she insists. “I’ll regret it if it’s not with you.”

Dean tilts his head to the side and gives her a bemused look. “You barely know me.”

She studies him closely. “You’re different,” she says mystically. “The same in a lot of ways, but… different.”

His features crunch together in a disbelieving scowl. “What makes you say that?”

“The way you are with Sam… I can just tell you’re a good person. The fact that you’re even hesitating-”

He turns away from her and shakes his head. “If I were a good person, I wouldn’t be here at all,” he says, the gravity of the situation suddenly sinking in. He really shouldn’t be here. What he’d wanted was a lighthearted romp, but this is starting to feel decidedly more consequential.

She touches his chin and turns his face back towards her. “I needed you to come, and you did.”

She seals her lips with his again, and this time, he doesn’t resist. He squares his shoulders to her so that she can swing her leg over his thighs. He can’t shake the feeling that she knows something he doesn’t, even if every shred of logic in his mind is urging him to halt this. And what they’re doing right now feels too good to be wrong.

Her mouth blazes a wet streak from the bottom of his earlobe down to the base of his neck, then she tugs his shirt over his head. She rocks her hips into his and can feel the corporeal manifestation of his desire starting to dig into her. It provides some of the friction she’s aching for, but not enough.

Dean, in turn, removes her shirt to find that she’s not wearing anything else underneath. She presses into his chest, finally finding the skin-on-skin contact she’s been craving. He flips her onto her back against the length of the mattress and peppers kisses down to her collarbone. She hooks her fingers into the waistband of his jeans before fumbling with the button on the front.

He pulls back. “Are you sure?”

“A hundred percent.”

He reaches into his back pocket and produces a condom he’d shoved in there on his way out of his motel, just in case. Claire removes her own pants and underwear before pulling at his.

“I’m gonna take it slow,” he whispers. His breath is hot and humid against the shell of her ear, and she arches her back into him.

There is a slight pinch that makes Claire wince despite herself.

“You okay?”

“Yeah, fine. Don’t stop.”

The discomfort is short-lived and soon gives way to staggering pleasure. Their bodies seem to meld together perfectly, exactly the right shape for one another. Dean, despite all of his experience, doesn’t last very long. He wants to say something, to tell her that he usually has more self-control, but remembers she has no point of reference.

When they’re finished, she asks, “Is it always like that?” 

They’re jammed side-by-side now on her too-small twin bed. His ribs are digging into the plaster of the wall beside him, and he thinks back to his first time, when he was fifteen. It was nothing like this. He turns to look at her with a sheepish smile. “No. That was...”

“I’ll only get better with practice.”

He wishes to a god he doesn’t believe in that he could stick around to find out. He kisses the corner of her mouth, exactly where she has a little freckle. X marks the spot. 

“Where are you guys headed tomorrow?” Claire asks.

“Not sure yet. We still need to track down our dad.”

“How will you do that if you don’t know where you’re going?”

“That’s a great question,” he laughs darkly.

She props herself up on her elbow to look at him dead-on. “Will I see you again? I mean, when you come back to drop Sam off?”

He glances at her out of the corner of his eye, but keeps his head aimed at the ceiling. He opens his mouth to speak, but no sound comes out. 

She takes his hesitation as a no. “Sam is coming back, right?”

“I’m not sure,” he admits.

Outwardly, Claire’s features furl into something indecipherable. Inwardly, she’s wading through the tumult of what this actually means. Sam is only months away from obtaining a degree from one of the best colleges in the world. Only one law school interview away from kickstarting the rest of his life as a successful lawyer. Would he really throw that all away? After how hard he worked to get here?

The weight of the opportunity Stanford provides is something that has become indoctrinated into all the students here, to a point where some find it crushing. Especially for kids like Sam and Claire – scholarship kids. Forgoing graduation is unthinkable, no matter the circumstances.

And then, there’s the matter of never seeing Dean again, which she should have been prepared for, but wasn’t. Somehow, she’d stupidly convinced herself that as long as Sam was in her life, Dean would be within arm’s reach, too. But now, Sam wouldn’t be in her life, and her link to him would be severed. How had she allowed herself to be lulled into such a false sense of familiarity with a stranger?

Dean seems to realize that he’s said the wrong thing. “Hey, you get breaks and stuff, right? We could meet up sometime after we get all this squared away with our dad,” he offers hollowly. He’s not exactly sure why he says this; he doesn’t really have any intention of seeing her again, even though he wants to. Maybe in saying it, he’s willing it to be true.

“Sure,” she says in a way that makes his chest ache. “Will you stay tonight?”

“If you want me to.”

She does want him to, in spite of it all, the threads of attraction and something else more inscrutable reeling her towards him.

“What will Sam say?”

She feels him shrug next to her. “Sam is… Not totally there right now.”

“You’re worried?”

“I mean, yeah.”

The obviousness of the statement is a start to her, even though it probably shouldn’t be. Not knowing what to say in reply, she expels a breath through her nostrils and lets her eyes fall closed.

At dawn, Dean awakes still pinned to the wall. Carefully, he sits up. Alarm bells are ringing in his brain, signaling that this was a grave mistake. Now that the fog of lust has dissipated, he’s able to see the situation with more clarity. Worst case, she’s some sort of succubus that put a spell on him – that would explain the strange pull he feels. However, this seems unlikely given the fact that he’s still alive. Best case, she’s just some poor, innocent college girl that he robbed of her virginity. This seems more likely. He chides himself because, at twenty-six, he really should know better. He’s not sure when he began to actually bleed into the rakish persona he loves to inhabit. 

With catlike precision, he extricates himself from Claire’s limp grasp without waking her and measures his next move. Eventually, he settles on cowardice and decides to leave without saying a mawkish and stilted goodbye. He’s not so cruel as to leave without a word, though. He finds a spiral notebook and pen on her college-issue desk. He leafs through to a blank page, but not before taking note of her neat, half-cursive handwriting, complete with loopy ‘L’s and flowery ‘G’s – some sort of holdover from her Catholic school days, he imagines. The content seems to be about some sort of cognitive neuroscience, which is way above his paygrade. He peeks at her again in mild surprise, struck by the notion that someone so incontestably intelligent could be stupid enough to want him.

The note he writes is simple:

Great time last night. Give me a call in a couple of days and I should know where we’re at by then.

Chapter Text

At the start of their long drive to Colorado, Sam demands, “Where were you last night?”

“None of your beeswax,” Dean retorts breezily.

“Let me take a guess, then. At Claire’s?”

He takes his brother’s silence as confirmation and gives his profile a glare that could turn a lesser man to stone.

“Didn’t I tell you to stay away from her?”

“Like I said, it’s not really any of your business where I spend my nights, Sammy.”

“It is when they’re with my friends,” he insists incredulously.

“I don’t really wanna talk about this.”

“Yeah, well, too bad. We’ve got twenty plus hours in the car together and you can’t just deflect the whole time.”

“I don’t see why my sex life needs to be the topic of conversation,” he says brashly. “We have enough real shit going on as it is.”

“So you did, then. You slept with her.” It’s half-question and half-statement.

Dean finally looks over his shoulder to stare at his brother in the passenger seat. “You really want the gory details?” 

He swears he sees a blush mottle Sam’s cheeks. “No,” he says quickly. “I don’t.”

“So then drop it,” is his firm reply.

There’s a pause while Sam inspects his fingernails. Even over a week later, there are little black crescents of ash trapped underneath. Eventually, he says, “Why can’t you ever listen to anything I ask you?”

At this, Dean rolls his eyes. He’d like to say that more often than not, it’s the other way around. But instead he says, “You’re making a whole lot outta nothin’.”

“My girlfriend was just burned to death on the ceiling of my house, Dean. I don’t think now is a good time for either of us to get involved with anyone else.”

“We’re not ‘involved.’ Are we not on our way to Black River right now? Far, far away from Palo Alto. Plus, you make it sound like she had nothing to do with it. If anything, she came onto me.”

It doesn’t matter if he’s telling the truth because, either way, Sam doesn’t believe him.

“I know how you are,” he says, and Dean can’t muster the energy to be offended because he knows he’s at least right about that.

They work the Wendigo case, but still come up empty handed when it comes to their primary mission of finding their dad. So, onto the next case, which leads them to Lake Manitoc, WI. 

Sam is handling the whole my-girlfriend-just-died-in-front-of-me thing a little too casually for Dean’s liking. The fact that he’s able to work at all is a marvel; Dean knows how this should play out. He had a front row seat to Dad’s unraveling after Mom died. Sam should be a total basket case, but he isn’t.

And Dean knows that just means he’s bottling it up, saving a breakdown for later on. The aftermath will come one way or another – it’s just a matter of when.

And when it does come, Dean will be there to pick up the pieces, just like he did with their dad. He remains dog-loyal to his brother, even though Sam abandoned them at the first available opportunity. 

Although now, Dean can’t help but feel that he’s not actually being a very good brother. Sneaking calls with Claire once a week in the motel bathroom seems pretty much in direct violation of Sam’s clearly articulated wishes, even if she’s the one calling him.

Before they know it, they’ve frittered away almost a full month on cases across the midwest. And then, something novel happens. 

It’s early December when Sam and Dean get separate calls about the same case. First, Claire calls Dean to let him know that she’s finished midterms early and is now officially on winter break. Instead of meeting up with him, though, like she’d originally wanted to, she tells him she’s visiting a friend in St. Louis who’s going through a hard time with her brother being accused of murdering his girlfriend, Emily. Claire knows both of them and says there’s no way he could have done it, so she’s gone to support her friends. He wagers this is definitely for the best – maybe now things can fizzle out naturally.

Dean doesn’t really think much of it until the same friend, Rebecca, calls Sam, too, and tells him the same story. He tries to persuade him that it’s not their type of job. All of them triangulating in St. Louis will undoubtedly cause his house of cards to come crashing down. After all, Sam has no idea about the calls. And similarly, Claire has no idea what they’re actually doing – hunting monsters. He does not want to get these wires crossed. 

Sam insists, though. His buddy, Zach, is someone that apparently Dean met for thirty seconds at the Halloween party. He urges him to remember what a good guy he is and presents evidence of identical cases popping up in a five-mile radius. 

Dean has to admit that it’s compelling.

On the way to Missouri, he begins his attempt to rectify the mess he’s carelessly created.

“Sam, there’s something I gotta tell you.”

“Uh huh?” he replies offhandedly, scrolling through emails on his phone.

“You’re not gonna like it.”

Now, Dean has his undivided attention. Sam flips his phone closed and stares at him.

“I’ve-uh… I’ve been keeping in touch with Claire.”

Sam nearly reels back in his seat. “Are you kidding me?”

Dean can only shake his head guiltily. 

“You are such a hypocrite. You give me this whole speech about cutting ties and then you go and pull this shit?! You’re unbelievable. You have the balls to talk about me lying to my friends when all along you’ve been lying to me.”

“I haven’t been lying,” he parrots. “I’ve just been leaving some things out.”

Sam huffs in disbelief. 

“She’s gonna be there,” he continues. “That’s why I’m telling you.”

“In Missouri?”

“Yeah, she called me to tell me about it yesterday. I s’pose I was gonna have to come clean sooner or later since she was trying to meet up with us before this all happened. You do understand, though – if this case ends up being our kinda thing, your friends are going to find out who you really are. Is that what you want?”

Sam chews on the inside of his cheek as he contemplates this. “I think we can get it done under the radar,” he replies finally.

Dean glances at him skeptically, but doesn’t push it. “So what’s our cover, then?”

“You’re a cop.”

“A cop? I met these people before. Don’t you think they’ll find that fishy?”

“I don’t think it’s weird that I wouldn’t introduce my brother the cop at my off-campus Halloween party, no. I think that would have been a buzzkill.”

A faint smirk tugs at Dean’s lips. “You tellin’ me there was underage drinking at that party?”

Sam rolls his eyes and snorts.

“You really have changed.”

“You’re so full of it, Dean. I seriously can’t believe you. If you’re so smart, what’s your plan, huh? You gonna string Claire along until you get her killed?”

This is harsh, even for Sam. The smirk drops from his face and he turns to look at him fully. “Of course not,” he chastises. 

“So what, then? Where does it go from here?”

“I guess I probably need to cut things off for real, is that what you’re saying? Fine. I will when we get there.”

When they get to Becky’s parents’ house, Claire is already there. Despite the grim circumstances of their meeting, she’s unable to contain her sparkling smile when she sees Dean again and hugs them both tightly. Sam can’t help but look mildly guilt-stricken knowing he’s been actively campaigning against seeing her again.

“When Becky told me that you guys were coming, I couldn’t believe it,” she says to them. She turns to address Dean directly. “I also couldn’t believe it when she told me you were a cop.”

Dean scratches the sandy hair at the back of his head sheepishly. “Yeah, about that…” 

“I mean, I get why you wouldn’t want to tell us at the party,” she presses on without giving him a chance to explain. “But why not after?”

“It just didn’t really seem important. And I’m a detective, actually.”

“So have you been working this whole time or are you actually looking for your dad?”

“We are looking for our dad.”

“Well, I’m so grateful that you guys stopped to help,” Becky interjects. “We need all the help we can get.”

Inside, Becky lays out the details of the case: Zach in two places at once, stolen clothes, a psychotic dog. It all amounts to a whole lot of confusion. Dean decides they need to look into the other, similar cases in the area to gather more clues. That, and check out the crime scene, which they all visit together.

Working this case up close and personal with someone he had tried very staunchly to jam into a completely separate compartment of his life is daunting and distracting. And Dean doesn’t do distracted, not when it comes to hunting. Distractions, particularly those of the romantic variety, are what get hunters killed – something that his father drilled into him from a very young age. Perhaps too young.

This is what he blames for the fact that he’s now tied up in the sewer. He was distracted and off his game. Distracted that Claire now knows he’s not a cop and thinks he’s some sort of criminal. Distracted that he can’t explain himself. And how even would he? He tried to tell Cassie what he did – years ago, now – and look how that turned out. 

And he’s still distracted. Distracted that this is the way it’s going to end. Maybe in more ways than one. Distracted that, most likely, that thing is making a bee-line for Claire. He broke the cardinal rule, and now he’s going to pay for it.

Sam appears eventually, and along with him, a glimmer of hope. 

“Dude, this seriously blows,” he tells him. “You’re telling me that that thing is walking around with my face?”

“Not just your face,” Sam corrects. “Like, all of you. Your thoughts. Your memories. Your feelings. He knew things he never could have known otherwise.”

“We need to get the hell outta here. He’s gonna go for Claire.”

He can’t see Sam, but he knows him well enough to know he’s biting back an I-told-you-so. Mercifully, he says, “I just got my hands free. I need to find my phone to call the cops.”

“The cops?” he asks incredulously as Sam helps him with his bindings.

“Yeah, they’ll get there faster than we can.”

“They’re gonna be after me,” he says, voice verging on something akin to a whine in a way that Sam hasn’t heard since they were in high school.

He looks at him with pity. 

“She’s going to think it’s me.”

Still, Sam is quiet for a while. Finally, he says, “Maybe it’s better that way.”

“No,” he insists. “All they’re gonna do is drive that freakshow into hiding and make me a fugitive. We need to stop it.”

“Okay, fine. So we need to high-tail it to Beck’s place.”

“No,” Dean repeats. “He’ll lure her to our motel.”

“How do you know that?”

“You said this thing is practically becoming me, right? Well, that’s what I would do. Less chance of being caught, and Claire’s gonna want an explanation for what’s going on.”

Meanwhile, when Claire receives a text from Dean asking to talk, she has half a mind to completely ignore it. She stares at the message with a mix of anger and curiosity. On one hand, she can’t figure out why Sam and Dean would lie to get access to the crime scene. Logically, they don’t really seem to have anything to gain.

On the other, it did seem like a lie from the first moment she heard it. Even though it explained his caginess around telling her what he does for a living, it just didn’t ring true, and she can’t help but sense that there is some other secret that has yet to be unveiled.

Historically, Claire’s curiosity has been one of her best qualities – one of the things that made her such an exemplary student. It hasn’t really let her astray thus far, which is why she lets it drive her to that motel room in the bad part of St. Louis.

And god, was it a mistake.

“Thanks for coming,” Dean greets as he opens the door to room 24.

“Where's Sam?” Claire asks, pushing past him and pacing along the edges of the room.

“I asked him to give us some privacy since we haven’t really had the chance to talk alone this whole week,” he replies. 

She snaps her eyes to Dean’s figure, studying him from top to bottom. His muscular arms are bulging out from the short sleeves of his t-shirt, crossed over his chest. He has some sort of talisman hanging around his neck that she hadn’t paid much attention to before, and she notices for the first time from his stance that he appears to be slightly bow-legged. His feet are firmly rooted in the grimy, patterned motel carpet and he’s wearing boots, which she finds odd. Even though he looks exactly as she remembers, she can’t help but shake the feeling that something is off.

“You wanna sit down?” He gestures to the table near the window and takes the seat closest to the door.

Reluctantly, Claire shimmies into the seat across from him.

“You said you were going to explain everything. So, explain,” she demands.

He lets out a weary sigh. “So, I admit, I’m not a detective.”

“That much I already know.”

He nods. “But I’m something kind of like a detective.”

Claire cocks her head, her ginger locks falling away from one side of her face and into the other.

“I’m a hunter,” he continues.

“A hunter?” she repeats, testing the word.

“Yeah. This thing that framed Zach, it’s a shapeshifter.”

She balks at him. “A what?”

“A shapeshifter,” he confirms. “It can take the form of other people. That’s how Zach was able to be in two places at once.”

Claire stands so quickly the chair almost falls back behind her. “So you’re insane, then. Got it.”

Dean grabs her by her upper arm and forces her back into the chair. His grip is painfully tight and an angry bruise starts to bloom almost instantly against her pale flesh.

“Let go of me!” she squeaks.

“I’m not done explaining,” he growls. 

But Claire has already put the pieces together, or at least she thinks she has. She made a gross miscalculation in judgment and lost her virginity to a schizophrenic, deranged rapist-slash-she dares not guess what else. White-hot panic skewers her and she is immobilized by fear, allowing him to continue his rant.

“I’m a hunter and Sam and I hunt these things. Monsters. Or at least, that’s what we tell ourselves they are. But you know, they’re not all bad. Some of them just want to be loved, just like everyone else.”

“Okay,” says Claire, shifting tactics. She’d read once that compliance can help in these types of situations. “I believe you.”

He looks at her dead-on and she swears she sees his eyes flash like a reptile’s.

“You’re sweet, Claire,” he says with less rage in his voice. “I actually like you. That’s gonna make this harder, but it’s gotta be done.”

“You don’t have to do anything,” she says carefully. “I-I can help you.”

“Too late.”

He rushes her and clamps his large, calloused hands onto her shoulders. Before her brain can register what is happening, he lifts her up and throws her onto one of the twin beds, which quakes violently with the new weight.

She feels tears prick the backs of her eyes as she frantically tries to figure a way out of this situation. She’s learned so much about the human brain in her classes, but it’s all left her, now. The paralyzing fear has scrambled all intelligent thoughts. Her own brain is trying to dissociate, to separate itself from what is about to happen to her body.

He uses his weight to pin her down and pulls a switchblade out from his denim pocket. He holds it to her cheek and she feels the air evacuate her lungs in an involuntary whimper.

Suddenly, the door to the motel blows open without warning and she hears a gun click.

“Get away from her, you son of a bitch,” comes a gravelly voice identical to the one that had been tormenting her. From her position on the bed, she can’t see who it is, but the voice is a dead giveaway.

Dean stands and turns to face the doorway – to face himself. Claire’s mind continues to careen as a shot rings out loudly and she sees a second Dean holding the gun.

The first Dean drops to the ground, blood pouring from his chest.

“What the hell!?” she screams breathlessly.

Dean number two vaults over to her, but she flinches as he puts his hands gently on her shoulders – the same place the other Dean had ruthlessly gripped her – and levels his head to hers. She stares blankly into the face of her would-be killer.

“Are you okay?” he demands, tone steeped with concern.

“No,” she says, looking wildly between them. “Wha-?”

“It was a shapeshifter,” Sam states.

Claire’s blue eyes gleam with tears and dire confusion. 

“What did he tell you?” Dean asks, sounding oddly tender.

She looks at the lifeless figure staining the already-filthy carpet. “He said you were hunters,” she replies distantly.

Dean’s mouth pulls into a line and he nods sharply before standing. He steals a look at Sam, whose eyebrows are bent in sympathy. 

Sam steps deeper into the room and pushes his shaggy hair out of his eyes. ”He was telling the truth about that, Claire,” he says.

She peers at him in wonder. “I-I can see…”

Dean and Sam lock eyes again. This certainly isn’t the first time they’ve done the ‘there are things that go bump in the night’ speech, but it feels different when it’s someone they both already know.

“There are other things like this psychotic asshole. Creatures, monsters, whatever you wanna call them,” Dean says, sitting beside her on the bed. “Sam and I, we hunt them.”

“A month ago, Sam was studying for econ midterms!” she exclaims with a mirthless laugh. 

The muscle in Dean’s jaw ticks and he nods again. “We’ve been doing this since we were kids,” he admits. “It’s what our dad does, too. That’s why we’re looking for him.”

Claire turns to him and scours his face, trying to spot differences between his and the monster’s. 

“Since you were kids?” she echoes.

“Yeah. Our family – we save people, Claire.”

She swallows heavily, acknowledging that he did indeed just save her. “That thing… It was going to rape me or kill me or both. And it was you.”

Dean grimaces. “That was its MO. It did the same thing with Zach and Emily.”

“I’m gonna give you guys a minute and deal with this body,” Sam jumps in.

“Wait,” says Dean, striding over to the body. He wraps his hand around the talisman and pulls it off his doppelganger’s neck before stuffing it into his pocket. He gives it a quick jab in the ribs with the toe of his boot to confirm that it is in fact dead. When he’s satisfied, he gives a nod to Sam, who grabs its ankles. 

“I don’t really know what to say or what to think,” Claire says once he’s gone.

“That’s normal.”

“This is… insane.”

“I know.”

“I mean, how many things like this are out there?”

“More than you would think.”

“What happened with Jessica…”

Dean turns his gaze to the moldy ceiling. “That was the same thing that killed our mom.”

Claire is mildly triumphant to know that she was right not to believe that it was an electrical fire. “So your mom was killed by some sort of creature like this?”

“Yeah. That’s what our dad is trying to track down.”

“He’s looking for revenge,” she observes.

“We all are.”

She folds and puts her face in her palms. “I wish this hadn’t happened,” she laments. “I wish I could go back to how things were before.”

Dean sits beside her again and very carefully places his hand on her back so as not to startle her. He’s conscious of the fact that she may not want to be anywhere near him after what that freak did to her, and it makes him feel a little nauseous.

“I know,” he consoles.

She straightens and wipes her eyes with the knuckles of her forefingers. “I need to get out of here,” she says. “My parents’ place  is less than three hours from here. I’m going to go home.”

“That’s probably a good idea,” Dean agrees.

Both of them stand and face one another for a long, silent moment. He studies her and takes stock of the red mark on her arm, the small cut on her cheek, and the bedraggled appearance of her hair. Claire opens her mouth to speak, but she can’t quite settle on the words she wants to say. 

Eventually, she says, “I guess this is goodbye.”

“I think it’s for the best,” he replies, looking vaguely pained.

She nods and turns her gaze down to her sneaker-clad feet. She’s about three feet away from the puddle of rusty blood and her shoes are still pristinely white.

“Thanks for saving me,” she says after flicking her eyes back to him.

Dean tries and fails to fight the urge to look away. “You don’t need to thank me. It’s my fault you were in this mess in the first place.”

“Not really. I came here for Becky. If you guys hadn’t intervened, we’d probably both be toast by now.”

He feels like a horrible person for wishing the shapeshifter had targeted Becky first.

“I would say let me know if you’re ever back in Palo Alto,” she continues, “but I’m not so sure I’d mean it.” She gives him a sad smile that doesn’t show her brilliant teeth.

“Take care, Claire. Do you need a ride or anything?”

“No, my car’s outside. Good luck finding your dad, and I hope you’re able to stop the thing that killed your mom and Jess.”

She gives him another mournful look and stands on her tip-toes to place a gentle kiss on his mouth. Dean doesn't touch her for fear of spooking her, but allows himself to lean into the kiss knowing it's their last.

Somehow, Dean and Sam leave the experience in St. Louis having swapped perspectives on the matter of whether or not they should be allowed to get close to anyone. Something the shapeshifter had said resonated with Sam and made him more empathetic towards his brother. 

On the flip side of the coin, Dean has been jolted into the realization that caring about people only puts them in harm’s way. Of course, this should have been something he’d known already. He’d seen it more times than he could count. But it’d never happened to him – not until St. Louis. His first real relationship with Cassie had tricked him into believing that maybe he actually could have both. He realizes now what a pipe dream that had been.

It’s not often that Dean is naive, and feeling that way now frustrates him. He’s always prided himself on his pragmatic approach to almost everything, including girls. Why he even took such a shine to Claire in the first place remains a mystery to him, though it's not hard to see why he'd be attracted to her physically. Why he'd bothered to maintain a relationship with her beyond the bounds of their time in Palo Alto together is the larger question.

He tries to push these thoughts from his mind as he and Sam drive silently to their next stop: a sorority in Iowa that will still inevitably remind him of his most recent fling. 

Chapter Text

Five more months pass with relatively straightforward cases, mainly hauntings. It’s enough time for Dean to almost completely forget about Claire.

Claire has not forgotten about Dean in the slightest, though. Ever since her life was upended by the knowledge that there’s a separate, supernatural world running in parallel to her own, she hasn’t been able to stop absorbing as much information about it as she can possibly find. Like most people, she’s always feared the unknown, and figures that she can assuage her fears by educating herself on what’s lurking in the shadows. She’s grateful that she’s in college and has the time to do so. 

In fact, when the spring semester started up, she registered for classes that would normally not be anywhere on her radar: Greek mythology, an English Lit class on the works of the Brothers Grimm, and the like. She’s been diligent enough in her coursework thus far that this won’t veer her off track from the credits she needs for her major, but she has to admit that her focus has shifted. She won’t let her grades slip, though, she tells herself. She can’t. She has to meet a minimum GPA threshold to keep her scholarship money.

Claire has always liked to deal in cold, hard facts, and the inability to wade through fact and fiction is frustrating. She knows she can’t believe everything she learns and doubts that her professors have any inkling that what they’re teaching is actually real. Or, she sometimes wonders, maybe they do. Maybe they’re creatures themselves. How many people has she encountered that are actually bonafide monsters? Are any of her classmates? Any of her friends?

She recognizes that she’s becoming a bit paranoid. Still, wanting to delve deeper into the truth tempts her into contacting Sam and Dean more times than she cares to admit. She’s stayed strong thus far, though. She knows it's better for her – better for her now, and in the future – to stay away from them. So why is it so difficult?

In the end, it’s Sam who breaches the unarticulated no-contact agreement. When Claire sees his name pop up on her phone on a Friday in late April, she’s in the library studying for yet another exam. Seeing those three letters is electrifying, and she leaves her bag and books at the desk when she rushes outside to take the call.

“Hello?”

“Claire, hey,” comes Sam’s voice. Even though he’s only spoken two simple words, she can hear uncertainty and doubt lacing each syllable.

“Hey, Sam. What’s up?” She’s sure she sounds equally uncertain.

“I know this is maybe kinda weird,” he prefaces. “But, well… Dean had an accident. He was electrocuted and had a massive heart attack. It’s not looking good.”

Claire feels like her stomach is being weighed down by an anvil and has to find a bench to sit. Her eyes track the students bustling past her to their next classes, trying to grab onto something to tether her back to reality.

“Did this happen…”

“It happened on a case,” he finishes, anticipating her question. “They say… they say he might only have a month, tops.”

She pauses, soaking in the pain that comes through clearly even through the grainy phone connection. Not unkindly, she asks, “Why are you calling me?”

“Well… I’m working on finding a way to save him, but… But if I can’t… He seemed to really like you. I thought… I don’t know, I thought maybe he would want to see you, that maybe it would cheer him up or something. Or that maybe you’d want to see him,” he stalls, losing steam. “Sorry if this was a stupid idea.”

“No, it’s okay. Where are you guys?”

“We’re headed to Joshua, Nebraska. I checked, it’s like a day’s drive for you. There’s a faith healer there that one of our dad’s friends said is the real deal. I figured we’d check it out since we don’t really have anything to lose at this point.”

“You want me to meet you there?” Claire’s tone is tentative; her exam is on Tuesday, and she was supposed to spend this weekend prepping.

“Yeah, but no pressure. He doesn’t know I’m calling you. He’d probably be mad at me for doing this,” he reflects with a dark chuckle.

“Well, if he doesn’t want to see me…”

“It’s not that,” he interrupts. “Dean is stubborn, and he wouldn’t let himself admit that he wants to see you because he’s worried about putting you in danger. But this… This is totally benign. You wouldn’t have anything to worry about. And, well, if it doesn’t work…” he trails off.

This could be the last time you get to see him, Claire’s mind finishes. She is silent for a few moments while her brain works. 

“Hello? You still there?”

“Yeah,” she replies slowly. “I’ll meet you guys there.”

“Really? Thanks, Claire. I think he’ll be glad to see you.”

She chews the inside of her cheek dubiously because she’s not so sure he will be. “I’ll text you my ETA when I leave,” she says.

Claire arrives in Joshua on Saturday night around 9 PM. She calls Sam right before she gets there, and he has the door to their motel room open and waiting for her when she pulls into the parking lot. She slides her navy Jetta into the spot alongside the glinting black Impala that she still recognizes as Dean’s.

“Hey, thanks for coming,” Sam greets her with a hug.

“Hey,” she echoes. “Does he know I’m here?”

“No, he’s inside resting right now.”

“How is he?”

Sam scratches the back of his shaggy head. “Not great. He’s really weak.”

“How are you?”

“I’ve been better,” he admits. “Here, why don’t you come inside.”

Claire enters the motel room that is eerily similar to the one she’d nearly been killed in in St. Louis. It’s not hard to push this trauma to the side when her eyes find Dean, though. The sight of him, prone on one of the twin beds, knocks the wind out of her chest. He has dark purple rings around his eyes and looks inconceivably fragile.

Soundlessly, she pulls a chair across the carpet to his bedside. 

“You can wake him up,” Sam says, voice just above a whisper. “Just do it gently. He shouldn’t get his heart rate up.”

Claire wouldn’t have considered waking him up any other way. She gingerly places her hand on top of his, which is by his side on top of the sheets. This physical contact rouses him from his sleep like a warm ray of sunlight piercing through the surface of the ocean. Slowly, his eyes flutter open and he scowls groggily as his vision comes into focus.

“Claire?” he murmurs hoarsely in surprise.

“Hey, yeah, it’s me.” She gives him a melancholy smile that doesn’t reach her eyes.

“What’re you doin’ here?”

“Sam told me about your accident. He-” Suddenly, upon seeing him like this, she’s starting to get choked up. She sniffs and finishes, “He thought maybe you’d want to see me. I wanted to see you.”

Dean casts his gaze at Sam, who’s standing shiftily in the middle of the room, hands in his pockets. 

“Did he tell you why we’re here?” There’s a tinge of derision in his tone.

“Yeah, he told me about the faith healer.”

“Total crock,” he scoffs. 

“I don’t know,” she replies slowly. She’s had a lot of time to consider this on the drive over. “I mean, there are so many evil things in this world. Is it so crazy to believe that there are some good things, too?”

Dean ignores how similar this is to what Sam has said, and briefly wonders if they’ve colluded against him. “Don’ get your hopes up,” is all he says.

“The service is tomorrow morning at ten,” Sam chimes in. “I got you the room next to ours.”

“Oh, you didn’t have to-”

“It’s the least I could do after you came all this way,” he replies with a tight-lipped smile. He scrapes a set of keys from the end table into the palm of his hand and gives them to her. “You must be tired after such a long drive.”

“I am,” she confesses. “You guys mind if I hit the hay early?”

“Of course not,” Sam replies. “We need to rest up, too. See you bright and early tomorrow morning.”

The next morning, the three of them pile into the Impala. While Sam looks just as he usually does, Dean looks even more sickly in the misty gray light of day. He’s wearing a hoodie under his jacket – a sign that he’s uncharacteristically cold – and is so hunched over that Sam has to help him into the car.

The “church” they’re attending is actually a tent in the middle of a muddy plain next to a farmhouse. Claire is dressed for a more formal occasion and finds her block heels sinking into the muck immediately upon exiting the car. She carefully treads through the soft earth and sodden grass to prevent her shoes from being suctioned clean off her feet. As she walks, she can feel a cold slick of dirt spray the backs of her bare calves.

While it’s somewhat difficult to push the innate skepticism from her mind upon seeing the place, it’s not as difficult as it would have been six months ago. And no one is more skeptical than Dean himself.

They file into a pew in the front of the tent. There are a whole manner of invalid people around them with varying degrees of health ailments. It probably wouldn’t be obvious how sick Dean was if not for the fact that Sam needs to help him walk, like some sort of familial guide dog.

The blind preacher immediately takes notice of Dean, seemingly interested in changing his mind. He calls him up, and when he does, the breath hitches in Claire’s throat. Against her own volition, she finds herself praying alongside all the other churchgoers. She’d thought she’d shed the shackles of her Catholic upbringing, but maybe she hadn’t fully. Maybe it would always be with her in times of desperation. Because that’s what this is, she realizes starkly: desperation. Dean is going to die, if not for divine intervention.

The preacher puts his hand on Dean’s head, and he falls to his knees. Dean is not one for theatrics, so Sam knows this must actually be real. Hope bubbles within his insides before he can think to stifle it.

After a while, Dean fully collapses and Sam sprints to the altar to help him up. Claire jolts to her feet, too, and looks directly at the preacher.

“The Lord’s healed him, Miss,” he tells her with a broad grin.

Claire can’t imagine how he knew she was staring at him.

Back at the motel, Dean has a new lease on life. The first thing he does is barrel straight to the mini fridge and pull out a beer. He twists off the cap and says, “I’m telling you, I’m fine,” to Sam who’s been trailing him like a duckling ever since they left the service.

“We still need to make sure,” he says while trying to snatch the beer out of his hand. “We’ll go see a doctor tomorrow.”

Dean holds the beer over his head to try to keep it out of his brother’s reach, and Claire can’t help but think they look like children.

“If he feels better he probably is better, don’t you think?” she posits to Sam. Back at Stanford, Sam and Claire had gotten into debates on occasion – typically about whether or not Jess should do something. This reminds her of those simpler times.

“I don’t think we should take the chance. It could be like… Like a placebo or something.”

“I feel like I could run a marathon right now,” Dean deadpans with a massive grin.

Claire can’t help but smile back at him, his joy infectious. She’s incredibly grateful to a god that she now wholeheartedly believes in. In the car on the way to Nebraska, she’d run through what she was going to say to Dean on his deathbed over and over again. What do you say to someone who’s dying at twenty six? Someone who you slept with and saved your life? She’s elated that she no longer has to utter the words.

“Dean-”

“Just let me have this, Sammy,” he pleads.

Sam crosses his arms over his broad chest, reverting into some younger form of himself in his older brother’s presence.

“Fine,” he huffs.

“Should we grab some lunch? I could go for a cheeseburger.”

They turn in early that night because Claire needs to leave at the crack of dawn to get back to Stanford in time for her exam. She’s already missing Monday’s classes and Sam suggested she email her professor to ask for a makeup exam, but she decided against it. Maybe she would have, if things had gone differently – but Dean seems to be doing fantastic.

In fact, he seems especially fantastic when he knocks on her door at 10 PM. 

“I wanted to talk to you,” he explains when she lets him in.

“You promise me you’re not a shapeshifter?” she says, only half-kidding.

He gives her a humorless smirk and takes a silver dollar out of his canvas jacket pocket. “I thought you might ask that,” he says. “Wouldn’t be able to do this if I were.”

He sits in the armchair in the corner of the room and props his feet up on the coffee table. “I can’t believe you came all this way to see me,” he remarks.

Claire narrows her eyes and takes a couple of steps towards him, hands on her hips. “Well, Sam called me.” While this is true, it doesn’t offer much in the way of an explanation.

He raises his eyebrows.

“I thought you were dying,” she continues, suddenly interested in looking at the floor. She gathers the bravery to peer at him again. “Clearly I like you, Dean,” she eventually professes.

He stands up and wipes some invisible specks of dirt from the front of his jeans. Then, he strides towards her and puts his hands on her bony shoulders. 

“I like you too, Claire,” he starts hesitantly. “But this… it’s not right. You have your whole life ahead of you. You’ve got it all – brains, beauty, heart… You can be whatever you want to be in this world. People like you are the reason people like me and Sam do this – so that you never have to have any of this bullshit leak into your life.”

“Yeah, but now that the curtain has been lifted, it’s impossible to pull it back down.”

Dean’s jaw tenses and he lets his hands fall away from her. He nods and looks around the room, which is half as big as his and Sam’s. There’s a queen-sized bed in the center and the thought of just forgetting this whole conversation and tumbling into it with her suddenly surges in his mind.

However, he says, “I know. But you really need to try to forget – forget about me, forget about Sam, forget about all of this. It will only drag you down.”

Claire stares into his gold-flecked eyes and is hit with the overwhelming urge to kiss him. She bites her lip hard to stop herself.

He continues, “I can’t give you what you want – what you deserve. So when you leave tomorrow, don’t look back.”

She nods, knowing deep down that he’s right. And really, she only came here because she thought he was dying, not because she was hoping to reopen the door on their relationship, if you can even call it that. A one-night-stand would be a more apt description at this point.

“Stay safe, Dean,” she says. “I mean that.”

On Monday, the doctor confirms what Dean already knew to be true. He is cured. However, as all miracles do, it came with a hefty cost: his life for someone else’s. He can't know that this isn't the first time a trade like this will be made. And Dean has always been a bit prone to self-loathing, but this plunges him into an even deeper mire of guilt. This guilt only mounts when he has to rob an innocent woman with a brain tumor of the same chance at salvation he was granted.

On the way to Missouri to work their next case, Dean asks Sam to make him a promise. No more contacting Claire, no matter how dire the circumstances are. Sam wants to know why, of course he does. And Dean explains it to him – explains how she’s too good for him, how she’ll throw her life away chasing after them. And as he explains it, a knife twists in Sam’s gut. He realizes that his brother will never allow himself to be happy.

In the end, he can’t grant him this promise.

Claire returns to California in time to flunk her exam. She knows she’s failed as soon as she turns it in, but has to wait an agonizing week to have it confirmed. Twenty percent of her grade down the toilet because she didn’t study enough.

It’s then that she makes the same vow to herself that she made to Dean in that motel room: she’s done with the Winchesters. For her own good.

Dean takes the case in Missouri because he thinks it will help him move on. And for a while, it does. He tries to drown thoughts of Claire in bed with Cassie, and it’s pretty effective. Cassie was the first woman he actually loved. However, it becomes clear that it is loved and not loves. Things feel hollow, now, like they’re trying to imitate something that used to exist but doesn’t anymore.

Claire is too fresh in his mind for him to not compare them. While both women are undoubtedly intelligent, their demeanors are completely different. Cassie is direct and bold. Claire is more cautious and calculating.

He’s not sure which is better suited for him, but he supposes it doesn’t actually matter because, for their own good, he’s going to stay far away from both of them.

Chapter Text

Claire does an admirable job of banishing thoughts of the Winchesters after she leaves Nebraska. She’s able to regain focus over her studies and correct any fluctuations in her grades well enough to secure an internship with a prestigious tech company in Seattle for the summer. 

By now, it’s almost August – more than three months since she last saw Sam and Dean. She’s about to finish her internship program and is getting ready to head home to Illinois for her three-week stretch of vacation when something incredibly strange happens.

Claire is fast asleep in the apartment she’s sharing with two other girls from Stanford. She has her window cracked 24/7 because the building they’re in is old and doesn’t have air conditioning. Not that Seattle ever really gets that hot, anyway, but it’s nice to have some fresh air filter into the fourth-story room. 

She is awoken abruptly in the middle of the night by the feeling of a presence in the room with her. At first, the feeling is almost identical to sleep paralysis, something she is all too familiar with. Like it usually does, her mind runs through a litany of prayers and pleas, half-conscious. However, she quickly realizes that she actually is awake. Her eyes find the neon green light of her digital clock: 3:33 AM.

As her pupils work to acclimate to the darkness, she notices a massive column of black smoke hovering right above her head. Her initial thought is that the room is on fire and she sits up frantically. However, the smoke stays in one place, still right above her. Her hand scrambles to turn on the lamp on her bedside table. Once the light flicks on, the smoke pours out of her open window.

For a moment, she just sits up in bed, stunned, with an uneasy feeling in the pit of her stomach. She starts to second-guess what she just saw, worrying that her brain mashed together a dream with reality. But no, that was definitely supernatural, she eventually decides.

By now, it’s 3:45 in the morning. The thought of calling Dean or Sam batters in her skull like a caged animal. She stands up shakily and pads over to the window, closing it firmly. She crawls back into bed, but finds her heart is racing in her chest. She digs her laptop out from her bedside table and tries Google, first. Nothing. Still, she fights the urge to call them, to wake them up in the middle of the night over something she’s not even one-hundred-percent sure was real. 

Eventually, she decides she’ll call them in the morning. Just to see if maybe they have any idea what the hell she just experienced was. That’s it.

Claire gets up at 7:30 AM after getting approximately zero minutes of additional sleep following the smoke incident. Today is the last day of her internship, so her sleep deprivation is not as damaging as it could have been. The leaders of her program have a whole host of fun activities planned for her internship cohort, and she’s hopeful that her stellar performance this summer might lead to a job offer once she graduates next year.

Typically, she commutes alongside her roommates. But not today. Today, she calls Dean on the twenty minute walk over. After the first call, there’s no answer. She considers just letting it go, but resolves to try one more time.

Three rings pass. Then, someone who’s not Dean answers.

“Claire?”

Claire’s features scrunch, trying to place the voice. “Sam?”

“Yeah, it’s me.” She can’t help but think that he sounds out of breath.

“Why are you answering Dean’s phone?”

There’s a pause. “I don’t even know where to start,” he admits. “You won’t believe what’s happened since we last saw you. Why are you calling?”

She hesitates, but then says, “Something really weird happened to me last night. I woke up in the middle of the night and there was this plume of black smoke in my room. It was just hovering over me and then went away as soon as I turned the light on.”

She hears him mutter, “This is crazy,” but can’t tell if he’s talking to her or someone else. 

“Yeah, I know – I was hoping you’d be able to shed some light on what that might have been.”

“No-I mean, yeah, that’s crazy, too, but that’s not what I was talking about. The timing. The timing of you calling is crazy.” 

“Why?” she asks cautiously.

“We’re in the hospital,” he says. “I was in Dean’s room and I just heard his phone buzzing. I look to see who it is, and it’s you. Dean’s in a coma.”

Claire stops abruptly on the sidewalk and commuters flow around her with annoyed looks on their faces.

“We were in a massive car accident last night,” Sam continues. “Us and my dad – we finally tracked him down, by the way.”

“Is he going to be okay?”

“I don’t know. They said he might never wake up. But Claire, it wasn’t just a car accident.”

“What do you mean?”

“This thing that we’re hunting. We found it. It’s a demon.”

“A demon?” she hisses, cupping her hand over the receiver so people don’t hear her.

“Yeah. And I bet that’s what you saw last night.”

“What? Why would a demon be after me?”

“I have no idea,” he laughs darkly, sounding almost crazed. “It makes no sense. Demons don’t just come into your room and look at you. They possess you. You should be possessed right now.”

Claire walks out of the center of the sidewalk and leans against the cool stone of a skyscraper. “Well, I’m obviously not.”

“Yeah. Makes no sense,” he repeats. “You should come here.”

“Where are you?”

“Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Where are you? Sounds like you’re in some sort of city?”

“I’m in Seattle,” she confirms.

“Dean is fighting, but…” he says, sounding broken. “This-I mean, I know last time was a false alarm, but this might really be it.” She can hear his breathing hitch as he suppresses tears.

“Okay,” she says slowly, trying to shake the familiarity of this situation out of her head. “I have to get to my car. I can drive, but it’ll take a while.” 

The next call Claire makes is to her supervisor to tell her that she has a family emergency.

When Claire arrives at the hospital in Sioux Falls, she has to thread through the linoleum maze of hallways for several minutes before she finds Sam. Thankfully, the visitor policy at the hospital seems pretty lax and several people are willing to assist her. When she does find him, she doesn’t even take a minute to speak before embracing him heavily. She’s exhausted from the drive, but quickly realizes that Sam was also just in a car wreck and is probably injured.

“Are you okay?” she asks him, pulling back to inspect him for the first time. He has a smattering of scrapes and bruises across his boyish face.

“Yeah, just a bit scratched up,” he says in response to her quizzical expression. “C’mon,” he says as he leads her into Dean’s hospital room.

Claire’s eyes scan his unconscious figure from the doorway. He’s lying in a hospital bed, propped up and intubated. He has an arsenal of tubes and machines hooked up to him, blipping and beeping as they keep him alive.

Claire has never seen anyone in such a state before and approaches him with trepidation, like he's made of glass. She sits down beside him and lets a shaky gust of air out of her lungs when she sees the large, jagged cut running down the center of his forehead. 

“Jesus,” she murmurs. She looks up to see Sam staring mournfully at his brother. “Where’s your dad,” she asks.

He snaps his gaze to hers. “He’s somewhere around here. We’re trying to find a way out of this, some spell, something…” 

She sees tears well in his eyes. He sniffs, wipes his nose with the back of his huge hand, and turns away. She stands and puts her much smaller hand on his elbow.

“Sam, I’m so sorry…”

For a moment, Sam’s not sure if he called her here for him or his brother. He shakes the thought swiftly from his head – she’s his girlfriend’s best friend, after all – and stays turned away from her.

“It’s okay. I gotta keep working on this, though. You stay here. Maybe… Maybe try talking to him? I don’t-I dunno if he can hear you, but I think he can…”

He leaves the room in a rush, keeping his watery gaze hidden from her, and Claire sits back down at Dean’s bedside. She places her hand on his, which has a thick needle taped into his veins.

“Dean, maybe this is stupid. But if you can hear me, I’m so sorry that this happened to you,” she says softly. Her vibrant blue eyes search his expressionless face, trying to find some indication of life. “I know I shouldn’t be here,” she continues. “I know you probably wouldn’t want me here. But, the craziest thing happened to me two nights ago. A huge cloud of smoke appeared in my bedroom. Sam says it was probably a demon – a demon. I mean, monsters are one thing, but demons… Demons imply the existence of a whole pandora’s box of other religious entities. Heaven, Hell – Satan, God. What would a demon want with me?” She pauses. “So, you need to wake up. I need your help to figure out what’s going on.”

Claire has just finished her sentence when a tall man with suntanned skin and dark hair appears in the doorway.

“Who’re you?” he asks gruffly.

Based on the scratches on his face and his arm in a sling, she surmises this must be Sam and Dean’s dad.

“I’m Claire, a friend of Sam and Dean’s,” she replies carefully.

Sam comes barreling down the hallway. “I was just looking for you,” he says to his father. 

He ignores him, eyes fixed dangerously on Claire. “I’m not sure what kind of friend you are,” he tells her, “but this is a family matter.”

“Dad, this is my friend Claire from college,” he says diplomatically, not knowing he’s being redundant.

“If she’s your friend, what’s she doing holding Dean’s hand?” he asks pointedly. He finally turns to look at his younger son with his bushy black eyebrows raised.

“She’s both of our friends. I asked her to come here. A demon came to her room the same night as the car accident, but didn't possess her. We need to figure out why once we get Dean patched up.”

Sam’s dad’s features soften some with this news. “So she knows.”

“They saved me from a shapeshifter a while back,” she confirms. 

“Alright, fine. I don’t see any harm in you just sitting with him,” he says before turning to leave. Sam chases after him, though he seems intent on shaking him.

Once they’re out of sight, Claire takes a moment to examine the room. She spots a ouija board on the cabinet across from the bed and holds it up to Dean’s lifeless body. 

“Was he using this to talk to you?” she wonders aloud, unfolding it and placing it on the ground. The last time she used a ouija board, she was thirteen at a slumber party. She sits cross-legged over the board and asks, “Can you hear me?”

The dial moves to ‘YES.’

Claire feels a shiver down her spine, and she’s not sure if she’s scared or excited. “Okay,” she mumbles. “Are you mad I’m here?”

It shifts to ‘NO.’

“That’s a relief,” she laughs lightly. The hair on her arm is standing up and the flesh is covered in goosebumps. “This is so weird. Did you hear what I said before?”

It flies back to ‘YES.’ Then, it slides over the letters ‘H’-’E’-’L’-’P’-’U.’

“Thank you,” she murmurs.

Meanwhile, John Winchester is in the boiler room of the hospital finalizing the trade: his life for his eldest son’s. They reach their agreement and the yellow-eyed demon, Azazel, mentions something offhanded.

“Y’know, I tried to come here as a familiar face instead of this ugly janitor.”

John cocks his head to the side bemusedly. “The girl?”

“I figured you’d probably heard about that,” he replies with a sly grin. 

John can’t help but sense that he’s feigning his casual demeanor, though, and is actually trying to see what he knows. John narrows his eyes at him, daring him to pry further, to reveal more information. He doesn’t take the bait. 

“In any case, what’s done is done.”

A full day has passed, and Claire and Sam are still standing over Dean’s bedside, just watching him. What they’re waiting for, they’re not totally sure. But suddenly, the moment makes itself known.

Dean shoots up in the hospital bed, coughing up his intubation tube. Sam immediately starts shouting for help, and a flurry of doctors and nurses pour into the room. They pull the tube up from his esophagus and inject something into his IV to sedate him while they can assess the situation.

Soon, Claire and Sam are allowed to see him again. 

“You were fighting a reaper,” Sam tells him. “You really don’t remember anything?”

“Nothin’,” Dean confirms hoarsely.

“Well… I should go let Dad know you’re awake,” Sam says.

Dean peers at Claire, who is once again sitting at his bedside. 

“We’ve gotta stop meeting like this,” he croaks, voice sounding like tire treads over gravel. He winces as he tries to clear his throat and swallow. The lining of his esophagus feels like it’s being painted with razorblades. 

“Then stop getting yourself into trouble,” Claire replies with a weary smirk. Her expression suddenly falls to a look of seriousness. “They said what happened is a miracle.”

“Another miracle,” he mutters sardonically. “You must be my lucky charm or somethin’.”

Claire feels her face getting hot when Sam reappears looking angry, with his dad in tow. 

“There he is,” he greets Dean with a dimpled grin. “You guys mind giving us a minute alone?”

“Sure,” she says, standing quickly.

“Let’s go grab some coffee,” Sam offers in a clipped tone. She senses that he just got into some sort of argument with their dad on the way over, but doesn’t want to intrude on whatever’s going on. He did say this was family business, after all, and she is most definitely not family.

John uses his last few minutes with his son to try to make amends. He apologizes for everything that he put on Dean, making him grow up too fast, making him be the parent to Sam that he couldn’t be. And even now, he’s still asking more of him.

Dean feels dread slither through his bloodstream like sepsis. These are the words of a dying man. Especially when he bends down to whisper, “Keep away from that girl. There’s something not right about her. And Sam… There is so much more coming for Sam. If you can’t save him, there may be a point where you need to stop him – to kill him.”

When he pulls away, Dean’s eyes search the lines of his face in utter disbelief. How could he possibly say something like that?

“Dad, what-”

But John is already walking into the hallway. 

Chapter Text

Dean’s grief following their father’s death teeters on a razor's edge between pure despair and overflowing rage. Sam is more levelheaded and is left to deal with the logistics. Claire’s is the only vehicle they have, and it’s not nearly large enough to fit all of them and a body. So, he calls Bobby.

In her car on the drive to Bobby’s, Dean clamps shut like a bear trap, unwilling to show any emotion deeper than fury. When she tries to pry him open, he snaps at her. 

“What are you even doing here, anyway?” he demands.

“You don’t remember,” she begins, wounded, “but I already told you. A demon came into my room back in Seattle and was just hovering over me. Sam said I should come here.”

“Of course he did,” he scoffs. What he does remember is his brother’s promise, now broken.

“Clearly she’s connected to this, somehow,” Sam interjects. He’s the one driving the car since he knows where Bobby lives, and he catches his brother’s gaze in the rearview mirror earnestly.

“Maybe Yellow-Eyes wanted to use her as a meatsuit to twist the knife or something,” he posits, crossing his arms over his chest. “Ever think of that?”

“Yeah, I mean, could be. But that’s not what I’m getting at. I think she can’t be possessed.”

Dean recalls his father’s last words to him, warning him to keep away from Claire. “We’ll ask Bobby about it when we get there,” he says.

And they do. In fact, it’s the first thing they do after they file into Bobby’s living room. Bobby narrows his eyes mistrustfully at Claire upon hearing the story of the disembodied black smoke in her room.

“Did you idjits not learn anything from last time?” he grumbles, spraying her with holy water.

“What the hell was that for?” she shouts.

“If I’m a demon, that’s a mighty good lie,” he reasons. “Clearly these boneheads bought it.”

“Well, now that we’re all on the same page that I was telling the truth-”

“You sure you ain’t some sorta hunter?” he interrupts.

“I mean, look at me. Obviously not,” she snickers, giving him a little ballerina twirl and putting her slight figure on display. “How long do you think I would last in this line of work?”

“I’ve known her for years, Bobby,” Sam insists in support. “She was Jess’s best friend. I’d know if she was hiding something like that.”

He gives him a pointed look. “Well, she didn’t seem to know that you were hiding somethin’ like that.”

“That’s different,” he mutters. “I’d convinced myself I was out of it.”

Bobby returns his attention to Claire. “Is there any sort o’ jewelry that you wear? Somethin’ you wear every day?”

“I mean, obviously I wear jewelry sometimes, but there isn’t anything that I would wear to bed. I wasn’t wearing any jewelry when this happened.”

“You got any tattoos?” 

She gives him a sassy look that says Does it look like I have any tattoos? But graciously answers, “No.”

This, Dean can mentally confirm is true.

“Well, I’m stumped,” Bobby says, giving up. “But this reminds me, I do have somethin’ for you boys.” He rifles through a drawer in his desk and hands them both matching amulets. “These will stop those assholes from taking your bodies for a ride again. Don’t lose ‘em.”

“Have you ever met anyone else who can’t be possessed?” she asks him.

“No. And as a matter o’ fact, I’ve never even heard of it. But y’know what they say? Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”

She catches Dean looking at her with his eyebrows drawn, perched on the edge of Bobby’s desk with his arms still crossed over his chest. He casts his gaze towards the window when she makes eye contact and starts to walk outside. 

“I’m gonna get to work on fixing up the car,” he states. 

Bobby shakes his head, but doesn’t say anything. That car is just as much of a lost cause as everything else, it feels like. Sam, still physically injured, looks metaphysically injured, too. They just lost their dad, and Dean can hardly acknowledge it. No one follows him. They let him take his anger out on the already-battered metal.

Sam leaves the house, too, and works on building the pyre. Salty tears stream down his face, stinging the cuts on his cheeks and clouding his vision as he chops heap after heap of scrap wood.

Inside, Bobby monitors Claire as she inspects his library. He’s not taking any chances with this one after the last girl that showed up at his house.

Soon enough, night falls and they watch the sky turn from cotton candy pink, to orange, to pitch black. John’s body is wrapped in a white shroud, almost like some sort of plague victim. It takes both brothers to lift him onto the pyre. Bobby pours the accelerant on and sparks the match. Soon, tall, hot flames lap the white sheet and turn it ash black.

“Why do you do this?” Claire whispers to Sam. 

“So they don’t come back,” he replies, using the heel of his hand to scrub his tear-slick brown locks out of his eyes.

She looks past Sam to Dean, whose stony face is illuminated by the reddish glow. He still has a long cut splitting his forehead in two hemispheres. He takes a swig from a metal flask before passing it to Bobby.

Bobby pours some of the liquor into the dirt. “You were a good ‘un, John,” he says. He takes a swig of his own before stuffing it into his pocket.

Sam turns to Dean and tearfully asks, “Before he… Before, did he say anything to you? About anything?”

“No. Nothing,” he lies curtly. He turns on his heel and walks back towards the workshop.

This time, Claire follows him.

“Dean, I-”

He erupts.

“I swear to god, if you’re hiding something,” he growls. 

He bends his face down so that mere inches lay between them and jabs his blunt fingertip into her collarbone, probing the bare skin revealed by her lacy, gray tank top. The sickly sweet smell of alcohol on his breath makes her heart rate hike several beats per minute. She staggers backward and before she knows it, she’s cornered, the unforgiving metal wall of the workshop pressing into her back. 

This is not the fun, drunk Dean she met at Sam and Jess’s Halloween party, which seems eons ago, now. This Dean is more similar to the shapeshifter.

He seems to remember this – or at least notices the fear flickering like the reflection of the flames in her eyes – and takes a measured step back.

“I swear,” she vows. She holds her hand flat over the place where he poked her as she begs him to believe her. “I’m just as confused as you are. I’m a totally average person from Pontiac, Illinois. I have a mom, a dad, and two younger brothers. My mom doesn’t work and my dad’s an electrician. There is nothing weird or unusual about me. I’m totally, utterly average.” She notices she sounds a bit histrionic when the words leave her mouth, but it’s too late to take them back. 

“Are you trying to convince me or yourself?”

She chuckles darkly, inhaling a deep breath through her nostrils to calm herself down. “Maybe a little of both.”

“What’s your background?” he asks. He’s started pacing across the dirt floor as his mind turns.

“What do you mean?”

“Like, you mentioned you were more religious when you were younger. Is your family super religious?”

“No, they’re not, like, nutty religious. I’d say they’re averagely religious. Church on Christmas and Easter. That level of religious.”

“They sent you to Catholic school?”

“Only because it was a private education for a fraction of the cost. I’m telling you, I am painfully average.”

“You’re not average, Claire,” he tells her with a light shake of his head. That much is obvious to him. He can’t imagine that at any point in her life she had actually been told as such. “You know what average means.”

“Fine, normal. Is that better?”

“I’m not sure you’re normal, either.”

She has the wherewithal to look mildly insulted.

“Lemme tell you what I think,” he starts after a pause, walking towards her again. “I think your family is a little more than averagely religious. And I think that has something to do with this.”

“It’s not like they were wearing hair shirts and flogging themselves,” she scoffs. “Plus, wouldn’t that put me on the good side of things anyway?”

“Maybe,” he permits.

He’s close again, now, and the light from the fire paired with the wound is casting strange shadows on his face. Still, he’s the most handsome man she’s ever seen.

“We’re talking about demons, here,” he goes on. “I don’t know if Sam told you, but the one weapon we had that works against these fuckers is gone. We’ve got nothing, now. We’re shit outta luck. Part of me thinks it’d be safer if you go back to the West Coast and forget about all this.”

“I tried that. It didn’t work.”

“Yellow-Eyes was trying to use you – that much I’m sure of. But the main thing is that he couldn’t. That means you’re probably safer on your own.” His father’s warning is blaring in his head, now.

“Let’s just… let’s just take a minute to think about this, do a little more digging to figure out why I might be different,” she says. “I’m on vacation for three weeks starting today. I-I’ll call my mom tomorrow, I’ll figure out what to do with my stuff back in Seattle-”

“Claire, we’ve already screwed your life up enough as it is,” he interrupts.

“That’s not clear to me,” she refutes. “I seem to be, I don’t know, involved in this somehow. I mean, why can’t I just stay away from you?” She lets out a bitter laugh and knots her hands in her hair.

“Don’t freak out,” he tells her, wrapping his hands around her wrists and lowering them.

“This is crazy, right? Like, totally illogical and insane. Why do I keep coming back for more?”

“I don’t know,” he answers honestly.

“Like, I just watched your dad drop dead in the hospital and then you burned his body in a junkyard in Sioux Falls.”

“You think I don’t know that?” He drops her wrists like they’re hot coals.

“Obviously you know. But, like, what am I doing?”

“Are you having a panic attack?” he deadpans.

“No. I mean, I don’t think so.” She looks him in the eye for the first time since the start of her rant. “Jesus, Dean. You’re the one who just lost his dad. I’m so sorry.”

He bristles. “You need to calm down,” he says. “Here, have some of this.” He holds out a handle of Jack Daniels from the workbench. 

“Have you been drinking in here all day?”

He doesn’t answer, but waves the half-empty bottle expectantly. She grabs it from him and takes a long draught. Immediately, she starts coughing as the liquor burns her throat. Dean lets out a genuine bark of laughter. 

“Whiskey’s not my drink of choice,” she says, voice uncharacteristically raspy.

He rolls his eyes, but gives her a smirk. She looks so innocuous to him, like a fluffy orange kitten. The caveman part of his brain has the inexplicable desire to protect her. How could his dad possibly think that there was something dangerous about her? If it were up to him, he’d put her on the list of least dangerous people he’s ever met. He can’t help but remember the first night he met her, when she was dressed like a devil. Uncanny, now that he thinks about it. But even then, he didn’t think it suited her.

But clearly, John knew something that they don’t, and now they’ll never be able to dig it out of him. He grits his teeth as he thinks about how his dad left him high and dry, even at the very end. How he soured one of the only things that seemed safe and pure.

She hands the whiskey back to him and takes a step closer, so that now there’s only about a foot between them. “Things started so differently…” she trails off, her voice barely above a whisper. 

The dark fan of her lashes is pointing towards his lips, and the liquor in his veins is urging him to do something about it. He could bend her over the workbench, if he wanted to. He could make her moan his name. Show her how good it can be now that the first time is out of the way. And he does want to.

“I wish they could’ve stayed different,” he says, swallowing hard. “I honestly do.” 

He’s not sure if it’s the whiskey, adrenaline, grief, or some combination of them all that’s making him feel this electricity in his stomach. Dean has a high sex drive, but rarely does he fantasize like this. After a struggle, however, he successfully fights against his more base instincts and leaves her there alone in the workshop.

The next morning, Dean lays awake in the same twin bed that he used to sleep in when he was a child. Sam is snoozing about five feet away. There are a couple of things that are different from when he was a kid, though. For starters, he’s got a ripping headache thanks to all the Jack Daniels he imbibed last night. 

Secondly, he can hear Claire’s soft, feminine voice – startlingly foreign, in this house – from beneath the thin floorboards.

“Hi, Mom. Yeah, yeah I’m okay. Yeah, I just missed the last day, but the internship went really well. One of my friends from college – his dad just passed away, so I came here for the funeral. I’m in South Dakota, actually. I know, yeah. No, he’s just a friend. I’m not sure yet. Maybe in a couple of days. Abby said she’d pack my stuff up for me – it’s just like two suitcases since the place was already furnished. I know, it’s really nice of her. I will. Okay. I’ll let you know. Love you, too.”

Even having only heard one side of the conversation, Dean’s heart constricts painfully in his chest. It reminds him of what he’s lost, what he never truly even had, but also what’s hanging in the balance for Claire.

He comes down the stairs to see her at the edge of the living room, sitting on the makeshift bed they’d done up on the couch last night.

“No mention of me to mommy dearest?” he teases.

She grins at him sheepishly and says, “You must feel better than you look.”

“Ouch,” he replies with mock offense. “You want some coffee?”

“Sure.”

He leans against the kitchen counter while he waits for the pot to fill up. He asks, “Where’s Bobby at?”

“He’s working on something in the basement.”

When the coffee is ready, he pads over to her and hands her a mug. Up close, Claire can now see that his sandy hair is sticking up messily. Something about it is charming, and she feels hopelessly confused.

Claire has never been an indecisive person. In fact, quite the opposite. She’s always known what she’s wanted and what it takes to make it happen. That’s what ambition is, in a nutshell. And she’s ambitious. She wants to succeed. She wants to graduate and get a high-paying job and live a life more comfortable than her parents’.

But she also feels like she might want Dean, too, and those things are at odds. She’s already seen the impact this will have on her ability to focus on her classes, on holding down a job. Pursuing this has the potential to destroy everything she’s worked for – just look at Sam. The same thing could just as easily happen to her.

Growing up, Claire was never particularly interested in boys. She’d had schoolyard crushes, but that was about it. Even now, she’s never had a real boyfriend. She’s never been in love. She’s never had to face this kind of distraction. And not because she never wanted it – in reality, she desperately wanted to find someone, to fall in love. But she just never felt it. Not with any of the perfectly smart an handsome lacrosse players, nor any of the tall and muscular crew rowers that her friends set her up with. By the time she hit twenty-one, she was starting to lose hope that it would ever happen.

That’s why she even spoke to him at that Halloween party in the first place. She didn’t think it could happen, let alone with her best friend’s boyfriend’s older brother. She thought she was immune.

She doesn’t love Dean. Not yet, anyway. And that’s the part that scares her – the not yet part. Because, for the first time ever, she feels like maybe she could.

How tragic is that? Why couldn’t it be with someone like her, someone with the same goals? Why does it have to be a twenty-seven-year-old demon-hunter?

She wishes she had someone she could talk to about this – preferably Jess, but that is, of course, impossible. She knows what she would say, though. What any of her clever, put-together friends would tell her. They would tell her to run as fast as she can in the other direction. They would tell her the same thing that every shred of logic in her brain is already telling her. They would say that eventually you'll forget, eventually you'll meet someone else. They'd share stories of the first boyfriends they had in high school and how they stupidly thought they'd never get over them. And Claire might find that a little patronizing, but she might also believe them. Part of her worries, though, that she's not like everyone else, and that what worked for her friends might not work for her. Part of her worries that she is fundamentally different and a little off in the romantic attachment department.

She burns the roof of her mouth on the hot coffee semi-intentionally to snap herself out of it. She’s spiraling. 

Dean catches her wince and asks, “You good?”

“Fine,” she mutters, even though mentally she is anything but fine.

“I think we’re gonna have to hit the books today if we wanna get any closer to figuring out what’s going on with you,” he says, changing the subject. “Should be easy for you and Sammy.”

“What about the thing that killed your dad?” she asks.

He freezes, his whole body going rigid, and grinds his molars together.

Clearly she's said the wrong thing. She repositions her question and asks, “Aren’t you going to go after it?”

He considers adding some booze to his coffee to get his day started on the right foot, but suppresses the urge. Eventually, he responds, “I don’t even know where to start.”

Sam descends the staircase and inadvertently lightens the mood in the room. “What’re you guys up to?” he asks innocently enough. “I heard my name.”

“We were just talkin’ about how much you love to read old historic texts,” Dean drawls. “ So you guys work on that, and I’ll keep working on getting the car back up and running.”

Sam can’t help but feel like Dean’s futile plight to repair the Impala is some sort of grotesque reflection of his inability to fix his relationship with their father. Neither of them really could. Sam had no qualms going head to head with the man, but Dean always preferred to internalize his suffering – just like he’s doing right now.

Chapter Text

Claire decides to spend another six days at Bobby’s parsing through tome after tome of religious lore. It’s mainly her and Sam sitting cross-legged on the floor in the living room surrounded by a sea of open books. Something about it is comfortable, familiar. She can almost pretend that they’re back at Stanford in the library together, prepping for some sort of test. 

Back in college, Claire and Sam never had much of a relationship independent from Jess. They got along, of course. Since Jess was almost like an older sister to her, that made Sam her de-facto older brother-in-law. They spent a lot of time together, but never one on one. 

Everything has changed now. Claire has seen Sam at the lowest moments of his life, seen him weeping in front of roaring flames twice. Sam doesn’t seem that old to her anymore, even though he’s a year ahead. And now that she’s gotten the chance to get to know him better, she can see one thing very clearly: they are incredibly similar. Maybe that’s why they both loved Jess so much.

Sam has both emotional and intellectual intelligence, a rare combination in men their age. Claire would know – she has two younger brothers, after all. Male friendships have always come easily to her because of this, which, on some subconscious level, she thinks is why she’s had so much trouble finding a boyfriend and run so headfirst into cultivating female relationships. That’s why she cherished her friendship with Jess so much. She was like the older sister that she always wanted.

And now she’s surrounded by men again, just like she was growing up. She can’t help but wonder how many women get into this line of work, if you can even call it that. Maybe it’s more like a calling, a vocation. She doesn’t feel like this is her calling because she doesn’t seem to be very good at it.

Their research has produced very little in the way of answers. Claire’s been jotting down everything that could be of substance in a moleskin notebook that Bobby gave her, and she reviews what they’ve found aloud with everyone.

“As far as I can tell, there aren’t too many heavenly figures, if we want to call them that. There are angels, of course, which I presume exist if demons exist. Obviously, I’m not an angel. I’ve seen my birth certificate.” 

She pauses, looking up from the paper, and catches Dean’s eye. He looks as though he’s biting back some sort of wisecrack. 

She ignores him and continues, “Then there are the human hybrid offspring of angels, nephilim. Theoretically, that could be possible, but there’s one glaring issue. Well, two, actually. First, I look like both of my parents. If you saw them, you’d agree. Second, I don’t have any powers.”

“You don’t have any powers that you know of,” Sam corrects. This is a topic that they’ve circled before. Sam seems to think that she could have some sort of latent power that has yet to be revealed.

Dean gives his brother an unreadable look. 

“I have never had anything – and I mean anything – strange or unexplained happen to me in my entire life. No moving objects, no super strength, no nothing.”

“We wouldn’t be here right now if that were true,” Dean interjects. 

“Yes, there was that thing with the demon,” she allows in exasperation, “but nothing else.” She makes a face as though another realization has just dawned on her.

Sam notices and asks, “What is it?”

“Well, maybe there is one other thing,” she starts guiltily. “Back with that faith healer – I prayed for Dean to be healed, and he was.”

“That was because of some reaper that they trapped to do their bidding,” Dean dismisses with a wave of his hand.

“Have there been other times where that’s happened?” Sam asks.

The color leaves her face in embarrassment as she thinks back to all the times she’s prayed throughout her life. “Well… I prayed to get into Stanford. I prayed to get a scholarship. I prayed for Dean to wake up from that coma…”

All of them look at her in surprise.

“I thought you said you weren’t religious,” Dean snaps gruffly. 

“I said that I wasn’t that religious anymore,” she says. “When I was younger, I prayed more. There have to be some stupid things that I prayed for that didn’t come true, but I can’t remember them.”

“You just mentioned two times that you prayed in the last year,” Sam points out. “Both of which ended up in you getting what you asked for.”

Dean surviving, is the unspoken end of that statement, which brings the color back to her cheeks.

“Those were big asks,” he goes on.

“Yeah, but we already established that at least one of those times had nothing to do with me.”

Sam’s features come together in a thoughtful expression, but he doesn’t say anything else.

Finally, Bobby chimes in for the first time. “What about lesser religious figures? Saints. Ain’t one o’ the criteria that they can perform miracles?”

“How could I be a saint?” she laughs. “I haven’t dedicated my life to anything besides getting straight As. And plus, there’s already a very famous Saint Clare from, like, the Renaissance. She’s known for cutting her beautiful hair and taking a strict vow of poverty. That’s pretty much the opposite of me.”

“Put what ya learned in school to the side for a minute,” he replies. “Maybe saints’re predetermined or somethin’.”

“Can saints be possessed?” Sam asks.

“Prob’ly should do some more diggin’ on that,” Bobby says with a shrug. 

Claire can’t help but think that he’s taking the role of a teacher in this situation as opposed to actually trying to help them get to the bottom of this, and she feels her temper flare.

“Everything I’ve prayed for was entirely selfish,” she states, and it’s too late to take the words back when she realizes the implication of them. She presses on, hoping the others won’t notice. “Saints are selfless – they perform miracles for people in need. They don’t pray to get into elite colleges.”

“Still,” Sam replies, “I think it’s a pretty good lead to look into. If saints are predetermined, like Bobby said, then it means that they don’t necessarily get their power from a life of service.” 

“Alright,” she concedes. 

They agree that the remainder of this research is best done online, which can be done anywhere. Meaning, Claire doesn’t need to extend her trip any longer. Her plan to return home tomorrow will stand. 

She actually does miss her family and is eager to see them. It will be difficult to explain to them what she’s been doing this whole week, so she’ll have to fabricate some sort of lie. Renting a lakehouse with some friends from college seems like a pretty good one. Claire doesn’t like to lie, especially not to the people she loves. She’s always prided herself on being an honest person. But there’s just no other way. Again, she can feel this world stripping things away from her, things she valued about herself and thought were inexorable. 

Not only that, it’s isolating her. She has an oppressive secret now. A secret that she will have to keep hidden from everyone apart from the three people in this room with her. And that means she’ll never be able to be truly upfront with anyone else again.

Dean and Claire have not found themselves in close quarters since the first night in the workshop. That’s by design. Dean has been avidly avoiding her, only willing to throw himself into her proximity when Sam or Bobby is there as a buffer. 

Tonight is the last night, though. As Claire lies awake on the sofa bed staring at the boards on the ceiling, she can’t help but wish that they had had one more moment together. She doesn’t dare to pray for it, but she wishes for it acutely, to the point where she can feel a physical aching in her ribs. The desire emanates from some surreptitious place that she didn’t know she had, a place that has been in constant battle with her defeated sense of reason these past few months.

She finally understands the cliche of your head and your heart being at war. She feels contrite for the many times she judged others for this same thing, and she can’t help but feel like her penance is now having the mother of all dilemmas. 

She hears the floorboards above her creak under some fresh weight. Probably just someone getting up to go to the bathroom, she hypothesizes. But the creaking follows a trail all the way to the staircase, and before long, she sees a tall figure walking towards her. Even in the dark, she can tell it’s Dean.

She sits up. Her bed is right beside the window, and in the moonlight he can see her quizzical expression.

“I was hoping you’d be asleep,” he whispers with a shamefaced smile. “I just came down to get some water.”

She has a fleeting thought that this might be a bluff.

“I’m leaving tomorrow,” she says, as though it’s not a fact that he’s already keenly aware of, as though it means something.

“I know,” he replies.

She stares at him, her eyes glimmering amorously. Just as she willed him to come down the stairs, she wills him to come nearer. She can see the muscle in his jaw tick as he considers it. 

“Don’ look at me like that,” he says finally.

“Like what?” she asks innocently.

He scowls and says, “You know,” in a warning tone. “And you know it’s not a good idea.”

He turns his back to her as he grabs a glass out of the cupboard and moves to fill it over the sink. Claire is light on her feet as she tiptoes behind him, quiet as a cat. Dean isn’t an easy person to sneak up on, but by the time he senses her, he spins around to find her mere inches from him. He opens his mouth to protest further, but she quickly smothers it with her lips. Against his better judgment, his left hand finds her waist while his other struggles to find the countertop. He places the cup of water down before it can spill or smash on the cool tile.

Claire links her arms around his neck and uses his broad shoulders to try to lever herself up. His body takes the cue easily, as though this was all he was ever made to do. He hoists her up and sets her on the edge of the countertop. She opens her thighs and he presses between them, but the angle isn’t quite right and it allows his brain to prevail for a fleeting moment. 

“You’re confused,” he murmurs huskily into her fruity-scented hair, and she is. She has never been more confused in her life.

“You’re confusing,” she retorts into the skin of his neck. He smells clean and musky, like aftershave. Her hands find the hem of his gray t-shirt shirt and slide underneath. 

“‘M not trying to be. You’re more confusing.” 

His breath is hot and damp on the space between her ear and jaw, and she feels a warmth cascade through her middle. She tugs his shirt over his head and lets it drop on the floor. Then, she kisses him again, long and slow, unable to get enough of him. She threads one hand into the short crop of hair at the back of his head and uses the other to grab his wrist. She places his hand firmly on her hip, under her long nightshirt. His fingers leave a burning trail as they brush up her thigh.

His resolve is too weak to fight against her. It’s endured six nights of temptation, only to fracture on the seventh. She’s not wearing anything but underwear underneath, and his hands grab either side of the fabric and pull upward. 

She extends her arms to allow him to remove the garment, but her wrist knocks the glass of water off of the counter and sends it tumbling to the ground. It shatters on impact, sending water and shards of glass across the tile and a loud smash booming through the quiet house.

“Shit,” he curses.

“What’s goin’ on down there?” he hears Bobby call from upstairs. They can see a light flick on. 

Claire goes wide-eyed as she considers the prospect of him or Sam coming downstairs to find her topless. She scrambles to put her shirt back on and smooth wisps of hair from her saliva-sticky face and throat.

“Nothin’” Dean calls back, his voice cracking slightly. “I just dropped a glass of water.”

“Well, clean it up,” Bobby grumbles. “Broom’s in the pantry.”

Both of them have bare feet, and there is a minefield of glass surrounding them. 

“Stay there,” Claire instructs, catching her breath. 

Before Dean can respond, she pulls herself up so that she’s standing on the counter and walks along the perimeter like an acrobat. Once she reaches a spot that’s beyond the fallout, she hops down and grabs two pairs of shoes by the door. She tosses Dean a pair. He carefully puts them on and walks to the pantry to get the dustpan and brush.

Both crouch over the floor as they clean up the mess. Dean scrapes the glass into the dustpan while Claire mops up the water with a dishtowel. 

“Maybe that was a sign,” he mutters, mostly joking.

She freezes and looks at him in dismay. 

“I’m kiddin’,” he amends when he notices her skittish expression. Lowering his voice to barely a rumble, he continues, “But the last thing I need is Bobby coming down here and seeing me with a boner and you with your bare ass on his counter. Or worse, Sam.”

“Yeah that wouldn’t be good,” she agrees, feeling deflated. “I’m sorry, I-”

“Don’t,” he cuts her off. “It’s okay. It’s not that I don’t want to. I mean, you could tell – I obviously want to. But we’ve been over this. It’s not a good idea.”

“You didn’t seem to have any issue before.” He can’t help but think that she almost seems like she’s pouting.

“That was completely different, as you know.”

“Why? Because you thought you’d never see me again?”

Her tone is sharp and causes Dean to stop what he’s doing. He mulls it over for a minute, before replying, “You can’t tell me you thought it’d be anything more than that, either.”

Her face flushes in embarrassment, and she returns her gaze to the floor without responding. They’ve nearly finished cleaning everything up. 

When all the water has been wiped away, she stands and carefully says, “Was that something you did a lot?”

Dean stands, too, and looks distressed. He licks his lips, trying to find the right words. He can still taste her vanilla chapstick on his mouth. This is all the confirmation she needs, and she suddenly feels a tidal wave of foolishness hit her in the gut.

“I see,” she mutters darkly. 

The weight of how significant this is to her – and how insignificant it is to him – suddenly feels like an unyielding yoke. How had she not thought about this before? She thinks about asking if there have been others in between, but decides quickly that she doesn’t want to know. One look at him should have been enough to surmise that he gets around. And once more, she can feel their misalignment starkly. They’re not following the same path, not right for one another in any other sense than carnal.

Dean’s temper rises. How could she possibly be mad about something like this? But she’s not mad, not really. Just disappointed.

“I’m a lot older than you,” is all he offers. “This line of work doesn’t lend itself well to long-term relationships.”

She thinks this is perhaps the most honest thing he’s ever said to her.

Chapter Text

Claire has almost nine hours between Sioux Falls and Pontiac to contemplate how to rid herself such jealous, immature, and inane thoughts. She believes the culprit to be some combination of whatever horny, twenty-two-year-old hormones are surging in her body along with the fact that her frontal lobe is not yet fully developed. 

What she ultimately decides is that the only solution is to go cold turkey from seeing Dean again. She needs to cloister herself, like a monk. The idea of being a saint was the inspiration. If Saint Clare could take a vow of poverty and shave her head, Claire should be able to muster the willpower to stop talking to one attractive man. She doesn’t even need to go full celibacy – she just needs to stay away from a single person. 

Her family’s daffodil-yellow Victorian home glows in the hot summer sun like a sanctuary. When she parks in the driveway, the first thing she does is take out her cellphone and block Sam and Dean’s numbers. Sam is an unfortunate casualty of this situation, but it needs to be done. If she needs to contact them for whatever reason, she can unblock them, and if anything truly dire comes up, they can contact her from another number.

She revels in the genius of her plan as she steps into her home. Instantly, she’s met with the warm, familiar embrace of the four walls she’s spent ninety-percent of her life in. She can practically feel the tumult of recent events fading into the background, like they were just some sort of unsettling dream.

“Hi, honey,” her mom calls from the other room. 

Claire walks into the kitchen to see her mother fixing a sandwich for herself and her youngest brother, Charlie. She pauses what she’s doing to give her a hug and a kiss on the cheek. She then returns to the counter, her back facing Claire, and asks, “Can I get you one, too?” 

Claire watches the soft sway of her hair as she moves. At one time, before she can remember, it was the same vivid red shade as her own. Now, it’s been dulled by snaking strands of gray.

“No, thanks. I stopped for some food on the way here,” she replies.

Charlie is sitting at the island waiting for his BLT. At fifteen, he has a half-grown look about him like some puppies do. His hands and feet seem too big for his skinny, lanky limbs. Like Claire and their mom, he has a shock of bright, shaggy, red hair.

“Hey,” he greets her as she slides into the stool next to him. His voice has the same sort of half-developed sound, in the process of shedding the high-pitched timbre of childhood.

“Hey, kiddo,” she says, fondly ruffling his hair like she used to do when he was much younger. He shirks away from her in annoyance. “Where’s Ryan?” she asks.

“He’s at the gym,” their mom answers. 

Of course. The gym. 

Ryan is their middle brother, only a year and a half younger than Claire and a rising sophomore at Ohio State. Ryan is an accomplished football player, which has been a source of contention since the moment it became clear that he had a shot at playing professionally. Due to their closeness in age, their parents had inadvertently put them in competition with one another, even though they have polar opposite strengths. Claire is the smart one. Ryan is the athletic one. Growing up, she couldn’t help but feel that her parents valued his athleticism more. 

Maybe this was part of why she is so driven to succeed – to prove them wrong. To prove that intellect can be just as lucrative as a multimillion dollar NFL contract. On some level, maybe she’s trying to prove this to herself, too. 

“How was the lake house?” her mom asks, rousing her from these thoughts.

“It was fun,” she lies easily. 

Her mother turns around and deposits a plate in front of Charlie.

“How about the funeral?” 

Claire searches her mother’s face. The similarities in their appearance mostly end at the hair. Her mother has a kind face – less angular than Claire's, and with hazel eyes flecked with green and amber. 

“Not as fun, as you can probably imagine,” she answers.

“This was the dad of a boy from college that you know?” she probes.

“Yeah, Jess’s boyfriend’s dad. He died from complications from a car accident.”

Her mother’s expression darkens at the mention of Jess. “Poor kid,” she laments. “Two tragedies like that in such a short period of time.”

“I know,” she agrees.

“Did he go to the lake house, too?”

“Yeah, we were hoping a vacation might help cheer him up.”

She takes a bite of her sandwich and nods thoughtfully. Charlie merely observes the exchange with mild curiosity. Claire is astute enough to know that her mom is trying to find out if there’s anything going on between her and Sam, but she’s not bold enough to ask it outright. She gives her a defiant look, daring her to keep interrogating her, but she doesn’t press the issue.

Claire pushes away from the island and stands. “I’m going to go upstairs and do a couple of things to prep for school starting,” she announces. 

What she is really doing is delving deeper into her research about saints. The concept is so ridiculous to her that she could almost laugh about it. Her, a saint? Absolutely absurd. Yesterday she was practically throwing herself at Dean – not a very saintly thing to do.

And now that she thinks about it more, there are other parts of the theory that just don’t add up. If it’s predetermined, does that mean that the church is getting it right one hundred percent of the time? No, that’s impossible. So how many false positives are there? Does that just completely negate any evidence about whether or not they can be possessed?

She feels frustration prickle in her chest. Patience with ambiguity was never something she was very good at. 

Dean, Sam, and Bobby wake up to find that Claire is already gone. 

“Why would she leave without saying anything?” Sam asks Dean accusatorily. 

He just shrugs. He’d pointed out that she was confused, but he’s confused, too. He supposes some chicks just don’t take rejection well. Not that what happened was rejection, exactly, but it was in the ballpark. And sometimes even that’s enough.

“Maybe she wanted to hit the road early without wakin’ everyone up,” Bobby posits with the sole aim of diffusing the tension. “She had a long drive ahead of ‘er.”

He doesn’t share that he took two steps downstairs last night to see Claire’s feet dangling on either side of Dean’s legs and an article of clothing crumpled on the floor. He’d retreated quickly, not wanting to see any more. That’s one tidbit he’ll take to the grave.

Is he surprised that Dean has put his grief to the side to instead focus on getting into that girl’s pants? No. Is he disappointed? Yes. Though he supposes it shouldn’t be a shock that he’s so emotionally constipated with a daddy like John Winchester. He wagers the only reason Sam turned out okay was because Dean was the one doing most of the raising. 

Later that day, Sam cracks the code to John’s voicemail inbox to find a message from a woman named Ellen. Both brothers agree that their dad wouldn’t keep a voicemail like that stored for over four months unless there was something of substance there. So, they set out to the Roadhouse, the bar where she works, in one of Bobby’s spare cars. A minivan, much to Dean’s chagrin. There, they meet Ellen, her daughter Jo, and Ash, who’s some sort of redneck genius hacker. 

Jo takes an immediate shine to Dean. At any other time, he would have been walking on cloud nine to have two smoking hot women coming onto him within days of one another. It’s just his luck that this is happening at a time when he’s as confused as he is. 

Jo seems a little like Claire, in a way. They’ve gotta be the same age and have a similar sassy quality about them. But Claire would never be brave enough to stick him in the back with a shotgun. The thought itself sends a snicker rising in his throat. 

So he turns her down, too. In part because he’s still thinking about someone else, but also because he really shouldn’t be thinking about anyone right now. They’re about to throw themselves into hunting the thing that nearly killed him. The thing that successfully killed both of his parents. And he’s not sure if he’s going to make it out of this one intact, especially not with their dad’s last words playing over and over again in his brain.

Claire spends the next two weeks of her summer vacation in a welcome routine of normalcy. She sunbathes on the deck, hangs out with her friends, and picks up a couple of shifts at the ice cream parlor where she used to work during previous summers. 

All thoughts of Heaven and Hell seem like distant memories, now. The only time they feel closer is when she’s with her two best friends from high school, Leah and Megan. While the two of them trade stories of their escapades, Claire feels the urge to share her situation with Dean crest in her like an uncontrollable rush of water. She beats it back, though. The more she shares, the more opportunities there are to get caught in a lie.

All in all, the two weeks pass quickly. By the end, she’s been lulled into believing that her life can continue normally. 

Her return to Stanford proves a bit more difficult to navigate. Word has gotten around her friend group that she’s been hanging out with Sam. First, it came from Becky mentioning that they saw them back in St. Louis several months ago. More recently, it came from Abby, who’d stored her things for her when she had to leave Seattle in a hurry. 

Some of her sorority sisters are understandably leery. Most of them were friends with Jess too, after all. It’s not a good look for her to be spending a lot of time with her dead best friend’s boyfriend. Her one saving grace is that some of them saw her at that Halloween party last year with Dean, and she uses that to her advantage. She sprinkles a few kernels of truth about what was going on with him to keep them sated.

They ask her how Sam is doing, and she tells them that he’s not likely to ever come back to Stanford. This news is always met with the same degree of acute shock and disbelief, as though he’s given up the most important thing in the world. 

She used to think like that, too. But now that she’s wise to everything else that’s out there, it doesn’t seem so inconceivable. Hell, she herself was dangerously close to being sucked into the vortex. She’d avoided it by the skin of her teeth. If that glass hadn’t shattered in Bobby’s kitchen, she may have never made it back here. Maybe it was an act of god, after all.

It’s her last year of college – only nine short months left. She just needs to muscle through it. Keep her head down, her grades up, and work on finding a job. 

Sometimes, when Dean’s trying to fall asleep at night, the folly of Claire praying for him invades his thoughts. Despite what she and Sam came up with, doesn’t believe in angels, saints, or anything of the sort. If there were a god, it wouldn’t have let their mother burn to death on the ceiling.

But Sam does. Sam wholeheartedly believes it. He thinks part of him even believes that Claire is connected to them, the way he’s connected to all those freaks who lost their mothers like they did. Dean tells him it’s a ludicrous idea; there are no visions, no headaches, no nothing. All they’ve got is her saying a couple of stupid prayers.

At one point, Sam poses the question, “Even if you being healed was the work of that reaper, how did the preacher know to pick you out of everyone? And how do you explain waking up from that coma?”

He doesn’t know, but he doesn’t dwell on it. Dwelling on it will put insane thoughts into his head. 

Sam’s second question is eventually answered, and the answer sends Dean into a depth of despair that he didn’t know existed. His father dying was bad enough. But his father selling his soul to a demon so that he could live? It’s too much to bear, and it’s all the vindication he needs to know that there most certainly is no god. 

Shortly after, Dean tells Sam what their dad said about him, and from there, their lives start to spin out of control. Sam needs faith to keep him from going completely off the rails, so he lets him have it. But he can’t share it.

Months go by. They keep working run-of-the-mill cases, but even those seem to be escalating to a boiling point. His and Sam’s difference in faith comes to a head during a case in Providence, Rhode Island. Up until the very end, Dean is triumphant that he is right, as he usually is. And then he sees something that sets him off course, that rattles him to his core. A rapist impaled by metal piping. Playing out to a script like it was written, like it was inevitable.

Had he not seen it with his own eyes, he wouldn’t have registered it for what it was: divine wrath. The nature of this makes it easier for him to wrap his head around the concept. In a way, it almost seems to click. Of course god’s will is felt through violence, not goodness. God isn’t merciful, he’s vengeful, and that tracks with everything Dean has felt up until this point.

And then, Sam loses the amulet Bobby gave him and goes and gets himself possessed, and through all of this, thoughts of Claire have almost completely fled his mind. He doesn’t even wonder why they never heard from her after she left in August.

Until he gets to Joliet, Illinois.

Chapter Text

Dean’s memory of Claire is first jogged by the proximity of Joliet to Pontiac, where she’s from. He knows she’s at Stanford now, though. She may have wanted to go no-contact, but Sam still keeps tabs on her on Facebook just to make sure she’s alive. She’ll be graduating in about a month.

But then, things only get stranger. 

While on a hunt for a djinn, he suddenly awakes next to her in bed in the middle of the night. 

She stirs and says, “Mm what’s the matter?” without opening her eyes. She rolls over so that she’s facing him and winds her arm around his torso. It’s then that he notices that she’s hardly wearing anything apart from a gleaming round engagement ring on her left hand. 

The shock of this alone is almost enough to break the djinn’s hold on him. Later, when he thinks back on this moment, he can’t help but suspect that part of his subconscious knew that something was wrong, but still wanted to see how it would play out. 

“I need to call Sam,” he mutters, sitting up.

The room is completely unfamiliar to him. He grabs his phone from the bedside table, flips it open, and starts scrolling to find Sam’s number.

Claire kneels behind him and snakes her arms around his shoulders. “It’s the middle of the night, babe. Don’t wake him up. We’ll see him tomorrow.”

Hearing Claire call him ‘babe’ makes the hairs on the back of his neck stand up, but Dean doesn't react. Instead, he checks the time and sees that it is indeed 2 AM. He flops back against the pillow. “I was working this case,” he starts, staring at the ceiling fan. “A djinn. It attacked me.”

“Gin?” she mumbles, still half-asleep.

“Like a genie.”

“It was just a bad dream.”

“How do I know this is real and not some sort of trick?”

Claire lays back down and props herself up on her elbow. She scrunches her face up in a mixture of bewilderment and irritation. “Why would this be a trick?”

“Tell me something only you would know. What were you wearing the first night we met?”

She smiles nostalgically and replies, “Some stupid devil costume. It was at that Halloween party where Sam and Jess introduced us.”

This quells Dean’s anxiety some, but he still feels disoriented.

“Where are we?” he asks.

“At home.”

“But where? California, Illinois-”

She cuts him off by placing the back of her hand to his forehead. “Do you have a fever? We’re in Lawrence, obviously.”

“Kansas?”

“Yes,” she confirms, sounding highly confused. “You don’t feel warm.” She reclines and mirrors his blank stare for a while. “Well, now I’m awake,” she states after a moment. She shifts to face him, eyes sparkling with mischief in the dark. 

By the time Dean gets the innuendo and turns to look at her, she’s already on top of him. 

To Dean’s continued surprise, they arrive at his childhood home the next afternoon with a large vat of mashed potatoes. Apparently, it’s Thanksgiving.

He’s not prepared for what he sees when the door opens. It’s his mom. 

“Hi, sweetie,” she says, smiling brightly.

He watches Claire hug her, on the verge of tears. His voice escapes him as she makes her way over to embrace him.

She notices something is wrong. “Are you okay?”

“I-uh,” he flounders.

“He’s been acting kind of weird,” Claire supplies. “I think maybe he’s coming down with something.”

“Well, your brother and Jess should be here any minute,” Mary says, taking the mashed potatoes from Claire. “Their flight from San Francisco is on time.”

He steps into the house, studying the family photos scattered throughout the room. “Where’s Dad?” 

Mary freezes in the kitchen, and Claire gives him a panicked look. 

“You know your father passed last year,” Mary replies carefully. 

“Yeah, babe, remember? The stroke. In his sleep.”

“Oh, right. Great. I mean – not great. But peaceful.”

Dean doesn’t have the words to describe the way Claire is staring at him. It’s some strange amalgamation of scared, perplexed, and angry. He can’t help but find it funny and a smirk unfolds across his face. 

“Have you been drinking already?” Mary asks. “I was going to offer you a mimosa, but now I’m not so sure it’s a good idea.”

“I’ll take one,” says Claire. His mother hands her a champagne glass and she downs it immediately. 

Before Dean can comment, there’s a knock on the door.

“That must be Sam.”

As predicted, Sam and Jess enter the house. The sight of Sam’s wide, dimpled grin is like a port in the storm. Dean notices that Jess also has a huge, shiny engagement ring on her finger, just like Claire. The redhead snatches her hand up to examine the ring, then launches herself at her taller friend. 

“Congratulations! I missed you so much!” Claire exclaims, beaming ear-to-ear. 

“Thanks. I missed you too,” Jess replies with an equally megawatt smile.

Mary looks at Sam and Jess in elation. “Oh my god, that’s so wonderful,” she says happily, giving them both a tight hug and proclaiming her congratulations.

When they break apart, Sam walks over to Dean and pulls him into a one-armed hug. “How’s it goin’ dude?”

Dean eyes him quizzically and leads him into the living room, out of earshot of the others. “I needa talk to you,” he says in a low voice. “Were we not just on a hunt? Looking for a djinn?”

Sam looks at him like he’s speaking Aramaic. “What are you talking about?”

“The djinn. You know, the scary creature that's supposed to grant wishes?”

“Are you drunk?”

“No,” he snaps. “Never mind. I just-” he halts, considering his next words. “What if it actually can grant wishes?”

“Dean, you’re not making any sense,” he states with a dour scowl. 

Claire slinks slyly into the room and walks up between them. “He’s been acting weird all day,” she tells Sam. “Anyway, I came over here to tell you congratulations.” Her eyes flit pointedly to Dean. “On the engagement,” she finishes.

“Oh, right, congrats, man,” he says, taking the hint.

“Thanks,” he says somewhat feebly. Dean can still sense his hard gaze bearing into him.

“Let’s get some champagne to toast,” suggests Claire.

This toast is the first of several. Later, when they’re all seated with heaping plates of turkey, cranberry sauce, and mashed potatoes in front of them, Mary raises her glass in another toast.

She barely gets the first word out before getting choked up. “I’m so grateful to have you all here today,” she begins. “With this being the first year without John, it means everything to have my boys here with me.”

Dean feels tears prick the backs of his own eyes, and he grasps his mother’s hand, urging her to go on. Claire notices that Dean is getting emotional and rests her fingers on his kneecap comfortingly.

“I’m so proud of the men you’ve grown into,” Mary continues. “And I am beyond excited that our family is expanding to include you lovely young women. I couldn’t ask for more.”

“We love you, Mom,” Dean blurts out when she’s finished.

Mary smiles and touches Dean’s jaw tenderly. “I love you too, sweetie.”

Sam clears his throat and raises his glass. “Cheers,” he says, reaching across the table to clink glasses with everyone.

That night, Dean and Claire return to their foreign house, which is a mere ten minutes down the road from his mom’s. 

Dean is starting to believe that he actually was granted some wish, a wish he hadn’t even articulated within the sanctity of his own mind: to live a normal life. With Mom alive. With Claire. This part is especially baffling to him. Out of all the girls – Cassie, the blonde truck stop waitresses, Jo, et cetera – it’s Claire that he’s with. 

And it feels wildly easy, like this was how it was always supposed to be. After they cross the threshold to the home they share together, Dean closes the door and pins her against it, drawing her into an impulsive kiss.

“Wha’s that for?” she mumbles into his lips.

He pulls back to look at her, her beautiful eyes glinting up at him like sapphires. “I’m not allowed to kiss my own fiancée?”

She smiles hesitantly, presses her lips back to his, and wraps her arms around his neck. He pulls her up and her long legs encircle his waist like it’s muscle memory. Dean briefly thinks that he wouldn’t be able to feel what he’s feeling if this were just a dream. She is solid, wound tightly around him. He carries her upstairs and lays her horizontally along the length of their plush, king-sized bed. 

They tussle in the sheets for a while. She knows his body with a familiarity that he’s never experienced before and has shed all the vestiges of shyness that she had the first time. When they’re done, Claire lays her head on his sternum and measures the distance between his heartbeats. His arm is wrapped around her and his hand is trying absently to untangle the knots in her hair. 

He asks, “Tell me about how we got together.”

He can feel Claire’s forehead crease into a frown against his skin. “I know I know,” he says. “But just humor me. I wanna hear it from your perspective.”

“Well,” she sighs tiredly, “we met when I was a junior when you came to visit Sam. He was shocked to see you. Then, we kept in touch here and there, but didn’t really get together until after I graduated. We did long distance for a little bit, and eventually you convinced me to move here. The rest is history.”

“How’d I convince you to leave California to move to Lawrence?”

“I dunno, I think it had something to do with the fact that I was madly in love with you. I tried to get you to come to California, but you didn’t want to be that far away from your parents.”

He looks down at the pointed tip of her nose and the dark spread of lashes. The word ‘love’ hits him in the gut like a sucker punch and makes it impossible for him to fall asleep, even after she has totally conked out. He carefully extracts himself from her embrace, smirking to himself as he sees a thin rivulet of drool making its way from the corner of her mouth to his bare chest.

He treads downstairs and turns on the TV. What comes on is a news story about a plane crash. The flight number is one that he’s all too familiar with – it’s the one that he and Sam prevented last year. It strikes him, then. There’s no one else filling in the gaps he’s left by not being a hunter. Just senseless death that isn’t stopped. 

So things aren’t predestined, after all. Not that he really ever believed that, but he’d flirted with the notion after the rapist impaling incident. 

He turns off the TV and scratches the back of his neck guiltily. He’d always known this was the tradeoff he was making. But it’s more painful now, knowing exactly what the trade is. He almost thinks the death toll could be worth it. He shakes the notion from his head quickly. No, he resolves. Tomorrow, he’ll start looking for some answers.

Claire and Jess spend the following day going on some sort of shopping spree, which leaves Dean wide open to make his way to the local college. He finds a professor who specializes in Middle Eastern studies and starts questioning him about djinns. The conversation doesn’t prove very fruitful, but something unusual happens when Dean makes his way to the Impala to head back to his mom’s house. He sees the spectral figure of a girl in white, and it fills him with a niggling sense of unease.

He pushes it out of his mind as he drives. When he arrives, Sam is sitting on the couch. He plops beside him with a shiteating grin.

“What’s gotten into you?” Sam asks warily.

Dean hands him a beer and unscrews the cap on one of his own. “Life’s good,” he states simply. “We’re engaged to best friends, you’re gonna be a lawyer. I’m just happy for you is all, Sammy.”

“Since when do you call me Sammy? Are you on something?”

“What? No.”

“You’re acting like you’re on molly or something.”

“You know I don’t mess around with that crap.”

“Do I? Dean, come on. We don’t talk outside of holidays. I have no clue what you do in your spare time.”

“We don’t? Well, I mean, we should. You’re my brother.”

“You’re my brother?” he mimics, placing the beer bottle on the coffee table.

Dean laughs uncomfortably. “Yeah.”

“You know, that’s what you said when you snaked my ATM card, or when you bailed on my graduation to go hook up with Claire in the Impala, or when you slept with my prom date. On prom night, no less,” he reminds him.

 “Yeah, that does kinda sound like me. Well, hey man, I'm sorry about all that.”

“No that, look, that's all right man, I-I just... You know I'm not asking you to change. I-I just, uh... I don't know, I... guess we just don't really have anything in common. You know?”

He stares at his brother and tries to blink away his incredulity. “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Yes we do. Yes we do.”

“What?”

“Hunting.”

“I’ve never been hunting in my life, Dean.”

“Yeah, well, then we should go sometime. I... I think you'd be great at it.”

Sam furrows his brow in total confusion and stands. “You should lay off the booze.” 

He walks into the other room and Dean casts his gaze out the window. The grass is looking a bit overgrown. He gets the mower out of the garage and starts cutting it.

Back at home, Claire is fixing them dinner. 

“Whatcha makin’, princess?” he asks from the doorway.

She glances over her shoulder and replies, “My famous lasagna.”

He walks up behind her and weaves his arms around her waist. He feels a fluttering in his stomach as she leans back against him, and he watches her stirring a pot of bright red sauce from over her head. It already smells delicious.

“How was your day?” she asks.

“Sammy and I… We don’t get along,” he remarks distantly.

Claire’s eyebrows draw together. “Did something happen?”

“No, it’s just… We’re not close.”

“Well, you don’t really ever see each other,” she reasons. “With them all the way out in California.”

He rests his chin on the top of her head and lets out a contemplative, “Hm.”

“Did you ask him yet?”

“Ask him what?”

“To be your best man. I asked Jess to be my maid of honor today while we were out.” Even though he can’t see her, he can sense her smiling.

“No,” he says slowly. “But I will. I’ll fix things with him.”

Claire sets the wooden spoon down by the side of the stove and turns into his embrace.

“Maybe we can convince them to move out here once he graduates,” she says.

“I’d like that,” he replies. He smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. “How’d I manage to reel in a catch like you?” 

“I’m a hopeless romantic,” she jokes.

“Maybe your standards are too low,” he jokes back.

“Don’t say that,” she admonishes lightly.

They break apart and she continues preparing the food. Dean moves through the house in search of a computer. As he’s looking, a flash of white catches his eye from out the window. The woman from earlier is walking across his lawn. He starts towards the door, but when he rounds the corner, she’s gone.

Eventually, he finds a laptop, but it’s dead. He roots through some desk drawers looking for the charger, before moving to the closet. What he sees when he opens it gives him a ghastly fright: several female corpses hanging from the bar. He turns around to see the flickering apparition of a woman with a serious head wound behind him. He flies back around towards the closet to find that it was a hallucination. 

Or, he thinks, this is the hallucination. That was reality.

He pops the laptop open and plugs it in. He opens Google and begins typing in the recent cases that he and Sam worked. All of them ended in tragedy, confirming his earlier suspicions about the plane crash. It wasn’t just the crash that they failed to prevent. All those lives they’d saved – it never happened. 

Dean feels a wave of anguish wash over him. He knows what he needs to do. He knows that the morally right decision is. So why is it so hard?

Late that night, Dean sneaks back into his childhood home. Sam attacks him with a baseball bat, but he’s able to hand his ass to him pretty easily. He thinks he’s there to steal from their own mother, and the mere thought fills him with revulsion. Dean is able to grit his teeth through the interaction convincingly enough, though. It’s easier now that he’s realized that this is not in fact a wish come true.

To his surprise, as he’s about to take off towards Illinois, Sam jumps into the car with him. He drives through the night to make it to Joliet, and on the way he tries to explain to Sam what’s going on. Sam can’t wrap his head around it, of course.

When they arrive, he tells him to keep behind him. Worry for his brother is a constant, animal-instinct reflex for him. It doesn’t matter that this is supposed to be his fantasy, and in his fantasy, Sam most certainly cannot die.

He knows he’s cracked the case when he poses the idea of killing himself and his mom, Claire, and Jess materialize alongside Sam in the warehouse. Each takes their turn trying to talk him off the ledge. 

Sam says, “We’re happy here, Dean. You, me, Claire, and Jess – we can raise our kids together. Mom will get to have grandkids.”

“I can’t stay here,” he grinds out. “I’ll die out there. The djinn’ll drain the life from me in a couple of days.”

Mary steps forward and takes his face in her hands. “But in here, with us, it'll feel like years. Like a lifetime. I promise. No more pain. Or fear. Just love and comfort. And safety. Dean, stay with us. Get some rest.”

Dean’s eyes and throat burn as he beats back tears. He knows it’s not real, but even the illusion of his mother is too much to take. He turns away from her hand and she steps back.

Now, fake Claire steps forward to take her turn at convincing him. Unlike the others, she has real emotion etched into her face, tears racing down her rosy cheeks. She kisses him and he can taste the salt on his lips. 

“I love you, Dean,” she chokes out. “Please. We're supposed to get married in a few months.”

His stomach twists.

“I want to stay,” he confesses, screwing his eyes shut and leaning his forehead against hers wearily. He’s not sure that he has the strength to do it. It would be so easy to just give up. But he knows this isn’t what the real Claire and Sam would want for him. They’re still alive, out there in the real world. His eyes snap open and he pulls away. “But I can’t. People will die.”

Sam tries again. “Why is it our job to save everyone? Haven't we done enough? I'm begging you. Give me the knife.”

“I’m sorry,” he murmurs before thrusting the knife into his gut.

He comes-to back in the real world, strung up and stuck with a needle like some sort of hog in a slaughterhouse. He can feel the life leaching out of his body. Sam is there, prodding him and trying to get him to wake up.

“Thank god. I thought I lost you for a second,” he says.

“You almost did.” He means this in more ways than one.

After, Dean doesn’t tell Sam the full story. How can he? How can he tell him that he nearly fell in love with a very real, flesh-and-blood person during a djinn-induced acid trip? That fact – the fact that Claire is still walking this earth – lessens the blow of losing his mother for the second time. It plants a seed that’s something like hope, but not exactly. The sheer confusion of the whole ordeal makes his head spin. Was that what things would be like if he just let it happen? The question haunts him like a vengeful spirit. 

Needless to say, he leaves the experience in Joliet feeling insanely softhearted towards Claire. And it’s that weakness that possesses him to send her a bouquet of roses, hydrangeas, and carnations on graduation weekend. There’s a note attached, but it’s not signed by him. It says simply:

Congratulations, Saint Claire

Chapter Text

Graduation weekend is made all the sweeter for Claire after how vehemently she fought to stay on course. Her entire family comes out to celebrate and help her move into her new apartment in Seattle. She has about a week-long gap to get settled before she starts her new job at the same company where she interned last summer. 

The weekend is such a whirlwind of activities that she hardly has time to process the mysterious bouquet of flowers that arrives at her dorm. It’s not so mysterious, in reality. When she reads the card, she knows they could have come from only one of two people: Sam or Dean. Or perhaps it’s from both of them. 

She’s surprised that they’re still thinking about her and feels a little tug in her chest as she guiltily remembers that she still has their numbers blocked. The flowers must be a sign that they’re doing well, though, she reasons.

That’s part of why what happens to her on the first night in her apartment in Seattle is such a colossal shock. As she’s unpacking boxes in her bedroom and hanging up her clothes in the closet, she’s hit with a brain-splitting migraine. Claire is not prone to getting headaches, and she initially fears she’s having some sort of aneurysm.

But then, words begin to take shape like they’re being branded into the backs of her eyes. Through the blinding pain, they’re so jumbled that she can’t make any sense of them. She collapses into her desk chair and opens her laptop, typing them in as they come through. Eventually, once she’s finished, the agony dissipates and she reads what has burst forth from her fingertips. 

It describes a scene of Sam getting stabbed in the back in a ghost town. The moment she registers the content of what she’s written, she realizes it’s some new supernatural symptom. She has no idea if it has already happened, is currently happening, or will happen in the future. The only way to know is to call Sam.

She quickly finds her phone and unblocks his number. She calls him three times, no answer. She bites her lip as she contemplates what to do next. The natural next step is to call Dean, so this is what she does. He answers after only one ring, so quickly she can’t imagine that he even had time to see who was calling.

“Hello?” comes his gruff rumble of voice, still familiar after all this time.

“Hey, it’s Claire,” she says. “I tried calling Sam-”

“Sam’s MIA right now. I thought maybe he was calling-”

“Something bad is happening. I don’t know if it’s happened yet, or will happen. I had a vision.”

“A vision?”

“Yeah, Sam’s in trouble. I saw him getting stabbed by someone named Jake.”

“Could you tell where he was?”

“Yeah. Maybe vision is the wrong word. It was like… a bunch of words flooding in. He’s in Cold Oak, South Dakota.”

“Okay,” he says. “I’m on my way.”

“Can you call me when you find him? Just so I know everything is okay?”

“Yeah,” he agrees before abruptly hanging up.

Claire combs her fingers through her hair anxiously. Her adrenaline and cortisol have peaked due to the pain and worry, and she feels restless. She stands and starts pacing the room, her brain working to process what has just happened.

She had a vision. This new development is inescapable. The prayers, the immunity to possession – those things were intangible and almost theoretical. This was something active, gripping her like a vise. Had the headache not produced a vision, she’d be straight on her way to the ER to get an MRI. 

Why now? Is it some message from God, warning her of Sam’s impending demise? Alerting her to the fact that it has already happened?

She feels panicked tears rushing to the surface. There’s a knock at her door, and she sniffs and quickly scrubs them away with the heel of her palm. 

“Come in,” she calls, voice cracking slightly. She realizes that her laptop is still open and slams it shut.

Abby enters the room and immediately her dark brows draw together in concern. “Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, fine. Just feeling a little bittersweet about leaving college, is all.”

Abby walks over and crouches to give her a hug around the shoulders. Claire realizes that she’s white-knuckling her phone and lets it drop onto the desk to reciprocate the embrace.

“I know how you feel. At least we still have each other,” she soothes. “Plus, with all of us living here together, it will be like we never left.”

If this were what Claire was truly upset about, she would have a fair point. They’re living in a four-bedroom house with two other friends from college, Sophie and Blake.

“I came in here to see if you wanted to watch a movie with us,” Abby continues.

“Sure,” she agrees. “I’ll be out in a minute.”

Dean doesn’t get to Cold Oak in time. 

Had Claire called him moments sooner, maybe he would have. Had the Impala been able to drive faster, maybe he would have. Maybe he wouldn’t have had to cradle his brother’s limp, too-big body and watch the life leave his eyes. Maybe he wouldn’t have had to drag his dead weight to that filthy mattress, leaving a sticky trail of blood in the dust along the way. 

Maybe things could have been different. Maybe he could have saved him. Maybe he wouldn’t have had to make this choice.

But in the end, it isn’t a choice at all. It’s survival. It’s not a crossroads, it’s the only path forward.

Two days pass without any word from Dean. Eventually, Claire texts him:

Everything ok?

About an hour passes. She putters around her room, trying to find something to distract herself. Finally, her phone chimes:

Ya Sams fine

Relief lifts the crushing boulder of stress that’s sitting on her lungs. She lets out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding in.

She doesn’t know what to say in response, so she doesn’t respond.

However, it’s not long after this exchange that she feels another spike of pain begin to percolate through her head. Soon, the force of it has become like an ice pick straight through her frontal lobe. She feels her way to her laptop. She can barely open her eyes, and when she does, she sees a white aura around the objects in the room.

More words pour out of her. Some sort of gate being opened in Jasper, Wyoming. It’s disconnected from the previous vision, picking up from a completely different point with none of the blanks filled in. It leaves her with a feeling, though. A feeling that can’t be described as anything other than impending doom.

She quickly grabs her phone and calls Dean.

“Hello?” he answers. His voice sounds different to her, strange in some way that she can’t quite place.

“Dean. I had another vision. A gate is going to be opened in Jasper, Wyoming. I saw you and Sam there. Sam – how is Sam?”

“Sam’s alright. He was hurt, but Bobby patched him up.”

Claire pauses. That doesn’t sound right. The wound she wrote about, it was fatal. She opens her mouth to speak, but he starts talking again.

“I know about Jasper. We’re headed there now.”

“Be careful.”

“We always are,” he replies. He’s trying to be snarky, but the delivery is flat. 

“Who was that?” Sam asks when he hangs up.

“Claire. She’s started having visions. This one was about Jasper. Last one was about Cold Oak. That’s how we were able to find you.”

“Visions?” Sam asks in shock.

“Yeah. She’s seeing the future.” 

Sam’s features contort to a look of concern and disbelief. “But she’s… She’s not one of Azazel’s gifted children, or else she would have been there.”

“She must be something else.”

After, when they finally kill Azazel, Sam is able to piece what happened together fairly quickly. Dean curses his brother for being so clever, but he should have expected that it wouldn’t take long for him to figure it out.

“One of the conditions is that we can’t try to get out of it,” he tells him defeatedly. 

“That’s bullshit and you know it, Dean. How could you do this to me? How could you make me live with this?”

“I had to, Sammy. There was no other way.”

“After what Dad did for you, that guilt that you’ve been holding. How could you put me through the same exact thing?”

“I told you, it was the only way. It’s my job to look out for you, to keep you safe.”

“Then what the hell is my job?” he erupts. “We will figure a way out of this. We will. We have to. We’ll find the demon that has the contract, we’ll kill it-”

“Maybe,” he cuts him off. “But promise me one thing. Do not call Claire. Do not tell her what’s going on, do not ask her to pray for a way out of it.”

“Why not? You said she has visions. What if she figures it out on her own? She would want to help,” he insists.

“Then she figures it out. But I do not want her getting mixed up in this if I can help it. This is serious shit. You heard Ellen. They’re building an army. They might not be able to possess her, but there are worse things. Being tortured and killed, for one. And if they find out that she can see the future, that puts her squarely in their crosshairs.”

And not only that, he thinks, it would only upset her to know that he’s on death row.

“What if it’s the only way?” Sam presses.

“We’ll cross that bridge if we get to it. We have a year.” He digs his phone out of his pocket as he drives. “I’m gonna call her and tell her that she needs to lay low.”

Sam swallows, but nods obediently. He crosses his arms and stares at the footwell as the phone rings.

“Hello?” she answers urgently.

“Hey,” he says. “I have you on speaker. We’re in the car. Sam’s here, too.”

“Hey,” he chimes in.

“Are you guys okay?”

“Yeah we’re alright. We killed Yellow-Eyes.”

“That’s great!”

“But a bunch of demons got through the gate. Hundreds. Thousands, even.”

“That’s not great.”

“No, it’s not. It means that we’re gonna have to be a hellova lot more careful. If they find out that you can see the future, that you’ve helped us get ahead… Well, that could be very bad. Sam and I are the only ones who know, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. We need to keep it that way. I don’t know what kind of resources these hell-bitches have, so unless you see something really important, it’s probably best if you keep it to yourself.”

“How will I know if it’s important or not?”

“I’m talking life and death type visions here.”

“Okay…” she says slowly.

“And one more thing. We need to have a code word if one of us is compromised.”

“What do you mean?”

“Say a demon’s got me tied up somewhere and calls you and tries to trick you into saying something. I’ll say the code word, and then you’ll know to make something up.”

“Okay, so what’s the code word?”

“Funkytown.”

“Funkytown?” she repeats incredulously. 

“It has to be something you can work into conversation easily enough, but not something so common that you might say it by accident,” Sam interjects.

“Okay,” she repeats with a little laugh. 

Dean brings the conversation back to a more somber note. “This might be the last time we talk for a while,” he says. “You need to be vigilant. Don’t let your guard down. Be cautious of new people. Test them with holy water. Set a salt line when you go to sleep at night.”

“Okay, Dad.”

“I’m serious. You can always call us if something happens, but the best offense is a good defense.”

Dean’s obvious concern is able to instill some fear in her, but she still feels somewhat removed from the comfort of her own home.

“Okay,” she says for what feels like the millionth time. There’s a lull, and she can sense that he’s about to hang up. Dean has a habit of ending their conversations without saying goodbye. “Wait,” she goes on. “Thank you for the flowers.”

A pause stretches on like she’s dropped a grenade.

“Don’ mention it,” he says finally, and it seems like he actually wishes she hadn’t. He hangs up before she can say anything else, leaving her confused on the other line. 

In the Impala, Sam looks at Dean in surprise and bewilderment. A stream of questions gushes from his mouth. “You sent her flowers? What? Why? When did you have time to do that? When have you ever sent anyone flowers?”

Dean fidgets in discomfort, pursing his lips and staring straight through the windshield. “Before you went and got yourself kidnapped,” he replies, electing to only answer one of his questions. 

The why is more complex, more loaded. Telling him that it was for her graduation is a nonanswer because that’s not what he’s asking. He’d long since decided that there is no way in hell he’s going to tell him the truth about the djinn’s trance, so this one is coming with him to the grave.

Sam doesn’t bother to push it because he can see that Dean’s not going to budge. Instead, he’s left to make his own assumptions about why. He doesn’t need to be a rocket scientist to do a simple calculus: something is going on between them. There is some unexplained connection. Maybe between the three of them, maybe just between Dean and Claire. Why else would she be having visions about them? How else could she have a sixth sense about Dean being in that coma?

There is a connection beyond that, too. A connection he observed since the day they met, to his prolonged vexation. Dean likes her. Romantically. Not just as some random fling.

He has watched his brother blow through women like chainsmokers blow through packs of cigarettes for as long as he can remember. That’s why he didn’t want him anywhere near his friend in the first place. But now, he can see that this is different. Different in a way that he will probably be too stubborn to acknowledge until the day he dies. And that day is fast approaching.

Chapter Text

11 MONTHS LATER

Nearly a year goes by with only two more visions. Claire, Dean, and Sam don’t talk, so she has no idea what is going on. All she knows from the visions is that they’re hunting the Seven Deadly Sins and a demon named Lilith who’s trying to bring on the Apocalypse. 

Most importantly, she doesn’t know about Dean’s deal. That fact alone is perhaps the reason why she’s able to maintain a sense of normalcy in her life in Seattle.

Sam, on the other hand, is falling apart at the seams. He’s been subjected to a whole manner of torture this past year, including but not limited to having to watch his brother die every day for over six months. He is getting desperate. Desperate enough to call Claire and ask for her help. 

He’s spent a lot of time trying to understand his brother’s mindset, and why he seems to care so little about his own life. Even once he’s literally inside his head, he still can’t make sense of it. He tries to ask him about what he saw when they were using African Dreamroot – him and Claire in a house together, cuddled up on a sofa watching TV. Something so normal and domestic it makes his mind reel. He knows Dean would never admit that this is what he wanted, but seeing with it his own two eyes confirms his suspicions. 

Maybe that’s part of why he calls her, too. 

When the call comes in, she’s working at her desk. Her office has an open floor plan, so she isn’t able to answer him right away. He almost loses hope before she’s able to duck into an empty conference room and pick up.

“Sam?”

“Hey, Claire.”

There’s a heavy pause, and she can almost sense him second guessing himself.

“What’s up?”

“I, uh, we need your help. This is a Hail Mary, but, well… Dean did something stupid. Really stupid. Last year.”

She sinks into a seat at the conference table, steeling herself for what’s going to come next.

“After Cold Oak, he made a deal with a demon to… to bring me back from the dead,” he continues, voice breaking. “His deal. It’s about to come due.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means he’s going to die. He’s going to die, and his soul is going to be dragged to Hell. Not only will he be gone, but he’ll be suffering for all of eternity. All because of me.”

Claire doesn’t realize she’s crying until she sees a dribble of water fall on the table. She quickly runs the edge of her thumb underneath her eyes to try to prevent her mascara from streaking.

“What-what can I do?” she manages.

“We need you to try what you did last time. Try praying again.”

“Okay,” she says slowly. That’s easy enough. “But what if that doesn’t work?”

“We’re running out of options. I’ll try anything at this point.”

“When exactly are they coming to collect?”

“One week.”

“Should I… should I try to meet you?”

“No,” he answers quickly. “It’s too dangerous.”

She is silent for another moment. 

Sam goes on, “Is there… is there anything you want me to tell him?”

She feels physically ill at the thought. What is there to say? I’m sorry? No. A sharp pang of rage rises in her throat like acid. How could he be stupid enough to do something like this? How could he be so selfish? 

“He shouldn’t have done it,” she says bitterly. She quickly corrects, “Not that-not that I’m not glad he brought you back. But the cost-”

“I know,” he interrupts, saving her the trouble of explaining what she means. And he does. He feels the exact same way. 

“Keep me… keep me updated,” she says.

“I will. Goodbye, Claire.”

She hangs up the phone and stands, smoothing out her top and running a hand through her hair. She tries to grab a quick glimpse of herself in the window to make sure she’s presentable enough to face her coworkers. 

On the way home, Claire stops at St. Joseph’s church. She figures if she wants to make her prayers count, this is the best way to do it.

She slides into a middle pew, setting her backpack down on the seat beside her. She kneels and folds her hands in front of her, like she used to do when she was a little girl. She stares up at the large, round, stained glass window where the crucifix would usually be, searching for something. 

“Please,” she begs, her voice barely a whisper. “If you can hear me, please. Don’t let him die. Not like this.” 

She bites back another surge of tears stabbing her eyes. Her throat feels hot, like she swallowed embers. She clears it and stands, wiping her nose. She’s supposed to go out to dinner with Fletcher tonight. If she leaves now, she’ll still be able to change first.

A few days later, the vision hits. Dean being torn to ribbons by some unseen force. A blood-soaked, violent death. The force of it causes bile to rise in her esophagus and she retches into her trash can. As she writes it out, she suddenly feels glad that she only sees words and not images. It’s a horrible way to die. Worse than what she saw of Sam’s death, by a mile. And he’s scared and screaming and-

Whatever Dean was to her once, he isn’t anymore, not after all this time. She hasn’t seen him in person since she left Bobby’s house the summer after her junior year of college. That seems like a decade ago, even though it was only a couple of years.

She has a boyfriend now, and the residual memory of what she once felt for Dean is flaring and causing confusion to resurface in her brain.

She still prays for him, though. Every night. 

She calls Sam and relays the horror of what she’s seen to him. He takes the information in calmly, pensively. Then he says, “Do you think this could mean that the prayers aren’t working?”

“I-I don’t know,” she stammers.

But she keeps trying.

One more whole week goes by before she hears from Sam again. The day it was supposed to happen, Claire called him nonstop. She probably called over a hundred times. Nothing.

She doesn’t take the overdue silence as a good sign, but tries to hold onto a shred of hope. God saved him once. She has to have faith that he’ll do it again.

When Sam finally does call, it’s a Sunday evening and she’s at Fletcher’s apartment. A high-rise downtown that he lives in by himself with a wall of windows overlooking the city. Mercifully, they just finished a run and he’s in the shower.

“He’s gone. I couldn’t stop it,” is all Sam can get out. He sounds shattered, delirious. 

An errant sob claws up her throat and she scrambles to figure out a way to leave before Fletcher tries to ask her what’s wrong. She pads into the fogged-up bathroom. Through the steam, he can’t see her.

“I’m not feeling great,” she says, modulating her tone carefully. “I think I’m gonna head home.”

“Is it from the run?” he calls to her. 

“No, I feel like I’m coming down with a cold.”

“Are you sure you don't wanna stay? I could go get you some ramen and meds, if you need.”

“That’s sweet, but no – I’d rather just be in my own bed.”

“Okay, well just wait a minute so I can say goodbye.” 

She hears him turn the faucet off and begins to panic. 

“I don’t want to get you sick,” she lies, backing out of the room in a hurry. 

She jogs out of the unit and into the elevator, shifting her weight from one foot to the other nervously as she descends to the lobby. By the time she’s out of the front door of the high-rise, she’s sprinting. She’s afraid that if she stops moving, she’ll completely break down. So, she runs the whole four miles back to her house without stopping.

By the time she gets there, she’s panting, sweating, and absolutely exhausted. Her heart is hammering in her chest like it’s going to explode. Each beat pounds in her throat, making her feel dizzy and out of control. 

By some miracle, she makes it up to her room without encountering any of her roommates. Once the door is closed, the sobs come crashing over her, so powerful that she can hardly breathe. She feels like she’s drowning. 

Her first instinct is to curse God. Curse him for letting this happen, for not heeding her prayers. She can’t think of anything else to do. Why give her these visions if there’s nothing she can do to stop them? Just to torture her?

Eventually, she’s able to catch her breath and the sobs ebb from thundering waves to gentler ripples. And then, she just cries softly until she drifts off into a fitful sleep. 

Her alarm wakes her up the next morning to a damp, tearstained pillowcase and several texts from Fletcher asking her how she’s feeling. Right now, she mainly feels dehydrated, like a dried-out sponge. She looks in the mirror to see that her eyes are nearly swollen shut from all the weeping, and she wonders how she’s going to explain it to her coworkers. Allergies, maybe. 

She beelines it to the bathroom to take a much-needed shower and get a cold compress to attempt to reduce the puffiness. 

As she stands under the hot jet of water, she thinks about what she’s going to tell Fletcher. Nothing, she eventually decides. What would she even tell him? That the guy she lost her virginity to died? That her friend died? But then, he’ll start to ask questions about the friend. Better not to say anything at all.  

She and Fletcher have been dating for around six months, and things are starting to get more serious. They met at a Stanford alumni mixer in downtown Seattle, and she was drawn in by his curly mop of chestnut hair and warm brown eyes. Even though he’s thirty, he still has a boyish charm about him, but without the immaturity of guys her own age. He works for a VC firm and is all and all very kind and respectable. 

So, of course he’s going to be worried about her if he sees her like this. Which is why she has to hide it. Fake it till you make it.

The main challenge is going to be not thinking about Dean. Every time she does, every time the thought of how he died crosses her mind, her eyes go misty and a searing lump begins to form in her throat. Even now, as she’s trying to get ready for work, it’s a struggle. She briefly entertains the idea that maybe she should take the day off, but ultimately decides that it’s better to have the distraction.

The silent moments are the ones in which self-destructive thoughts breach her mind. Not just about how Dean died, but about what they could have been to one another, but never had the chance to be. Thoughts of what might have been, if she’d acted differently. If she hadn’t stormed out of Bobby’s that summer. Or maybe, if the timing had just been different. She has to mourn what was and could have been, too. 

She’ll never know what could have been. And she has to accept that she’ll never know, or else it’s going to ruin what she already has.

Chapter Text

FOUR MONTHS LATER

Four more months go by, and the pain begins to numb from something like a raw, festering wound to a half-healed broken limb. Claire’s heart still clenches every time she thinks about him, but those moments are becoming fewer.

She has Fletcher to keep her mind off of it, who she thinks she might love. Or will love, in the future, when enough time has passed that she can move on. She can tell she’s on the precipice, like she was that one time, before-

She pushes away such foolish thoughts. She tries to forget how quickly she reached that point with Dean, and how much slower it seems to be happening with Fletcher. She tries not to think about what that means. She tries, but she doesn’t always succeed.

So, although she has faint doubts swirling in the back of her mind, she decides it’s time for him to meet her family. It’s overdue, really, since she’s long since met his parents, older sister, brother-in-law, niece, and nephew.

Fletcher Gordon is from an ultra wealthy family in Santa Barbara. His parents live in a mansion near the beach, and when she first saw it, she was completely awestruck. It was a beautiful, Spanish style house with a pool and mature olive trees on the property. She grew up around McMansions, but this was unlike anything she had ever seen before. It reminded her of what she imagines European estates are like, though she wouldn’t know because she’s never been to Europe.

Fletcher’s parents are ten years older than her own and already retired, which means they have tons of time for their children and grandchildren. They like her, or at least Fletcher tells her they do. She knows they think she’s young – maybe too young, given their poorly cloaked desire to have more grandchildren. 

Part of why she’s put off introducing Fletcher to her family is because she worries it’s only going to complicate things between them. She is from much more modest means than he is. Her parents’ house, though she loves it, is not nearly as comfortable and well-appointed as his. 

These feelings of insufficiency have haunted her since she was a freshman at Stanford. She is no stranger to rubbing shoulders with children of billionaires and celebrities, but the issue is much closer to home, now – literally and figuratively. She doesn’t want him to think that she’s with him for the wrong reasons because she truly isn’t.

He has never made her feel inadequate. Quite the opposite, in fact. He often comments on how impressed he is with her success and laments how easy everything was for him due to his upbringing. He has long been asking to take a trip to her childhood home to meet her family, and finally, during the long weekend, she obliges him.

They’re walking through the Seattle airport as she briefs him on what to expect. “My parents are probably going to make you stay in my brothers’ room,” she tells him. “They’re kind of old school with that stuff.”

“Okay, that’s fine. But where are they going to sleep?”

“Ryan’s at college so you won’t meet him, and they’ll probably have Charlie sleep on the couch.”

“That seems kind of silly, no? Why would I take over his room when I could just stay with you?”

She shrugs. “Some of the stuff they do makes no sense.”

The flight is around four and a half hours. Now that she has an actual salary, she can’t remember why she ever decided to drive this route instead of flying. For the most part, it’s pretty uneventful; she watches a movie on the tiny screen in front of her and tries to take a nap. 

That is, it’s uneventful until she feels another vision coming on when they are thirty minutes from landing. Thus far, Claire has been fortunate with the timing of her visions. They’ve only struck when she was in the safety of her own apartment. She realizes now how grateful she should have been for that fact. 

Her nails dig into the armrest as she grips it as though her life depends on it. Fletcher notices that her eyes are screwed shut and immediately asks what’s wrong.

“I’m just… getting a headache,” she manages. She folds at the waist, reaching for her backpack under the seat.

“What are you doing?” he asks, trying to figure out a way to help her.

“I’m just… trying to… get my laptop.”

“Why?”

Words burst forth from her mouth before she has the chance to consider them, some sort of self-preservation instinct kicking in. “I need something to take my mind off of it,” she says.

He helps her unzip the backpack and hands her the laptop. She opens it and angles her body away from him so that he can’t see what she’s typing.

“You don’t want me to see?” he asks, his thick brows knit in confusion.

“I’m working on a new product launch. It’s not public knowledge yet and if people find out it could impact the stock price.”

“You know I wouldn’t tell anyone,” he says with a little laugh. 

“I know. Just being extra careful with all these people on this flight.”

“They really scared you with that insider trading training, huh?” he comments lightly.

Through the mindbending pain, she’s barely able to spare him a fatigued smile. Thankfully, it subsides before the stewardess comes to ask her to put her computer away. She has to close her laptop before reading back what she’s written.

“Do you usually get headaches like that?” Fletcher asks her after a moment.

“Sometimes. This one probably had something to do with the altitude,” she fibs.

The chaotic shuffle of landing, piling into her mom’s minivan, and driving almost two hours from Chicago to Pontiac allows Claire to nearly forget about the vision by the time they get to her parents’ house. She’ll check back on it when she has a private moment later that night, resolving to give her full attention to ensuring a smooth meeting between Fletcher and her family.

It goes well, of course. Fletcher has that Southern California easygoing way about him that seems to make everyone like him. She’s pretty sure he could make conversation with a mailbox, if he needed to. Plus, her parents are on their best behavior, their midwestern hospitality on full display. The house is spotless when they walk in and warm chocolate chip cookies are on the counter.

“I like him,” her mother tells her when they have a moment alone together while prepping dinner. “He seems very calm.”

This causes Claire to laugh, though she supposes calm is an apt way to describe him.

Later, while getting ready for bed, she and Fletcher stand shoulder-to-shoulder in front of the double vanity of the shared bathroom as they brush their teeth. Through the foamy toothpaste, he gives her a wide, dimpled grin and mumbles, “I think that went well.”

That’s another thing she likes about him – his positivity. 

“Yeah, it did,” she agrees with a smile of her own. 

When they’re done, she gives him a soft kiss on the lips before retreating to her bedroom. By now, it’s after midnight, but she’s still wide awake on West Coast time. She opens her laptop and pulls up the document she wrote on the plane.

What she reads nearly causes her heart to stop beating in her ribcage. A molten heat of fear and disbelief pours into her body like lava, all the way to her shaking, tingling fingertips. 

Tomorrow, Dean will be saved. Dean will be alive. Right here in Pontiac.

It’s just a coincidence, surely, she tries to convince herself. But what if it isn’t? What are the odds? It’s too much to ignore.

Words like fate and destiny never meant much to her. But what else do you call it when you’re shown an immutable future?

She calls Sam, keeping her voice low so that she doesn’t wake the rest of the house. He doesn’t answer, so she leaves a voicemail:

“Sam, it’s Claire. You won’t believe what I just saw. Dean – he’s going to be resurrected tomorrow. Saved, it says. I don’t know how, but it’s happening in Pontiac. I’m in Pontiac at my family’s house right now. I-I can go pick him up.”

She stops herself there. But how? How can she go pick him up? She has several hours to think through a plan. Tomorrow is Saturday. That works in her favor since she can probably borrow one of her parents’ cars. Where will she bring him? Maybe to a motel or something to get cleaned up? He will be covered in dirt. He’ll need a new set of clothes. Ryan’s clothes would probably fit him. She just needs to sneak in there when Fletcher and Charlie aren’t around. 

Fletcher. That presents a wrinkle in her plan. What’s he going to do while she’s gone? She can’t just ditch him all day. He barely knows her family. She’ll have to be quick, she decides. She’ll have to make it seem like she’s just running an errand.

It doesn’t take long for Claire to form these plans, and when she tries to fall asleep, she can’t. Laying her childhood bed, staring at the white ceiling of her salmon-colored room – it feels akin to the urgency of waiting for Christmas morning. There is a fluttering in the hollow of her stomach that can only be described as excitement. And that’s normal, isn’t it? To be excited to see a friend you haven’t seen in years, who you thought was dead? It’s normal, even though everything else about this situation is definitely not.

The next morning when Claire descends the stairs, she sees the back of her dad’s salt-and-pepper head hunched over the kitchen island with a cup of coffee and the newspaper.

“Hey, Dad,” she says. “Is it okay if I borrow your truck? I need to run an errand.”

“Sure, what do you need it for?” 

“I just need to run to Walgreens to get some girl stuff,” she says cryptically.

“Oh, okay. The keys are by the door.”

“Thanks. I’m gonna let Fletcher know.”

“Don’t be long. Your mom’s at the store. She wanted to make a whole pancake breakfast for you guys.”

“I won’t,” she says sweetly. She sprints back up the stairs and knocks on the door to her brothers’ room, where Fletcher is sleeping. 

“Mornin’,” he greets with a groggy smile. He’s in Ryan’s twin bed, and Charlie’s sits empty about seven feet away from him in the navy blue room. He stretches his arms and scratches the back of his wild, curly head. She spots the thin, leather bracelet she gave him as a Christmas gift – the one that she carved an anti-possession symbol into with a steak knife – around his left wrist.

“Good morning,” she says fondly. “Sorry to wake you. I’m going to go run a quick errand at Walgreens, do you mind?”

“No, ‘course not. You want me to come?”

“No, no need. Why don’t you go back to sleep for a little bit? I’m not sure why I’m up so early with the time difference and everything.”

She starts towards the dresser near the door, which has a massive array of sports trophies on it. “Charlie asked me to grab some clothes for him,” she lies, rifling through the drawers. She grabs a few of Ryan’s things and holds them in a neatly folded pile as she walks back downstairs. No one notices as she walks straight out the front door and into her dad’s red pickup truck.

Claire’s heart feels like it’s trying to thump into the steering wheel as she drives across town. The fright of her phone ringing almost sends her over the edge into full cardiac arrest.

“Hello?”

“Claire, it’s Sam. I got your voicemail-”

“I’m on my way to get him now,” she says. 

“I’m on my way too, but I started all the way in Texas. It will still be a few hours before I get there.”

“All good. I’m going to drop him off at a motel. I’ll let you know where exactly later.”

“Thanks. This is just… insane.”

“I know,” she agrees. 

“I can’t believe you’re already there.”

Claire pauses and chews her lip, not knowing quite what the implications of this are. She knows Sam well enough to know that he’s also not going to believe that it’s just some random coincidence.

“Yeah, it’s strange,” she says weakly. “I’ll give you an update in a little bit. Bye.”

She hangs up and throws the phone into the cupholder. She hates driving her dad’s truck; she feels like she’s in some sort of a cruise ship. It’s a stark contrast to her beloved Jetta. She has to pitch forward over the steering wheel just to properly see where she’s going, let alone be able to spot Dean walking around in her periphery.

She gets to the outskirts of town, near a gas station, when she finally spots him. There aren’t any other cars nearby and she’s able to pull up alongside him easily. She can see him squinting against the glare and through the windshield, and she rolls the passenger’s side window down.

“Dean!” she calls.

His squint deepens into more of a scowl. “Claire?” comes his gruff voice, even hoarser than usual. She wishes she’d had the foresight to bring a water bottle.

“Get in,” she orders.

Dean looks like he’d have been less shocked if aliens flew up to beam him into a UFO. “What the hell are you doing here?” he demands, nevertheless opening the passenger’s side door and climbing in. 

Once he’s inside, she studies him closely, trying to discern differences between now and the last time she saw him. There’s a thin layer of dirt and sweat smeared on his face that makes his eyes look unnaturally green, especially against the tree line behind him. She’d forgotten how strikingly handsome he is.

He seems to be studying her just as intently, his eyes darting back and forth as they search hers. “How’d you know I’d be here?”

“I had a vision,” she explains. “I was home visiting my family.”

“I have no clue what happened,” he offers. “The last thing I remember was being a hellhound’s chew-toy. Then, I woke up in a pine box, and now I’m here.”

“In the vision, it said that you were saved.”

His eyebrows bend together again. “I don’t understand…”

“I’m going to take you to a motel to get cleaned up,” she interrupts, pulling away from the curb and making a U-turn. “There’s one not too far from here that charges by the hour. I also brought you a change of clothes in the back.”

“When did you get the vision about this?” he asks, clearly confused by how she had so much time to prepare.

“Last night.”

When they reach the motel, Claire drops the steep distance between the driver’s seat and the ground, the soles of her sneakers crunching into the gravel parking lot as they make contact.

He asks, “Whose car is this?” 

“My dad’s.”

She walks into the front desk area to pay the sweaty, balding clerk while Dean holds the bundle of clothes under his arm and waits. There’s a small concession stand and she also buys a couple of bottles of water and some granola bars. She then ventures back towards Dean with the keys to room 7. As she walks towards him, the sunlight catches the top of her red-gold hair and makes it look like she has a halo. Once she reaches him, he follows behind closely, and she can feel the presence of his body trailing her like a dull heat. There is some tension between them, and she doesn’t know why or what to say to break it.

“He probably thinks we’re gearing up for some sort of sex marathon,” he comments with a snort.

“Well, he’d be sorely mistaken. This place is disgusting. How much you wanna bet there are hidden cameras in the rooms?”

Dean makes a grossed-out expression, but he’s still behind her, so she doesn’t see it. Once they’re inside the room, she twists the dial on the window AC unit to full blast. He goes to set the clothes she gave him on the bed, but she stops him.

“I wouldn’t go anywhere near that thing, if I were you. God knows what kind of STDs are on that thing. Let alone bedbugs…” She shudders theatrically at the thought.

“Y’know, I don’t remember you bein’ such a priss,” he gibes with a smirk. 

He walks in her direction and sets the bundle of clothing down on the table next to her. He’s very close now, and she can smell a salty, mineral scent coming off of him in the heat. She sets the granola bars and water bottles down, too. He picks one up and chugs it, drinking the entire thing before crunching the plastic in his fist and tossing it in the trash can. When he’s finished, he continues to stare at her in a way that’s starting to become unnerving, like his eyes are boring into her soul. Without thinking, she takes her thumb and rubs a clean streak along his left cheekbone. 

“You need a shower,” she remarks, wondering to herself what possessed her to touch him like that.

In the blink of an eye, his hands find their way to her face, too, and he’s drawing her into a passionate kiss. His lips are still wet from the water and taste earthy and chalky, like soil and dust. Claire feels a surprising stab of desire in her gut, but quickly jerks away.

“I can’t,” she says breathlessly, casting her gaze to the rust-colored carpet. 

Dean lets his hands drop from her face and scratches the back of his head awkwardly. The heat of embarrassment crawls up his neck. “Oh, uh, sorry… I thought-”

“I’m seeing someone,” she blurts out.

“Oh. Sorry,” he repeats. “I guess I’m just happy to see a friendly face.”

She finally gathers the courage to meet his eyes again to see that he’s smiling sheepishly at her.

“I’m glad to see you, too,” she allows. “I already called Sam. He should be here in a few hours.”

“Great. I’m gonna take a shower.”

Dean disappears into the bathroom and while he does, she takes the opportunity to call Sam again and let him know exactly where they are. There is an elephant in the room: how the hell did this happen? She imagines that will be the next order of business to figure out once he gets here.

But Claire does not have hours to spare. 

Dean eventually emerges from the bathroom wearing a bath towel around his waist and drying his hair with a hand towel. The sight of him without a shirt sends a blush creeping up Claire’s face. His toned torso isn’t anything new, but it’s been a while since she’s seen it.

“Check this out,” he says. He turns so that she can see his left shoulder. There’s a massive, puckered scar – as if from a burn or brand – in the shape of a handprint.

“What the hell is that?”

He shrugs. “Must be from whatever jail-broke me outta Hell,” he reasons. “Everything else is… healed.”

She allows herself to actually look at his body in earnest to see that he’s right.

“Those hellhounds made a meal outta me,” he goes on, swallowing heavily at the memory. “And even scars I had before that. All of ‘em are gone.”

He’s walking toward her, and she realizes it’s because the clothes are right next to her. She quickly steps out of the way. For some unknown reason, she has the overwhelming urge to feel the handprint mark, but she ignores it.

“Do you remember it?” she asks carefully.

“Remember what?”

“Hell.”

He sets his jaw and looks out the window as his mind works. “No,” he says eventually. “I must have blocked it out.”

All of a sudden, her phone rings. It’s Fletcher.

“Hey, Fletch. Yeah, I’m sorry this is taking longer than I expected. The Walgreens I went to first didn’t have the brand of tampons that I like, so I had to go somewhere else. I should be back in like thirty minutes.” 

“No worries, take your time,” he replies.

She flips the phone closed to see that Dean is looking at her with both eyebrows raised in vague amusement.

“That the boyfriend?”

“Yeah.”

“You told him you were out getting tampons?”

“You’d be amazed how quickly men stop asking questions the minute the word tampon is thrown around.”

A bark of laughter erupts from his throat, and she lets herself smile back at him. He pulls the shirt over his head and slips the pants on from under his towel as she averts her eyes.

“Ain’t anything you haven’t already seen.” He scrunches his nose as though he’s just had a sudden realization. “These aren’t his clothes, are they?”

“They’re my brother’s.”

“They fit pretty well,” he comments in surprise.

“Maybe a little loose, but yeah, I thought you guys would be around the same size.”

The handprint scar is now hidden beneath the sleeve of his navy blue Chicago Bears t-shirt.

“Does it hurt?”

“Does what hurt?”

“The mark.”

“Oh. No, it doesn’t.” He lifts the sleeve up so she can get a better look, and she cautiously brushes her fingertips over it. The flesh is hard and swollen. 

“I wonder what type of thing could have done this…”

Suddenly, the TV turns on by itself, the bathroom mirror cracks, and the window is blown out. Dean puts himself between Claire and the flying glass, shielding her. All the while, his hands are clamped over his ears as though his ear drums are about to explode.

Claire experiences the sound differently. To her, the noise sounds like a clear, beautiful voice. It says, “It was I, the angel Castiel, who gripped Dean tight and raised him from perdition.”

When it’s over, Dean stays hunched for a few moments. He takes his hands away from his ears to see blood. He straightens and looks at Claire, who is staring blankly at the TV as though she’s in a trance.

“What the fuck was that?” he shouts.

She snaps her gaze to his. “You didn’t hear that?”

“All I heard was this awful, buzzing static sound,” he says, still yelling. She hopes he didn’t suffer permanent hearing loss.

“It was a voice,” she says in wonder. “An angel.”

Dean’s brows gather in a look of disbelief. “What?”

“Castiel,” she continues. “It said its name was Castiel. You couldn’t hear it?”

“No,” he reiterates harshly. 

“It sounded… beautiful,” she continues, still sounding eerily calm.

“There’s no such thing as angels,” he snaps.

“If there’s no such thing as angels, then what was that?”

This, Dean can’t answer. She can see his masseter muscles flex as he grinds his teeth in frustration.

All of a sudden, something on the TV catches her attention. A local news anchor says, “Breaking news. We just got word of a devastating explosion on Glendale Ave. Firefighters suspect a gas leak, but this is still a developing story.”

“Glendale Ave,” Claire repeats softly to herself, a stricken look unfurling across her face. “That’s… that’s where my parents live.”

Chapter Text

It seems like it only takes a millisecond for them to leave the motel room, leap into her dad’s red pickup truck, and start racing towards her house. Dean has the abstract idea that Claire might not be in the right mental state to be driving, but she’s the one who knows the way, so he doesn’t push it. He’d be lying if he said the way she’s whipping this massive car around isn’t making him nervous, though.

Carefully, he asks, “When you checked into that motel, did you have to show your ID?”

“Yeah,” she answers distractedly. 

“What address is on there?”

She chews the inside of her cheek. “It’s still my Illinois address. I never bothered changing it to Washington.”

“So, your parents’ address?” he deduces.

“Yeah.” 

Her eyebrows are drawn together in zealous worry as she speeds down the residential streets towards Glendale Ave, going fifty in a twenty-five zone. Dean thinks about how crazy it would be if he died in a car accident within hours of being brought back from the dead. 

However, after a harrowing fifteen minutes, they arrive at the start of the Glendale. Police tape bars them from turning onto the street, and there are easily five or more firetrucks lining the curb. She pulls the truck onto the perpendicular sidewalk and yanks the parking brake on before flying out of the door. Dean exits the car, too, and his nose immediately registers the dread-inducing reek of sulfur. 

A small crowd has gathered to watch the scene, but police are preventing anyone from passing through. Claire weaves her way through the people to reach the front.

“Please,” she implores the female officer. “My house is down there.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am. We haven’t cleared the area yet. It’s not safe for anyone to enter.”

“My family – they were in the house. Are they okay?”

She gives her a look like she shouldn’t be doing this, but nonetheless asks, “What’s your address?”

“One seventy-four.”

Claire can immediately tell from the expression that comes over the officer’s face that they are not okay. It feels like she’s been shot, and she falters where she stands. The officer puts her arm out to catch her.

Dean witnesses this interaction and rushes forward. She feels his fingers brush her back and his voice near her ear.

“What happened?” he asks the officer.

“Her house was where the blast came from,” she says sympathetically.

“What about the people inside?”

She looks pained. “If there were any survivors, they’d be at the hospital by now.”

Quickly, he whisks Claire back towards the truck. He grabs her gently by the shoulders, lowering his face so that it’s level with hers. “If I drive, can you direct me towards the hospital?”

She nods vacantly.

He helps her into the passenger’s seat, his hands on her waist as he boosts her in. Then, he strides to the other side and gets behind the wheel. 

“This doesn’t make any sense,” she cries as they drive. “I talked to Fletcher like ten minutes before this came on the news.”

“Just try to stay calm until we know more,” he coaches. “There could’ve been some kind of mistake.”

When they arrive at the hospital, Claire bounds towards the automatic doors of the ER, leaving him to trail behind once more. When she reaches the reception, her face is already sticky and tear-streaked.

“I’m looking for some people who were involved in the gas leak on Glendale,” she says. “The Shurley family, Fletcher Gordon – are any of them here?”

The elderly receptionist’s dark eyes shine pityingly from behind her half-moon glasses. “We did have one person brought in from the explosion,” she says. “A boy who seemed to be around sixteen or seventeen.”

“That’s probably my brother,” she says, treacherous hope prickling in her chest. “Charlie. Can I see him?”

“I’ll let the doctors know you’re here,” is all she says.

Dean is standing in the waiting area, trying to repress memories of the last time they were in a hospital together. He will forever associate the distinctive, cloying chemical smell with one of the worst moments of his life. 

Claire approaches him and tells him, “I think Charlie’s here. They’re going to ask if I can see him.”

One. There were four people in that house, and only one is accounted for. She sits in a seafoam-green chair and stares at the stock photo art on the wall in front of her. A well of tears begins to spring forth from her eyes, and Dean puts his hand on hers, over her bare knee.

“This is all my fault,” she murmurs.

“Don’t say that,” he scolds. “We don’t know what happened yet.”

She turns her head and looks at him in a way that breaks his heart. She doesn’t need to use words to convey what she’s thinking, because he knows that exact look. He knows it because he’s had it before. The magnitude of her loss is so deep that she can’t even fully process it, and she’s blaming herself.

About an hour goes by before the receptionist tells her that she can see Charlie. Dean stays in the waiting area and a doctor accompanies her to his hospital room. 

On the way, he tells her, “Your brother is gravely injured, but somehow he’s conscious right now so we wanted to let you see him and speak to him. We haven’t been able to figure it out – his vitals don’t look good. It’s some sort of miracle.”

When they arrive at Charlie’s room, the door is wide open and she can see her brother propped halfway into a sitting position. She rushes to his bedside and goes to grab his hand, but quickly discovers that both of his arms are completely covered in yellow-stained bandages. Burns. All over him.

Instead, she grips the railing on the gurney. 

She starts, “Charlie, what-”

Charlie’s green-flecked eyes flash to obsidian black orbs as he turns to her with a sickening smile.

“Charlie’s not here,” he hisses through bloodstained teeth.

Claire lurches back in terror. This is no miracle.

“Baby brother doesn’t have the same godspell protecting him that you do.” 

She has never seen a demon before, but instinct tells her that there is nothing else that this creature could be. “What did you do with him?” she asks, voice dangerously low.

“Tell me what gate-crashed the Winchester out of Hell and I’ll let him go.”

“I don’t know.”

“Lying’s a sin, you know. You were right there when he came topside, which means you know something we don’t.”

“Whatever it is, it’s not something you want to mess around with,” she snaps. “And I think you know that.”

“That may be true,” he says pensively. “But the boss doesn’t take kindly to runaways.”

“It’s way more powerful than you are, that much I’m sure of.”

“Well, I guess I should tell you then that Charlie has been dead for hours,” the demon snarls at her. “I rode his meatsuit out of that blast to find you and your little boyfriend. And I don’t mean the one we killed, whore.”

Hearing her brother’s voice speak to her in such a vile way is enough to make her stomach churn and vomit rise in her throat. She vaults out the open door and down the hall, her brain struggling to compute what is happening.

Has she really gone from having everything to having nothing in the span of an hour? Her entire family wiped out?

But no. Not her entire family. Ryan is still at OSU, and she has to warn him. She whips her phone out of her pocket to see a bunch of missed calls from Sam, probably looking for them. She’ll call him back after. She punches Ryan’s number in and, surprisingly, he answers.

“What’s up?” he says, sounding confused and vaguely annoyed. “You never call me.”

“There was an accident,” she manages numbly. “Everyone. They’re all gone.”

There’s a pregnant silence on the other line before he finally responds, “What?”

“A gas leak. The house blew up. There’s… there’s nothing left.”

“What about Mom and Dad and Charlie?” She can hear him starting to get hysterical, and she wonders why she’s not at that stage yet. 

“All of them are gone,” she confirms, voice breaking. “You need to get here. I-I’m going to text you the picture of something and I want you to draw it on yourself with… with like a marker or something.”

“Wha-”

“I know it sounds crazy, but you just have to trust me.”

“Where should I meet you?”

“I’ll text you the name of a motel. There’s nothing. The whole house, everything is gone. Get here as fast as you can. Don’t stop.”

“I-I’ll ask one of my friends if I can borrow their car.”

“Be careful. The police haven’t said much yet, but I think this could have been some sort of arson.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. Who would want to hurt our family?”

“I’ll explain more when you get here.”

She hangs up and walks out the door into the waiting area to see Dean standing near the exit. 

“What happened?” he demands.

Claire’s features contort into a look of agony. “He’s-he’s gone.” He leads her gingerly outside by her elbow, into the bright, cheerful, summer sun that seems to be in direct conflict with what’s happening in her life. “He was possessed by a demon. That’s the only reason he was talking,” she sobs.

Dean pulls her into an embrace, not knowing what else to do.

“I called my other brother, Ryan,” she says into the fabric of his t-shirt. “I told him he needs to get here as fast as possible. And Sam – I need to call him back.”

“I can do that,” he says. She pulls back and hands her phone to him.

Dean flips it open and calls Sam’s number. “Hey,” he starts. “It’s me. Stay where you are, we’ll come to you. There’s been a, uh, an accident with Claire’s family. Demons torched her parents’ place.”

The content of what he’s saying is enough for Sam to momentarily put the shock of hearing his brother’s voice again to the side. “What?” he interrogates on the other end of the line. “Why would they do that?”

“Probably something to do with the fact that I was just busted out of Hell by – get this – something calling itself an angel.”

“Why target Claire?”

“I’m not sure. She seems to be back on their radar all of a sudden. She-she could hear it. To me, it just sounded like this high-pitched static, like what you hear when you bring a mic too close to a speaker times a thousand. But she said she heard it speak.”

“The demon, it told me I have some sort of god spell protecting me,” she interjects.

“You hear that?” 

“Yeah. Are you guys on your way back to the motel?”

“We will be in a few. Sam, watch out for the guy at the front desk. He’s a demon – he’s the one who tipped off the others.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll handle it.”

When they arrive back at the motel, Sam is waiting in front of room 7 with his arms crossed over his chest. Whereas Dean has changed very little in the last two years since Claire saw him, Sam appears to have changed quite a bit. His hair is several inches longer and he looks much more muscular. The two things paired together make him appear less boyish than he once looked.

For a moment, his features flash a look of pure joy upon seeing his older brother. He brings him into a tight embrace and says, “I’m sorry it wasn’t me that got you out. I hope you know… I tried everything I could think of, I tried to make a deal, I-”

“You don’t need to apologize,” Dean says, cutting him off. “I’m glad they wouldn’t let you do something so stupid.”

They pull apart, and Sam’s relief at seeing his brother transmutes into sympathy as he turns his attention to Claire. “I’m so sorry,” he says, giving her a hug.

She looks in the direction of the front desk and asks, “Where’s the evil piece of shit?”

“I dealt with him,” he tells her, noticing her fists balling at her sides.

Typically, when faced with fight or flight, Claire chooses flight. But right now, she doesn’t have anything else left to lose.

“I hope you mean you killed him,” she says hotly.

“I sent him back to Hell, which is as good as.”

They step inside the dingy motel room that they have long overstayed the rate she paid for. Once the door is closed, she says, “We need to figure out a way to contact the angel, Castiel. He brought you back. Maybe… maybe he can bring my family back, too.”

Sam and Dean make eye contact, both keenly aware of where this line of thinking can lead. “I’ll try calling Bobby,” Sam replies cautiously. “I’m sure he’ll want to see you too, Dean.”

Sam steps outside to make the call, leaving them alone in the motel room again. 

Claire says, “Ryan will be here in a few hours. We need to tell him everything. For his own good.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’ve never been more sure of anything. He needs to know so he can protect himself.”

Dean swallows heavily. “Alright,” he agrees.

“If Bobby’s also coming here, we’re going to need to find a bigger spot. I noticed there’s a new housing development going up a few miles from here. We could head there once it gets dark and squat.” 

“Hm. You never struck me as the B&E type.”

“Do you have a better idea?”

“No, fine. We’ll need space to summon the thing anyway.”

“Summon it?” 

“I assume it can be summoned, same as demons and ghosts. That’s what we need Bobby for. But Claire…” he pauses, unsure how to continue. “You need to prepare yourself for the very real possibility that this thing either can’t or won’t bring your family back.”

She feels a coil of sorrow slither around her throat like a noose and searing tears burn her eyes. “You don’t know that,” she bites. “Why should you get to come back, but not them?”

“I don’t know,” he answers meekly. “I’m asking myself the same question – why should I get to come back when no one else does? There’s always some sorta catch.”

Sam returns to the room and announces, “Bobby’s on his way. I’m gonna get some food while we wait it out for a bit. Pizza okay?”

“I’m not hungry,” Claire mutters darkly, despite the fact that she hasn’t had anything to eat since last night’s dinner.

“You need to eat,” Dean insists. 

She glares sharply at him. “I’m not. Hungry,” she repeats, malice lacing each syllable.

He backs off, instead opting to change the subject. “We’re gonna have to relocate once everyone gets here,” he tells Sam. “This shithole ain’t big enough for all of us. Claire said there’s a new housing complex that we could post up in once it gets dark.”

Ryan arrives at the motel before Bobby. By now, the entire day has come and gone, and the sun is starting to set. It’s a beautiful summer night, and the sky is painted a bright amber. Claire races to the door the minute she hears him knock.

“Do you have the mark that I asked you to draw?” is the first thing she asks.

He flips his left hand over and shows her his wrist. There’s a sloppily drawn pentagram inside a circle, just like she’d instructed. This is all she needs to see before collapsing into his arms. Though Ryan is her younger brother, he has dwarfed her physically for some time now. She still remembers the beginning of her senior year of high school, when he shot up finally and surpassed her in height. Now, he’s not just taller, but with the strapping build of a D1 college quarterback.

“Who are you?” he questions, his piercing blue eyes – which are identical to Claire’s – falling on the Winchester brothers.

“These are my friends, Sam and Dean,” she says, pulling back and wiping her eyes with her wrist.

“What are they doing here?”

“There’s something I need to talk to you about,” she prefaces, circumventing the question. “It’s going to sound crazy, but you need to believe me.”

His gaze flits between them, his black-brown eyebrows pulled into a pained expression. “Claire, what the hell is happening?”

“Promise you won’t freak out?”

“You’re scaring me.”

“You should be scared,” she replies, gulping down a lump building in her throat. “This is scary. Everything you’ve seen in horror movies – the creatures, monsters, demons – they’re all real.”

Ryan turns to Sam and Dean pleadingly. “Is she on something?”

“No,” Sam answers softly. “She’s telling the truth.”

Ryan doesn’t like this answer. “Who even are you?” he snaps. “How do you know each other?”

“Sam is my friend from college,” Claire replies. “Dean is his brother. They deal with things like this – things like what killed Mom and Dad and Charlie. Demons.”

“Demons?! What the fuck are you talking about?!”

“They killed our parents, too,” Sam responds.

Ryan’s stony expression breaks and he folds onto the edge of bed. “They’re all dead.”

It’s the first time those precise words have been uttered aloud, and the statement hangs in the air like a curse. Claire sits beside him.

“They’re dead,” she confirms. “But… There might be a way to get them back. I… I’ve been having visions. I’m not sure exactly what they mean or why, but there is something out there – an angel. It can bring them back.”

“An angel? You must be having some sort of psychotic break.”

“I know how it sounds. But I’m totally lucid. The angel… It brought Dean back, too. Dean was dead.”

Ryan straightens and looks at Dean, who has yet to speak.

He clears his throat and says, “It’s true.”

“You guys are all insane. Is that my shirt?”

Dean opens his mouth to reply, but Claire cuts him off, charging forward. “That symbol I had you draw on your wrist, it protects you from being possessed.”

Ryan stands up hastily. “I can’t hear any more of this,” he says. “I’m going to go to the police station-”

“You can’t leave,” she insists. “The town is swarming with demons, and one of them is possessing Charlie. It’s not safe. They’ll try to trick you. And plus, the police aren’t going to be able to do jack shit. We’re going to summon the angel tonight – you’ll be able to see it for yourself. It’s real.”

Again, Ryan looks at Sam and Dean imploringly, disbelievingly, hoping that one of them has the common sense to back him up. Neither of them speak, jaws set and wearing twin expressions of neutrality. He continues walking towards the door, and Claire stands in front of him with her arms outstretched blocking the exit. 

“I’m serious, Ryan. Please, please just trust me. I’m the only family you have left.”

This causes the wind to leave his sails and he hangs his head in defeat. She sees tears falling from his eyes and onto the carpet. He quickly scrubs his face before lifting his head to look at her.

“So, what’s next?” he asks quietly.

Sam jumps in. “We’re waiting for our friend, Bobby. He’s on his way. He’s gonna help us summon the angel.”

“We need to move to another location when he gets here,” Claire adds. “There’s not enough space here.”

By the time Bobby arrives, it’s after 10 PM. When he sees Dean, he nearly breaks down in tears. 

“I can’t believe it’s you, son,” he mutters into his shoulder. He pulls back and examines him. “Since when’re you a Bears fan?”

“I had to get him a change of clothes,” Claire interjects. “It’s my brother, Ryan’s.” She steps to the side and gestures between them by way of introduction. The two men shake hands.

“Sam filled me in on what happened,” Bobby says, the joy of his reunion with Dean dampened by the situation at hand. “I’m real sorry to hear it, sweetheart.”

“It’s not over yet,” she replies, waving him away enigmatically. Dean can’t help but fear that her faith in this angel is starting to cross into delusion. “We should get going.”

“I got all the stuff in my car,” Bobby says.

“Claire and Ryan can ride with you, and Dean and I will follow behind in the Impala. I’m sure you’re eager to check in on it,” Sam tells him with a mirthless smile.

“I call dibs on driving,” Dean replies.

The chainlink entrance to the new housing development is nothing a couple of wirecutters can’t get past. There don’t appear to be any security cameras, which was their main concern. The complex contains six huge, brand new houses that appear to be nearly completed. They have freshly installed windows and doors with the stickers still on them. No landscaping has been done yet, so they sit atop a barren, dusty hill.

When they arrive, Sam hops out of the Impala in front of the first house and picks the lock to the main entrance. Then, he winds through the unfamiliar floorplan to eventually find and open the double garage door. Bobby and Dean pull inside to keep their cars out of sight from any passersby.

“This is more of a mansion than a house,” Sam remarks from the doorway as everyone exits the cars.

“Good. This thing’s gonna need a lotta space,” Bobby replies. 

He walks around the back of his truck and begins taking bags of supplies out of the bed. Wordlessly, the four others bring them into the home. There’s a large, empty space that seems to be intended to be the living room where they decide to set up shop. 

It’s pitch-black by now, so they set up a few camping lanterns. The electricity in the house seems to be finished, but there are no curtains or shades and they can’t risk someone passing by and seeing the lights on. Bobby begins drawing symbols on the ground that are similar to the antipossession symbol that Ryan has on his wrist.

When he’s done, he stands back and examines his work. “You sure you wanna go through with this?” he asks, hands on his hips.

“We have to,” Claire insists. “And plus, don’t you want to know why it brought Dean back?”

“We’re doing it,” Dean confirms. “We’ve got every weapon here under the sun, including this.” He pulls Ruby’s knife out from his back pocket.

“I don’t think it’s going to hurt us,” Claire adds. “If it wanted to, it would have already.”

“Alright,” Bobby complies with a weary sigh. He makes some sort of potion and begins chanting in Latin. At first, nothing happens. The five of them stand around looking at one another impatiently. 

“You sure you did it right?” Dean asks eventually.

Bobby gives him a thorny look and Dean holds his hands up in mock surrender.

All of a sudden, the whole house starts shaking and the front door flies open. Through the threshold walks a dark-haired man in a long beige trenchcoat. Bobby, Sam, and Dean raise their shotguns and track him as he strides into the center of the room. All the lights turn on, before the bulbs burst with a surge of power, causing everyone to flinch.

“Who are you?” Dean growls.

“It is I, Castiel,” the man replies with a growl of his own. “You summoned me.”

“What are you?” Dean continues to interrogate.

“I am an Angel of the Lord.”

Dean’s features contort into a look of disbelief. “Bullshit. There’s no such thing.”

There’s another power surge, and the light outlines Castiel’s form. Two dark, shadowy wings appear on the wall behind him. Everyone adopts a similar look of shock – Ryan especially. He grabs Claire’s elbow and hisses, “What the hell is happening?”

This seems to alert Castiel to the number of people in the room. He raises his index and middle finger and all of a sudden everyone except Claire and Dean falls to the floor.

“What did you do?!” Claire shouts in concern, crouching down to check her brother’s pulse.

“They are fine. Just sleeping. I need to talk to you both alone.”

Claire stands and walks beside Dean. “Why didn’t you show up like this earlier?” he asks.

“This is a vessel. Most humans cannot perceive my true form or my true voice. They find it… overwhelming. Certain people, special people, can perceive my true visage. I thought you would be one of them. I was wrong.”

“Claire could,” he points out.

“Yes, of course.”

“What do you mean ‘of course’?”

“Claire is a Prophet of the Lord.”

Dean balks, looking between the two of them. Claire has a similarly stunned expression on her face.

“What does that mean?”

“It means that God has plans for you. For both of you.”

“I’m not buying it. You show up here as some holy tax accountant possessing some poor bastard and expect me to believe this ‘God has a plan for me’ crap?”

“He’s a devout man, he actually prayed for this.”

“Whatever. It still doesn’t make any sense.”

“Good things do happen, Dean.”

“Not in my experience.”

“What’s the matter? You don’t think you deserve to be saved?”

Dean opens his mouth to reply, but Claire jumps in before he can. “You saved Dean. Can you save my family? Fletcher? They… they were killed by demons.”

Castiel sighs. “I am aware that they were killed. But no, I cannot bring them back. I saved Dean because God commanded it.”

“So what, you’re saying… you’re saying you won’t do it because you’re not authorized to?” Hot, furious tears are building in Claire’s eyes. Dean can see her fists balling at her sides and when she takes a step forward, he grabs her arm to stop her.

“Precisely. If I were to bring them back, it would upset the balance.”

“What balance? What plans?”

“I can’t say more. The hand of fate is not meant to be felt.”

Claire crumples into a heap on the ground, wracked with heavy sobs. The full weight of what has happened finally hits her like a bullet train. Dean stoops beside her and wraps an arm around her shoulders.

“Can’t you do something?” he snaps angrily.

Castiel steps forward and puts his hand on the crown of her head. Abruptly, she stops crying.

“What did you do?” Dean demands.

“I lessened her pain. Now, I must be going.”

Dean can hardly get out a harried “Wait” before he vanishes into thin air.

Chapter Text

Sam, Bobby, and Ryan wake up as soon as Castiel is gone and scramble to their feet.

“What the actual fuck was that?” Ryan demands in anguished confusion.

“That was an angel,” Claire answers calmly. “Like I told you.”

“So… so it really was?” Sam questions.

“That’s what it said it was,” is Dean’s begrudging response.

“Could he bring our family back?” Ryan asks.

Claire looks down and shakes her head, red strands of hair swishing side to side as they obscure her face. “He said it was… part of the plan,” she murmurs.

“Plan? What plan?” he questions through tears.

“I don’t know,” she admits. “He wouldn’t tell us any more.”

“That’s not exactly true,” Dean corrects. “He told us what Claire is.”

Sam and Bobby look at him expectantly with their eyebrows raised.

“A prophet,” she finishes.

“A prophet,” Sam repeats, testing the word. “So the visions. They’re what, like, the Word of God?”

“That would make sense,” she says thoughtfully. “At first, I thought I was seeing these things so that I could stop them or so that I could… react in some way. But what if that’s not why? What if I’m just meant to record what’s happening and there is no way to stop it?”

“These visions – you write them out?” Bobby asks.

“Yeah, it’s like a flood of words – not actual images. I get these excruciating headaches and they don’t stop until I’ve written the scene. I’m not seeing everything, though. The visions seem to be restricted just to key events. Key events that are leading up to something…”

“The Apocalypse,” Sam finishes. 

“So what, she’s writing out the Gospel of Claire?” Dean questions impatiently, only half-serious.

“Sounds like,” Bobby replies.

“So Mom, Dad, Charlie – they’re not coming back?” Ryan demands heatedly, reminding them of the most important development.

“No,” Claire responds sadly.

“And what, you don’t care?” he snaps at her.

“Of course I care-”

“You’re not acting like it.”

“The angel did something to her,” Dean interjects. “He said… he said he ‘lessened her pain’.”

“The hell does that mean? He gave her some sorta divine antidepressant?” Bobby questions.

Dean shrugs simply. “I dunno.”

“So, what now?” Ryan mutters.

“We need to stop it,” Sam starts. “We need to stop Lilith from starting the Apocalypse.”

“I mean what about us,” Ryan says, gesturing to himself and Claire.

“I’m clearly part of it,” she replies. “And these demons… Ryan, they killed our whole family. Don’t you want revenge?”

“What the hell am I supposed to do about it? I’m just some guy. And you’re… I mean, you’re you. Are you saying you’re gonna quit your job and dedicate your life to this?”

“Castiel made it sound like that was my… purpose.”

“So now you think you’re on some sort of holy mission?!”

“I don’t know!” She runs her fingers through her hair and paces, trying to make sense of everything. 

“At the very least, Claire has a direct line to Heaven,” Sam says quietly. “Whether she wants it or not.”

“And you, Ryan, who’s to say the demons aren’t going to come after you, too,” she says. “After what happened with Mom and Dad and Charlie and Fletcher…”

“You’re saying they’re gonna come after me to get to you? So lemme get this straight. I have to drop out of college and throw my whole life away just because you have some sort of calling?”

“I don’t know. I’m not saying that, exactly. But you need to learn to protect yourself.”

Ryan turns his gaze up to the ceiling, trying to force unshed tears back into his eye sockets. He runs his hands over his dark locks. “This is unbelievable,” he mutters.

Claire touches his elbow soothingly. “I know it’s not ideal.”

“Not ideal?!” he explodes. “This isn’t some minor inconvenience, Claire! Our entire family is dead and our lives are over, too! This is fucking catastrophic!”

“She’s not acting like herself,” Dean jumps in, trying to abate the brewing argument.

“I think I know my own fucking sister, thanks,” Ryan bites back.

Sam shoots his brother a look and he backs off. “Maybe we should give you two a minute to talk alone,” he suggests.

“I have nothing else to say,” Ryan replies spitefully. “Teach me what you think I need to know to survive on my own, then I’m getting the hell out of here.”

Whatever Castiel did to Claire has made her feel an unfamiliar sense of serenity. She is upset about her family and Fletcher, of course. But she also has an underlying sense that they’re in a better place. Perhaps that’s what he conveyed to her – that they’re at peace in Heaven. 

She can’t help but feel that there is a block somewhere in her brain, though, that is keeping her from reaching the true depths of her sorrow. It’s like a mound of gauze, spongy and nebulous. She has the sense that if she picks at it, she can remove it, though she’s not sure that she should. The block might be the only thing stopping her from going completely catatonic.

One thing she feels with full force is guilt. Guilt that she is the reason that this happened, and now guilt that she doesn’t even have the strength to face it properly. The fact that Ryan also seems to blame her does nothing to quell the feeling.

There is a mountain of administrative things that they need to take care of. Funerals. Insurance claims. Calling Fletcher’s parents. Notifying work. The whole thing feels so insurmountable. She wishes she would wake up, cozy in her bed, just to find that this was some awful nightmare. Because that’s what it feels like – a nightmare. It’s surreal to be in her hometown, staying at some seedy motel fifteen minutes away from the home she grew up in, speeding down the same streets she learned to drive on. Things that are so familiar mingled with things that are so foreign.

But no, it’s reality. That yellow Victorian is gone forever, blown to smithereens, along with most of her family. And the only one left hates her.

She is grateful that Sam, Dean, and Bobby are there to act as a buffer and guide them through this. Even though she’s technically an adult, she feels way out of her depth, and she doubts she and Ryan would be able to navigate this situation on their own. They spend the week helping them get everything squared away, and then comes the long-awaited inflection point: what do they do next?

She can’t help but shake the feeling that she’s been kicking the can down the road on this decision for years now. But this recent tragedy has put things into clearer perspective. They are dealing with life and death. Not just their own, but life and death – and good and evil – on a cosmic level. Her obsession with work and climbing the corporate ladder suddenly seems laughably insignificant, and the decision she’s been agonizing over finally seems ridiculously easy. She’ll go with them. 

She calls her roommates and tells them what happens. When she asks them to sublease her room, they’re effusively understanding. Even her boss at work tries to convince her not to quit, to go on medical leave. But the thought of ever having to return to her life in Seattle is unconscionable, so she refuses.

Ryan returns to college, a shattered husk of the person he used to be before this. The monumental revelation of what’s out there, along with the loss of his family, drives him to the brink of insanity and he has to quit the football team when he starts to see opposing players running at him with pitch-black eyes.

After they leave Pontiac, they decide to head to Bobby’s in Sioux Falls. Claire is in the back of the Impala pretending to be asleep when she overhears a conversation between Dean and Sam that cinches her heart.

“I’m just… I’m not buying it, Sammy. I was not groped by an angel.”

“Then what else could it be?”

“Maybe he’s some kind of demon. Demons lie.”

“Why would he lie to you? He saved you.”

“Yeah, but we don’t know what the catch is.”

“You believed him about Claire being a prophet,” he reasons. “Why is it so hard to believe that he would save you, no strings attached?”

“That’s different. She’s having these visions – that’s proof, in my book. But me? I’m just a regular guy. I’ve saved some people, yeah. I figured that made up for the stealing and the ditching chicks. But why do I deserve to get saved?”

“What exactly did he say to you?”

“He said that God had a plan for me,” he snorts.

“So what, you don’t believe that?”

“Hell no! Sam, do you really think, after all the awful shit we’ve seen, that there’s a God? And not only that, but a God that gives a crap about me personally? I’m sorry, but I’m not buying it.”

“Okay, look. I know you're not all choirboy about this stuff, but this is becoming less and less about faith and more and more about proof, like you said.”

“Don't you think that if angels were real, that some hunter somewhere would have seen one... at some point... ever?”

“Yeah. You just did, Dean. Bobby did a lot of research. He said that’s the only thing he could find with enough juice to get you out of the Pit in one piece. And if the angel is saying that it’s working for God, well… I mean, it makes sense.”

Dean shakes his head warily. 

“What else did he say?” Sam asks. “Did he say what the plan is?”

“He pleaded the fifth on that part.”

“What about for Claire?”

“Same deal.”

Sam thinks for a moment. “How are we going to keep her from getting hurt? We’re pretty much riding into the eye of the storm.”

Dean grinds his teeth, the muscle in his jaw working. He replies, “I know. But she wouldn’t take no for an answer. At least with us, we can keep an eye on her. Who knows what could happen if she’s on her own.”

They arrive at Bobby’s and set up shop just like they did that summer all those years ago, when everything was different. When Sam and Dean had never died and Claire’s family was all still alive and well. When she was just a student with a whole future of opportunities ahead of her.

They’re all damaged now, and some wounds are fresher than others. It doesn’t escape her memory that the last time she was here, Sam and Dean’s dad had just died. There seems to be some twisted symmetry to the fact that now she’s the one who lost her parents, her brother. She understands their pain in a way that she couldn’t have before.

Later, in the middle of the night, a vision hits her hard. She can’t help but cry out as pain cleaves her brain in half as she crashes into consciousness. In the dark, she scrambles to find her laptop. The words pour forth from her fingertips, and as she writes she fails to notice that someone has come downstairs.

Dean watches her from the doorway, her face illuminated by the ghostly blue glow of the computer.

“You alright?” he asks, voice still rough with sleep.

Her eyes flit away from the screen and squint as they try to make him out. “I had a vision,” she says simply. “Sorry to wake you.”

“I barely sleep these days,” he dismisses flippantly, walking closer.

She gives him a bemused look that’s verging on a glare. “I thought you said you didn’t remember it.”

He sits beside her on the edge of the makeshift bed and considers his next words carefully. “Bits and pieces are coming back,” he admits. He glues his eyes to the document on the computer. “What did you see?”

Claire cannot stand to feel the warmth of his body so close beside hers. She quickly stands up and passes him the laptop. “See for yourself,” she says. She pads into the kitchen to get herself a glass of water, and can’t help but recall the last time they were in there together. Against her will, she feels a heat rise to her face. 

“Who are these Witnesses?” he asks.

“I don’t know, but they’re coming our way tomorrow. It’s one of the seals from Revelations. We should probably brush up on our bible study, huh? It’s been a while for me.”

“I’d say so,” he agrees.

She leans against the doorway and holds the cool glass to her forehead, staring at him unabashedly. He lifts his gaze to look at her, too. The moonlight is filtering in through the window behind her, making it difficult to see anything but the outline of her body. They just stay like that for a few seconds, not saying anything. Not knowing what to say. Not knowing who they even are anymore, let alone who they are to each other.

“Thank you,” she says finally. “For being there for me when… I don’t think I could have dealt with it by myself.”

Dean gives her a strained look. “You don’t need to thank me,” he says curtly. “You did the same for me, if memory serves. And you’re handling things a hellova lot better than I did.”

“That’s thanks to Castiel,” she says sadly. “If only he could’ve done the same thing for Ryan… I’m worried he’s going to hate me forever.”

“He won’t. You guys are blood. He just needs time.”

“Do you think he’ll be okay? Safe, I mean.”

This isn’t a question he’s prepared to answer, nor one that he wants to. “We taught him everything we could. He seems like a tough kid.”

She nods pensively. He is tough. And smart, too. He could make a good hunter someday, she can’t help but think. She quickly shakes the idea from her head. She doesn’t want this life for him.

“We should probably head back to sleep,” she says eventually.

“Yeah,” he agrees, standing to walk back towards the staircase. “Goodnight.”

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?

Chapter Text

SEVERAL DAYS LATER

The motel sleeping arrangements between the three of them are less than ideal. Inevitably, someone ends up on a cot and just as inevitably, Dean the Martyr is always the one to volunteer. His back is beginning to bear the toll. 

That’s what he blames for waking up in the middle of the night in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania. The tight, lumpy coil of metal springs digging into the abused muscles in his neck and shoulders. That, and Castiel visiting him in his dream, sending him back to 1973 and then returning him to consciousness. When his eyes open, he notices something glaring: Sam is missing.

Thankfully, Castiel has given him the address.

He quickly slides out of bed and casts a fleeting glance at Claire. She’s fast asleep in the other twin bed, looking tiny in comparison to how Sam usually looks when he’s asleep. He’s careful not to wake her as he leaves the room, the door clicking softly closed behind him.

Then, he hops into the Impala and makes his way to an abandoned warehouse, and what he witnesses inside causes fury and terror to pool in his gut. Sam exorcizing a demon with his mind with Ruby by his side. 

They have a blowout fight. Dean can’t fathom how Sam could be so foolish to trust a demon, even in his darkest moments. Not after what their dad told him. Not after what he sacrificed so that he could live. It feels like a suckerpunch to the jaw, like he’s spitting in the face of everything he tried to instill in him.

And now, Castiel’s warning makes him even more sick to his stomach. He sent him back in time for what? To understand how deeply rooted this poison is in his brother’s blood? How fundamental it is to his very existence? 

No. Dean can’t accept that. He won’t. 

Maybe that was why he was brought back – to stop Sam from going fully to the dark side. To drag him out of bed with the devil. Because when he learns that Sam is also sleeping with Ruby, it just about knocks him off his feet. He may as well have physically struck him. He actually does physically strike him in return. 

Sam may have finally come clean. And he may have even promised he was done with it. But that doesn’t mean he believes him.

When Claire awakes the next morning, the tension between the brothers is palpable. They make their way to a diner to grab some breakfast when she finally gathers the resolve to ask what’s going on.

“Did I miss something?” she asks, taking a long sip of coffee and peering at them from under her eyelashes.

They’re sitting in a booth; she and Sam on one side, and Dean across from them. The brothers have been glaring daggers at one another since they arrived.

“No,” Dean replies flatly.

Sam gives him a disapproving look. “Actually, yes.” He angles his head towards Claire. “Castiel visited him in a dream last night.”

Her eyebrows fly up as she looks at Dean, who’s suddenly highly interested in playing with a sugar packet.

“He sent him back to 1973,” Sam continues.

“Why?”

“To see what happened to our parents. Apparently, these demon deals go way back. Our mom made a deal with Azazel to save our dad. When it came due, he came into my nursery and fed me some of his blood. Mom caught him in the act, and that’s when he killed her.”

“Why would he give you his blood?” she hisses in disbelief, struggling to keep her voice low. 

“Originally, I thought it was so I could be the leader of some sort of demon army, but now I’m not so sure. There seems to be some bigger picture at play. Claire, I don’t think we ever told you, but I have… powers.”

“What kind of powers?”

“Psychic powers, telekinesis. And one other one that I discovered more recently. I can, uh, exorcise demons with my mind.”

Her eyebrows shoot up again. “Why didn’t you guys tell me this earlier?”

“It didn’t seem like something you needed to know at the time,” he replies somewhat guiltily. 

“I just found out about the last one last night,” Dean adds, finally looking up from the table.

“And anyway, I’m done with it. I thought it was a blessing, being able to exorcise demons without hurting the host. But now I’m starting to think that any power given to me by Yellow-Eyes is a curse, not a gift.”

“You gonna tell her about the other thing?”

Sam adopts a look similar to that of a dog caught eating something it’s not supposed to.

“What other thing?” Claire inquires innocently enough.

“Ruby,” Dean goes on, sparing his brother the trouble. “Sam’s been canoodling with a demon.”

“She saved my life. She’s been helping me control my powers,” Sam corrects. 

Dean snorts. “So that’s what you call it?”

Claire’s eyes narrow as she tries to decipher the subtext in what they’re saying. Her best guess is that Sam has found himself in some sort of romantic entanglement with this demon, which is a horrifying concept. 

“We can trust her,” Sam insists, sensing her discomfort. “She’s not like the others.”

“But I don’t understand. Why is she different? Why would she help you?” she asks.

Dean’s gaze snaps to hers, and he holds it there in a way that’s borderline unnerving. “That’s the million dollar question,” he replies.

They’re in Pennsylvania working what appears to be a vampire case while they wait for their next lead on whatever seal Lilith is going to try to break next. Dean selected this place in particular because it’s Oktoberfest and he wants to blow off a little steam after his stint in Hell. Glimpses into the memory of what happened there are coming back in the form of wholly unwelcome nightmares. Bury them deep, the voice in the back of his head that sounds suspiciously like his father tells him.

So that’s what he tries. He figures a beer tent in the middle of nowhere will be a good distraction.

What he’s less upfront with himself about is that he’s looking for a distraction in another way, too. A distraction from Claire, ever-present and fraying the tether of his self-control. 

It’s been just over a month since she lost her family, her boyfriend. It’s not nearly enough time. 

But he’d be lying if he said he didn’t notice the stolen glances, the charming pink creep of a blush emblazoning her cheekbones when he catches her. The skimpy pajama shorts exposing her long, graceful legs. He knows this isn’t any sort of display for him. Or at least, he’s pretty sure it isn’t. He doesn’t dare to let himself consider that it might be.

Busty barmaids in lederhosen will help take his mind off it – that’s one thing he is sure of.

After a day of investigation, the three of them are now sitting at a picnic table under a beer tent when one of said busty barmaids brings over a few pints of beer for them. She sets the sloshing liquid in front of them before sauntering back into the nearby bar.

Claire watches Dean’s eyes track the sway of the blonde’s hips as she walks, and she feels something prickly and unpleasant burn through her middle. She wraps her hand around the handle of the beer stein, nails digging little crescents into the heel of her palm. She takes a long gulp of the fizzy wheat ale.

Dean finally turns his attention back to the two of them once she’s out of eyeshot. He charges through the half-quizzical, half-critical expression on Sam’s face and proposes a cheers. They clink their mugs together.

“It’s definitely not our type of case,” Sam says after taking a draught of his beer.

“Agreed. But who cares? Room's paid for, and it's Oktoberfest.” He chugs more than half of his drink and wipes the foam away from his mouth with the back of his hand.

Sam and Claire share a similarly put-off look.

“I’m gonna head up to the bar to get another. Either of you want one?” Dean asks.

“I’m good,” Claire says.

“Me too,” Sam agrees. When he’s gone, he rubs his eyes wearily and says, “He can be such an idiot sometimes.”

She laughs. “He’s been to hell and back. I don’t blame him for wanting a little break.”

“Fair enough. How are you doing?”

“I’m alright. I think the distraction is good for me, too, but there is part of me that just wants to keep pressing forward after Lilith.”

“I get that. I was pretty one-track-minded after Dean… you know.”

Dean returns with another pint and a shiteating grin.

“What?” Sam asks in response to his expression.

“Nothin’.”

But Sam knows that look. He’s seen it a million times. That’s the ‘I scored a waitress’s number’ look. In reply, he gives him the equally familiar ‘Are you sure you should be doing that right now?’ look.

Claire seems to sense some silent communication between the two of them and announces, “I’m gonna use the bathroom,” before extracting herself from the picnic bench.

“Dude,” Sam says once she’s gone.

“What?” Dean asks defensively.

“Are you really hitting on that bartender right now?”

“So what if I am? Bar wenches and Oktoberfest basically go hand in hand.”

Sam shakes his head, his shaggy hair falling into his eyes.

“What?” he presses.

“I know you just went back in time, but I’m pretty sure women don’t like to be called wenches in 2008. And I don’t know if you picking up chicks in front of Claire is a good idea.”

Dean sits back as though this is the first time the thought has ever occurred to him. “There’s nothing going on there,” he insists. “It’s been years.”

Sam just gives him a knowing look.

“I’m serious,” he continues. “She had a whole ass relationship and her boyfriend just died. You remember what that’s like, don’t you? Or has Ruby made you forget?”

His brother’s features contort to something furious and stricken. “That’s a shitty thing to say,” he snaps.

“I’m sorry,” he amends, sounding genuinely penitent. “I just don’t think you’re in a position to be giving out unsolicited advice right now.”

“Whatever. I’m just trying to help. It’s your funeral.” He polishes off his beer and stands to get another, leaving Dean at the table alone.

After a few minutes, Claire returns. 

“Where’s Sam?” she asks as she slides back onto the bench.

“He went to grab another beer.”

“Oh.” Claire stares at her half-finished pint. It’s probably a good thing that she’s not trying to keep pace with them considering they’re almost twice her size.

Sam returns and sits back down. By now, the sun is starting to set and the happy hour crowd is beginning to dissipate. The first thing he says is directed at Claire. “It’s just gonna be you and me for dinner tonight. No car, so we’ll have to go somewhere close to the motel.”

She flits her eyes to Dean. “Where are you going?”

“He’s got a hot date,” Sam answers for him. Dean can’t help but get the sense that Sam is now trying to enact some sort of revenge against him for what he said. 

“Oh,” she repeats carefully. Surprise is etched clearly into her features. “With who?”

“Our bartender,” Sam goes on.

“I see,” is all she says before taking another long sip of her beer, finishing it.

Dean looks at Sam uneasily, and he gives him a cheeky smirk in return.

After Dean drops them off at another bar near the motel, Claire’s drinking escalates considerably. She starts ordering margaritas with dinner and begins to become noticeably intoxicated, to Sam’s chagrin. He’s seen her drunk for what feels like a thousand times at this point, so that’s not the issue. The issue is that this is a completely different setting – not a frat party with a hundred other college students. It’s just the two of them sitting at a hightop, and a lot of terrible shit has happened between then and now. He’s worried the fun, happy drunk Claire that he’s familiar with is going to be exchanged for someone more jaded.

“Eat some nachos,” he instructs, pushing the plate towards her.

Claire dangles a chip between her thumb and index finger and waves it around as she rambles, “I just don’t get how he can pick someone up in, like, point five seconds.”

“That’s Dean for ya.”

“I see now why you said he can be an idiot.”

“Yeah.”

She chomps down on the chip. “So, anyway. What’s the deal with you and this demon,” she asks through a mouthful.

Sam sighs wearily and sucks down a large gulp of his beer. “It’s complicated.”

“Yeah, I’d say. Isn’t she possessing someone? How does that work?”

“The woman she’s possessing was taken off life support. She’s brain dead.”

“How… ethical? It’s still her body, though. How do you know for sure she doesn’t know what’s going on? Aren’t you just taking the demon’s word for it?”

“Yeah, but… Well, Ruby has done a lot to earn my trust. And I was in a pretty bad place while Dean was gone. She was there.”

“Seems opportunistic.”

“Look, I know it’s weird.”

“I’ll say. I don’t think Jess would approve.”

He looks pained and scratches the back of his neck. “Yeah, I know,” he says quietly. “It was just a hookup. I’m done with it now.”

“How long did it take?”

“How long did what take?”

“For you to stop thinking about Jess.”

Sam’s eyebrows knit together as he considers the question. Eventually, he answers, “I never stopped thinking about her. I still do. It just, uh, it just gets easier with time, I guess.”

Claire nods slowly and takes a sip of her third margarita through the straw. “How long, do you think?”

“I don’t know, maybe like a few months? But… part of me will always love her.”

“I’m not sure that I really loved Fletcher,” she blurts out. “I feel like such an awful person even saying that. I told him I did, but I’m not sure.”

Sam looks at her with interest. “That’s just because of what Castiel did to help you get through it,” he tries.

“No. Even before, I mean. While we were in it. I wasn’t sure.” She takes another drink. “When I called his parents to tell them, they were… totally destroyed. Beside themselves. Seeing their grief made me feel sick about it.” She sniffs and stares at the table. “I just don’t think I would have reacted like that, even without Castiel.”

“You can still love someone without being in love with them,” he offers.

“Yeah. Maybe that’s what it was.” She takes another bite of food, her mind churning. “Look at us,” she says eventually. “How much we’ve changed. It’s hard to believe that a few years ago our biggest concerns were getting As in our classes.”

“I know,” he agrees. “I remember when you were a freshman rushing Jess’s sorority. They hazed the shit out of you. You almost needed to get EMSed.”

“That was bad. I was still just a teenager – didn’t know how to hold my liquor back then.” She smiles nostalgically, unaware that Sam is still doubting her ability to hold her liquor. “We’ve known each other for a long time.” 

Sam searches her eyes and sees something strange shining back. “Can I ask you something?”

“Shoot.”

“What’s the deal with you and Dean?”

She gives him a sheepish grin. “I need another marg for that one.”

Sam laughs and orders them another round when the waitress comes by. 

“Okay, so?” he presses.

“We hooked up once,” she answers. “Almost three years ago, the week after Halloween. I’m sure you had your suspicions.”

“So it was just a one-time thing?”

“Yup,” she says, popping the ‘p.’

“Huh.”

“Why ‘huh’?”

“I dunno, I just thought it was more than that.”

“No.”

“Then why’d you show up all those times he was in trouble?”

“I mean, I did have a huge crush on him.”

“But not anymore?”

Claire feels heat rising to her face. “Not anymore,” she confirms.

“Hmm.” 

She can sense that he doesn’t believe her, but she’s done with her drink, and the edges of her vision are starting to blur. She squints to check the time on her phone. It’s after ten. Dean’s probably on his way to the bartender's house by now. “Maybe we should get goin’?” she suggests, hoping to sleep off the feelings of jealousy brewing in her gut.

“Yeah,” he agrees.

The walk back to the motel reveals how drunk Claire actually is. She staggers down a grassy median separating the bar parking lot from the motel, using Sam’s arm as a brace to keep from falling. By the time they get back to the room, they’re both laughing.

“You think Dean has any more booze in his bag?” she asks once they’re inside.

“Undoubtedly. I’m not sure you need any more, though.”

Claire ignores him and walks over to Dean’s duffel. She starts unzipping the pockets, unbothered that this is a violation of privacy. Eventually, she finds a fifth of whiskey, unscrews the cap, and takes a big swig.

She sits against the headboard of her bed, legs curled into her chest. 

“I can’t believe he’s out hooking up with some bartender right now,” she mutters darkly.

“Who, Dean?”

“Yeah.”

“If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were jealous,” he baits.

She looks at him in a way that’s meant to be sharp, but just comes off as foggy as her vision is starting to double.

“No,” she denies. She takes another swig of whiskey and tears start to prick her eyes. “Okay, maybe a little.” Just as the confession bursts forth, she starts to feel something else rising in her throat and rushes to the bathroom.

“Uh oh,” Sam says to himself as he hears her empty the contents of her stomach into the toilet. “You okay?” he calls to her.

When she doesn’t answer, he ventures to the doorway. It’s unclear to him if she’s crying, retching, or both. He walks closer and grabs a hair elastic off of the side of the sink. Then, he crouches beside her and hands it to her. She lifts her head from the toilet bowl and pulls her hair into a messy bun. He can’t tell if her eyes are watering from vomiting or because she’s actually upset.

“Are you alright?” he asks gently.

“No,” she says bitterly, scrubbing at her face and trying to stop the room from spinning. “I’m so confused.”

“About what?”

“Your brother,” she sobs.

Sam chews the inside of his cheek. This is pretty much exactly what he was afraid of happening, and anger towards Dean starts to boil in his chest. He decides, then and there, that he’s going to call him and tell him to come back. Maybe it’s not his best idea ever, and Claire probably doesn’t want him to see her like this. But he’s done cleaning up his brother’s messes for him. And he, too, is a little bit drunk.

So, he leaves the bathroom to go get his phone and makes the call. 

Meanwhile, Dean has just pulled up to Jamie’s apartment and is getting ready to go inside with her when his phone starts buzzing in his pocket.

“Just a sec,” he tells her with a winning smile, pulling the phone out and flipping it open.

“What?” he answers.

“You need to come back here,” Sam tells him bluntly.

“What the hell, Sammy? Why?”

“Claire is freaking out. She got wasted and is now puking and crying.”

“Can’t you deal with that?”

“She wants you.”

Dean can’t wrap his head around what he could possibly mean by that, so he just replies, “Well, I’m a little busy.”

“Oh, I know. And so does she. Hence the puking and crying.”

Dean stares at the dark night sky, processing this information and trying to find the answer to what to do next. On one hand, he was really hoping to get laid tonight. It’s been ages – the time in Hell passed like dog years. On the other, he still has a soft spot for Claire, and his curiosity around what Sam meant is piqued. 

Eventually, he lets out a heavy sigh and simply replies, “Alright,” and snaps the phone closed. He turns his head in Jamie’s direction to find her staring at him with a pretty, expectant smile. “I gotta take a rain check,” he says defeatedly. “There’s been a new development in the case.”

“Can’t it wait til morning?” she asks, walking over to him. 

“I wish. But the law never sleeps.”

She smiles and presses her lips to his sweetly. “Alright, G-Man. But I expect a do-over sometime soon.”

“You bet,” he says, leaning into another kiss. Then, he gets back into the car and heads to the motel, using the fifteen minute drive to contemplate how to handle this situation. He and Sam have dealt with a whole manner of different challenges together, but never one quite like this.

When he arrives, Sam is sitting on his bed reading. Dean raises his brows in irritation and says, “Since when can you not manage one drunk chick?”

Sam just smirks and replies, “She’s in the bathroom.” 

Dean walks into the bathroom to find Claire crumpled against the wall, across from the toilet, looking worse for wear.

“What happened here?” he questions, arms in an outstretched gesture.

She barely glances at him. “Why’re you back?” she grumbles into her knees.

“Sam called me.”

She pulls her face away from her legs and gives him a startled look, like a deer in the headlights. He chuckles lightly and sits on the edge of the bathtub.

“You ever hear that old saying? How does it go… Beer before liquor?”

“‘M fine,” she says unconvincingly, burying her face in her knees again.

“Sam told me you were having a meltdown.”

“That little bitch…”

Dean laughs again and gets up to close the door so Sam can’t hear her further insult him.

“He’s just starting shit,” she continues.

“Why’d you get so hammered?” he asks, sitting back down.

“It’s Oktoberfest.”

He grins, eyes crinkling at the corners. He thinks offhandedly that she’s a pretty funny drunk. “Well, next time give me a heads up so I can join the party.”

“Oh, you were having your own party.”

He cocks his head to the side. 

“With the bartender,” she elaborates.

“So? What’s the problem with that?”

She folds more tightly into herself.

“You jealous?” he theorizes, half-kidding.

A little sniffle escapes her body, and his eyes narrow and his spine straightens.

Lowering his voice to a huskier timbre so Sam doesn’t overhear, he says, “Seriously?”

“I know,” she whines.

“You can’t have it both ways.”

“I know,” she repeats.

He expels a tired breath from his lungs and runs a hand over his hair. He doesn’t know what else to say, and they don’t seem to be getting anywhere, so he just decides on “Let’s get you to bed,” and approaches her carefully. He lifts her up by her elbows to find that she is nearly dead weight. He gives a quick roll of his eyes before making the call to fully carry her, sweeping his left arm under her knees. 

“Sam, need a little help with the door,” he calls into the other room.

After a few stretching moments, Sam appears with an impassive expression and steps aside to allow his brother to pass through. Dean lays Claire on her bed and sloppily pulls the covers over her. She rolls onto her side and buries her face in the pillow, not wanting to look at either of them. Dean drops the plastic trash bin on the side of her bed. 

“Sweet dreams, princess,” he tells her, patting the lump of her body platonically.

Sam watches the interaction with vague amusement, and Dean quirks an eyebrow when he notices.

“Happy?” he asks him.

“I told you she wanted you,” he says with an innocuous shrug.

He points his finger at him and replies, “I’ll remember this.”

This causes Sam to break into an actual smile. “Whatever,” he mumbles.

The next morning, Claire is awoken to Dean shoving a styrofoam cup of coffee in her face.

“Rise and shine, Lindsay Lohan,” he greets, looking down on her with a smirk.

Her eyes focus to see that he and Sam are already dressed in suits.

“What’s going on?” she mumbles groggily.

“There’s been a new development in the case,” Sam tells her. “Another body. Different MO this time.”

She sits up and tries to rub the sleep from her face. She doesn’t feel great, but she expects she’d feel worse if she hadn’t gotten half of what she’d drank out the night before. A spike of adrenaline hits her as she thinks back to what unfolded with acute embarrassment. She snatches the cup of coffee from Dean.

“I suggest you freshen up so we can get going, sunshine,” he says. 

“Enough with the nicknames,” she scoffs, climbing out of bed. In fairness to him, she does feel disgusting and desperately needs to brush her teeth.

She uses the time in the shower to think about why her heart couldn’t bear the thought of Dean with someone else, even after all this time. She thinks about how irrational it is, though not exactly out of character. Eventually, she decides to give herself some grace and blames her heightened emotional state on everything else that has happened to her recently. And anyway, it could have been worse. She could have tried to make out with Sam, or streaked, or something similarly insane. A few drunken tears aren’t so bad when you think of it that way.

The ride to the morgue is awkward. Claire can’t believe that Sam actually called Dean and asked him to cut his date short all because she got too drunk, and she’s not happy about it. For what? So she could humiliate herself in front of both of them? Sam has seen her in that state before, but not Dean. Plus, she can hardly remember what she said, which is even more anxiety-inducing. 

“Big night last night, huh?” Dean asks on the drive over, trying to lighten the mood. He peers into the rearview mirror to see her simply shrug in response. Clearly she’s not ready to joke about it, he surmises. 

At the morgue, they examine the latest victim. Claire’s stomach has not settled enough for her to be able to stay in the room after they unzip the body bag and the wafting scent of rotting flesh is unleashed into the room.

“She’s just a trainee,” Dean tells the sheriff with a thin-lipped smile. 

He discusses the findings with them; wolf hairs. Though, shockingly, the heart is still intact. They thank him for the information and head out to digest it on their own. 

When Claire exits the bathroom, Dean is standing there waiting for her.

“Is it normal for feds to wait for their trainees at the door of the lady’s room?” she asks wryly.

He holds his hands up in surrender. “I was just checkin’ to see if you were okay.”

“I’m fine,” she says without looking at him.

“Y’know, we should talk about last night,” he tells her as he follows her down the hallway. 

“Maybe. But not right now, and sure as hell not here.”

“Fine,” he agrees. “You just seem kinda pissed, is all.”

“I am pissed. At Sam. He shouldn’t have called you.”

“At least we can agree on that.”

They reconvene at the same bar she and Sam were at the night before.

“So we’ve got a werewolf and a vampire monster mashing in the same town,” Dean remarks.

“But it’s not a real werewolf or vampire,” Sam replies, “Real werewolves don’t have actual wolf hair.”

“Yeah, definitely a weird one.”

Claire is looking a bit green as she picks delicately at the plate of french fries in front of her. 

“Y’know, if you’re not feeling up for it, we can handle this on our own,” Sam offers, feeling bad that she’s clearly not happy with him.

“No, I’m fine,” she insists, staring at a glob of ketchup. Dean is watching her with a somewhat pained expression.

Sam’s eyes dart between them in slow realization. Then, he says, “Oh shoot. I just realized I forgot something, uh, really important at the motel. I’ll be right back.”

Dean watches his brother’s figure walk out of the bar before turning his attention back to her. She still won’t meet his eyes.

“So why did Sam call me back last night, Claire?” he asks softly.

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

“He seemed to think you were upset about something.”

She just shrugs again. “It was stupid.”

“What was?”

Finally, she looks at him. “Me. I was being stupid. I drank too much and… I don’t know. I couldn’t deal with everything that I was feeling.”

“...Which was?”

“You’re really gonna make me say it? I was jealous, okay? Are you satisfied? And I know I don’t have any right to be.”

Dean is suddenly keenly aware of how empty the bar is, and how on-display she must feel. He throws down a few bills and suggests, “How ‘bout we go for a little walk?”

“But Sam-”

“Sam’s a big boy. He’ll figure out what to do with himself for a while.”

Not in the mood to do Sam any favors anyway, she hops down from the barstool and follows him outside into the bright light of the day. They walk wordlessly past a strip mall for a few minutes before either of them speaks again. Dean is the one to break the silence. 

He says, “Y’know, if I’m being honest, I think I would’ve felt the same way if I were you.”

This stops Claire in her tracks and she turns to scour his face desperately, searching for signs of deception. “Really?”

He comes to a halt, too, and studies her back. “Yeah. I mean, obviously I would’ve handled it differently,” he teases. More seriously, he adds, “But I get it. I wasn’t exactly jumping for joy to find out you had a boyfriend, but… It’s complicated. It’s gonna be the three of us for a while.”

“I think being with you guys again is bringing back some old feelings for me,” she admits. “But, I don’t know. Everything else is so fresh, still.”

“I get it,” he repeats, and he does. He’s feeling conflicted, too. If they were to start something up again, it would completely upend the current dynamic. The one night stands are so much easier because they scratch the itch without any of the normal expectations. That’s why he’s gone that route for pretty much his entire life. But now, things have changed and he’s stuck between a rock and a hard place. He has needs, but the cost is steep if it means torturing her to meet them. But then, what’s the alternative? Getting into a full-blown relationship? That brings a whole slew of other issues that he doesn’t even want to begin to think about. There’s no winning.

His phone buzzing in his pocket rouses him from these thoughts. 

“What’s up?” he answers.

“There’s another body,” Sam tells him. “At the museum. Where are you guys?”

“We were walkin’ off the burgers. Why don’t you swing by and pick us up on the way? We’re just down the road from the bar.”

Sam is pulling up to the sidewalk in the Impala within minutes.

“Three old school monsters in the same town,” Sam remarks on the way. “There’s something we’re missing.”

“This is just getting weirder and weirder. I’ve never heard of an actual mummy killing someone – especially not in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania.”

“I don’t even think real mummies exist. Wouldn’t they just be ghosts, ghouls, or zombies?”

When they arrive at the scene, it’s clear that the murder was the work of a fraud. The sarcophagus and dry ice machine lead to a local costume and special effects store.

“This is stupid,” Sam comments.

Dean’s phone abruptly starts ringing again.

“Hello?” he answers.

“Hey, it’s Jamie.”

“Oh hey, Jamie. If you’re hoping for the rain check right now, I’m sorry, but it’s not a great time.”

“No, it’s not that. I think… I think someone is following me.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m just walking home from work.”

“Alright, go wait back at the bar and we can give you an escort.”

“Okay, thanks.”

Dean hangs up and turns to Sam and Claire. “Gotta go,” he orders.

“What’s going on?” Sam asks.

“Jamie said someone’s following her. Could be our guy.”

“Who’s Jamie?” Claire asks.

“The bartender from yesterday,” he clarifies with a faint grimace, knowing it’s a sore spot. Luckily for him, she doesn’t react.

The three of them pile back into the car and head towards the tavern where she works. When they arrive, Dean is relieved to see her standing behind the bar with her coworker, Lucy, through the window. They all walk in to Lucy pouring five drinks.

“The knight in shining armor arrives,” she exclaims. “With company. How about a round on us for your troubles?”

“Thanks,” Dean says. “These are my partners, Sam and Claire.”

“They don’t usually send feds in pairs of three, do they?” Lucy asks.

“She’s a trainee,” he recites easily.

“Ah, I see. Well, Jamie told me about the stalker, so I came straight here to wait with her.” 

“You’re a good friend,” Claire says. 

“The best,” Jamie agrees.

“You must live pretty close by to have gotten here so quickly,” she continues.

“I happened to be in the area.”

Everyone has started drinking their beers, but Claire hasn’t touched hers yet. Dean nudges her with his elbow. “No better cure than hair of the dog,” he says sagely.

She takes a begrudging sip. As the effervescent liquid hits her tongue, she has to admit that she does feel a little better. That is, until she starts to get tunnel vision.

Sam is the first to come-to, tied to a board. He’s also the first to figure out what’s going on. When Dean shakes his head awake, he tells him, “It’s a shifter.”

“How do you know?”

“It’s the only thing that fits. Someone drugged those drinks – most likely Lucy.”

“Bravo!” they hear coming from a platform above them. “You figured it out, Van Helsing.”

Dean’s eyes struggle to adjust to the dim lighting as he looks around the room. “Where are Claire and Jamie?” he demands.

“My brides are indisposed at the moment.”

“You crazy son of a bitch. You are not Dracula – you get that, right?”

“I am all monsters!” he exclaims.

All of a sudden, the door rings, and the shifter says, “Please, excuse me.”

Several beats go by, and then all of a sudden Claire and Jamie sneak into the room and descend the staircase. They’re clad in identical silky, white nightgowns that leave little to the imagination.

“What the hell are you guys wearing?” Dean hisses.

“He must’ve changed us into these while we were out,” Claire replies, shuddering at the thought. “The dumbass didn’t think to tie us up, though.”

“Is it some kinda rule that all shifters are pervs?” 

The blood drains from her face and she stops abruptly. “It’s a shifter?” she asks in terror.

“It’s okay. I’ve got a gun in the back of my jeans and a knife on my ankle,” he instructs. “One of you grab that, the other work on getting us free.”

“On it,” Jamie obeys, snaking her hand under the hem of Dean’s shirt to grab the gun from his waistband.

Claire apparently pulled the short straw and rolls his jeans up to grab the knife from the strap above his boot. She tries to rid herself of thoughts about how weird it is to be up close and personal with his hairy leg and quickly works on cutting the ropes.

The moment of two scantily-clad women tearing at his clothing is not lost on him, and he flashes Sam his eyebrows and a cocky, lopsided grin. He’s met with an all too familiar eye roll in reply.

Once Dean is free, he takes the gun from Jamie.

“You got silver bullets?” Sam asks as Claire shifts her focus to cutting him free.

“Always.”

“Silver bullets?” Jamie repeats in confusion.

“We’ll explain later,” he replies.

Just then, ‘Dracula’ reappears at the top of the staircase. Dean aims the gun at him and releases the safety, looking very much like an actual cop. 

“The jig’s up, bozo. Whatever freaky shit you were planning on doing with these two is very much not happening.”

“You, Harker, you must die.”

He lunges towards him, and Dean doesn’t hesitate to pull the trigger. The shifter crumples to the ground in a heap, his arms outstretched towards Jamie. 

“Do not weep for me, Mina,” he says before dying. Several moments pass where they just stare.

“He was seriously disturbed,” Claire remarks eventually, eyes still fixed on the body. “He actually thought he was Dracula.”

“Yeah, a real freakshow,” Dean agrees.

She turns to Jamie and says, “Let’s go find our clothes.”

They drop Jamie off at her house, and Dean walks her to the door. Claire averts her eyes as Jamie gives him a grateful kiss on the front step, color rising to her face. What she doesn’t see is that Dean doesn’t really react. Sam watches her with unbridled curiosity through the rearview mirror.

When Dean returns to the car, he also spares her a cautious glance, but doesn’t say anything. The drive back to the motel is spent in an uncomfortable silence. They arrive back at the room, and Dean is the first to speak. 

He says, “Dammit. I meant to stop by a liquor store on the way home. I was hoping to have a little night cap, and I forgot that Jack Sparrow here drank the last of my stash.”

Sam gives him a bemused look, but he continues, “Sammy, you mind making a run?”

His confusion deepens, and Dean shoots him a wink. 

Sam suddenly realizes he wants him to get lost. “Oh, uh, sure,” he says, picking the car keys off the table. “I’ll, uh, be right back.”

When he’s gone, Dean turns back towards Claire, who’s looking at him shiftily. The acidic sting of jealousy is still lingering in her stomach, and she suddenly feels exposed, like he can see right through her.

He walks closer and brushes a strand of hair behind her ear. The graze of his fingertips against her cheekbone is enough to send electric currents through her entire body.

His lips are on hers before her brain has a chance to register what is happening. It happens so quickly, so feverishly, that her body reciprocates based on sheer instinct. Their tongues and teeth clash together, a reflection of their desperately muddled wills. His hands are in her hair, on her face, on the small of her back, drawing her closer. But he doesn’t need to. She is already drawn to him by some sort of intangible magnetism, her heart battering against her sternum as it tries to press her forward and into him.

He staggers backwards until he comes into contact with the wall. She breaks the kiss, but keeps their foreheads pressed together. “Wait,” she pants. “We can’t.”

Dean straightens and stares at her, the lust in his eyes mingled with bewilderment. Claire, on the other hand, looks pained.

“I’m sorry. It’s too soon,” she continues. “Fletcher… he’s hardly in the ground.” She covers her face to hide the rogue tears suddenly amassing in her eyes and clouding her vision.

“It’s okay,” he says hoarsely. “I understand.”

“I’m such a horrible person,” she cries.

“You’re not. I just… y’know. I just got out of jail, basically. And I thought you wanted this.”

Claire removes her hands from her face to study him. She thinks offhandedly how ironic it is that a couple of years ago, she was chasing after him, and now it’s the opposite. He resisted her then because, she fears, he thought she was too good for him, that he would only end up hurting her. And now, now that she’s already been sucked into this world by the friggin’ will of God, she’s the one resisting. Resisting something that her body so clearly yearns for. And that in itself brings on another stab of guilt – she shouldn’t want this the way that she does. If she were a good person, she wouldn’t.

“I-I don’t know what I want,” she confesses.

“Talk about mixed signals,” he says more sternly.

“I know. I’m sorry. I just… need more time.”

He runs his hand over his hair. “You’re killin’ me.”

“I know. It’s not fair, I know.”

Claire steps back and hews some space between them. He searches her face for a moment, a look of seriousness overtaking his features as his green eyes trace the tiny beads of water on her lower lashes down to her swollen lips.

“I’m not gonna pressure you into doing something you’re not sure about,” he says finally, and she can’t help but feel like she’s being given some sort of ultimatum. 

The impossibility of the situation suddenly feels suffocating. She starts, “Dean, I-” but the words wilt in her throat. She doesn’t know what to say, what to do. 

She’s spared from finishing her sentence by two firm knocks on the door. Then, in comes Sam. 

“I’m back,” he announces, avoiding looking at them straight on. “Hope I’m not interrupting anything!”

“You’re not,” Claire answers quickly.

What she can’t know is that Dean still thinks about the djinn’s trance often. Every time he sees her, every time he touches her, he’s reminded of it. He thinks about how he was literally brought back from the dead and given a second chance at life. A chance to do everything he didn’t do the first time – to have what he wouldn’t let himself have. And he’s impatient for it. He doesn’t want to waste any more time.

But if he has to, he’ll wait. Anything worth having at all is worth waiting for.

Chapter Text

It’s not long after the Canonsburg case that Claire finally has a long-awaited vision about the next seal, which sends them to Moscow, Idaho. It’s about to be Halloween, and the raising of the demon Samhain is Lilith’s next target.

Halloween brings back strange memories for all of them. For Sam, it’s pretty clear cut. His hatred for the holiday – if you can even call it that – has been renewed with exceptional vigor. 

But for Claire, it’s a bit more obscure. True enough, it’s the three-year anniversary of losing her best friend. But it’s also the three-year anniversary of meeting Dean, an event that, on its face, was the first falling domino in the eventual collapse of her entire life. But the feelings it raises are not so straightforward, as much as she hates to admit it.

Driving through town and seeing the quaint, close-knit neighborhoods decked out in cobwebs and jack-o-lanterns recalls pleasant memories from her childhood. She and her brothers would go trick or treating from house to house in their cul-de-sac, usually chaperoned by their father. Charlie dressed as Batman for five years straight. He was so little, then. Barely more than a toddler. His stubby legs would tire quickly, but he was so insistent on keeping up with her and Ryan. By the end of the night, someone would have to carry him.

These memories are tainted now, bringing with them the bitter sting of loss. That chubby-cheeked child is gone forever.

Claire blinks back the sting of tears, oblivious to Dean watching her through the rearview mirror. Right now, they are on a literal witch hunt. 

When they arrive at the motel, Castiel is there, accompanied by another angel that they’ve never met before. Uriel, he says his name is. They warn them about the seal, repeating what they already know from Claire’s vision. However, instead of entreating them to stop it, they instruct them to leave; they plan to raze the entire town.

Now, having just driven through it, the three of them are acutely aware of how many innocent lives this town contains. How many children. How many people who don’t deserve to be collateral damage. Dean especially is vehemently opposed to their plan. 

Eventually, the angels decide to give them a chance to stop it on their own.

“We need to find this witch, and fast,” Dean says once they’re gone.

Sam has his laptop open and is biting the nail on his thumb. “Check this out,” he starts. “There have been two strange deaths here in the last week. I say we head to the crime scenes and see what we can find.”

They find hex bags at the scenes of both crimes. Back at the motel, Sam dissects the little black velvet pouches held together with twine. They’re filled with baby bones and extinct herbs, meaning whatever type of witch they’re dealing with is particularly ancient and nasty.

“How does this work?” Claire asks, gesturing to the contents laid out on the table. 

“What do you mean?” Sam replies.

“Like, can anyone be a witch if you do the spells right, or is it some sort of power you’re born with?”

“You considerin’ a career change?” Dean pipes up.

“Just curious.”

“As far as I know, it’s a little of both, or of either,” Sam answers. “Bobby has done simple spells before and he’s not a witch. Even you were able to do the spell to put the Witnesses to rest. But there are also some people out there who have hereditary power.”

Claire chews her lip contemplatively. “Interesting,” she remarks.

“The type of witch we’re looking for made a pact with a demon,” Dean says. “Most likely Samhain himself. That’s where they’re drawing their power from, meaning if they raise him…”

“They get even more powerful,” she finishes.

“Exactly,” says Sam.

The scorched baby bones end up being the prevailing clue, allowing them to hone in on the local high school. One of the victims was a student there, and the other victim employed a babysitter who went to the same school. They narrow their search to someone who had access to the kilns in the ceramics studio, eventually settling on the teacher himself.

But they’re coming up short on time. Tonight is Halloween, meaning they only have a few hours to stop the seal from being broken. They catch wind of a big high school party taking place at a local mausoleum later tonight. What better place to raise an army of ghosts, ghouls, and zombies than a cemetery? 

Sam and Claire can’t help but be reminded of their time at Stanford, where the Halloween Mausoleum party was one of the biggest events on campus. This thrusts bittersweet memories of Jess to the forefront of both their minds, especially upon seeing the place, which bears an uncanny resemblance to the Stanford Mausoleum.

By the time they get there, it’s already begun. Students are locked within the crypt, being picked off by ghosts and zombies like lame ducks. Claire and Dean work frantically to free them while Sam pursues Samhain deeper beneath the building.

Then, the two split up. Claire continues to lead the students to safety while Dean races to back Sam up. 

When he finds him, he feels as though a knife has literally been jabbed into the center of his back, just like what happened to Sam those years ago. Sam is exorcising Samhain. With his mind. Just as he vowed he wouldn’t.

Dean can only watch on with helpless rage and fear as it happens. 

Before the end of it, Claire rejoins them in the mausoleum and watches the scene in horror. The sight of it causes dread to pool in her stomach, some furtive part of her body sensing that this is innately wrong. Blood is gushing from Sam’s nose.

“This is his power?” she hisses to Dean.

He takes her by the shoulders and pulls her away from the doorway. “C’mon,” he says gruffly. “He’s got it under control.”

When it’s done, Sam chases after them. “Dean, wait!” he calls loudly into the echoey hallway. 

Dean keeps plowing ahead without looking at him. “Save it, Sam,” he growls through gritted teeth. 

“It was the only way.”

“You swore you wouldn’t!”

“Would you rather I just let all those people die?” he counters, his voice bristling.

Dean spins around to face him. At times like these, he truly hates being several inches shorter than his younger brother. He jabs his finger into the bones in his chest and says, “There are other ways, and you know it. You should’ve used the knife.”

“He was too powerful,” he insists.

Claire wedges herself between them. “Guys, stop,” she says. “We have more pressing issues. The seal, it was broken.”

“Yeah, we failed,” Dean acknowledges darkly. “Again. It’s only a matter of time before those winged assholes fly down here to say I told you so.”

“We’re losing,” she says, and no one bothers to ask how she knows that.

“Would you have rather we let them nuke the whole damn town?” Dean demands, pained.

“That’s not what I’m saying,” she amends. “What I am saying is that we need to take another approach. The visions. They’re too slow. What if… what if we go straight to the source? Straight to Lilith and put a stop to all this.”

“I tried that,” Sam says. “It didn’t work.”

“Isn’t that what you were training for with Ruby?” Dean asks. “Some big face-off?”

“Yes,” Sam admits. “But didn’t you just say you wanted me to stop this?”

“That hasn’t changed. But maybe Ruby’s got a lead on where Lilith is. Demon radio.”

“I could call her,” he suggests cautiously. “But how are we going to stop her if you don’t want me to use my powers?”

“We’ve got angels in our corner, now. That’s not an edge we had before. Cas definitely has the juice to blast that bitch to timbuktu. They wanna help? Let them help.”

“Okay, so what,” Sam starts, his mind brimming as he thinks through the plan. “We work with Ruby to find out where Lilith is, then we call Castiel to finish her off?”

“Why not?” Claire says. “It seems as good as anything else we can come up with.”

Back at the motel, Sam makes the call to Ruby. She’s able to get there disturbingly quickly, and before long there’s a knock at the door. 

“Well, well, well,” she says upon entering, her arms crossed over her chest. “Look who’s come crawling back.” She’s wearing a maroon leather jacket and her thick, dark hair falls past her shoulders in loose waves. Claire thinks offhandedly that she’s quite attractive for a demon.

“Thanks for coming,” Sam says diplomatically, closing the door behind her.

She squares herself to the three of them and stares directly at Claire. “So, what is she?” 

Sam and Dean both look at the redhead, then back at Ruby. Dean narrows his eyes at her and asks, “What do you think she is?”

“No clue. The demons are going crazy trying to figure it out. Lots of chatter about it.”

“How can you tell she’s different?” Sam asks.

“There’s like… a glow around her. Some are calling it a god spell. In other words, no-go-zone. No one’s ever seen anything like it before. So, what is she? I know you’ve been tangling with angels. You must know.”

“It’s none of your business,” Dean answers before anyone else can. He sure as hell doesn’t trust Ruby with this information.

“You’re really not going to tell me after you called me here to ask for my help? Unbelievable,” she huffs.

“You don’t need to know,” Sam says, backing his brother up.

“Really, Sam? After all the trust we’ve built?” she asks in a sultry tone. “Fine. Whatever. Keep your little secrets. What is it you fuckups need?”

“Stopping the seals from breaking isn’t working. We need to find Lilith.”

She rolls her vessel’s almost-black eyes. “We talked about this, Sam. You’re not strong enough, and you’re sure as hell not getting any stronger without practice. You’re getting flabby.”

“I just sent Samhain back to hell,” he bites back.

“Yeah? And how’d that go? Judging by the blood on your shirt, it was a struggle. And now your energy is totally sapped. You don’t have a snowball’s chance against Lilith.”

“Sam isn’t going to do it,” Dean interjects. “We’re going to ask the angel brigade for help.”

“Are you fucking crazy?” she says, panicked. “I’m not getting within a hundred miles of one of those things. They smite first, ask questions later.”

“You don’t have to,” Sam says. “We won’t call them until we get closer to Lilith. You can be long gone by then.”

Ruby bites her lower lip and shifts her weight from one foot to another. “Okay,” she finally allows. “I’ll do a little digging, but no promises – I’m not exactly a fan favorite with the demon crew anymore.”

Without further ado, she storms back over to the door, wrenches it open, and disappears into the night.

“Charming,” Claire drawls once she’s gone.

“My thoughts exactly,” Dean agrees.

“We need her help,” Sam insists.

“Yeah, well, I don’t have to like it,” his brother snaps back.

The next morning as they’re packing up to blow out of town, Sam’s phone rings shrilly.

“Ruby?”

“The one and only. I was able to find out some useful information. Turns out Lilith’s not the only one breaking seals.”

“Okay, so? How does that help us?”

“I’m not sure that it helps you at all. It mostly just means that even if you do gank Lilith, someone else might just crop up to finish the job. I did, however, also get a lead on the next seal they’re targeting.”

“Who’s they?”

“Another big daddy demon. Alastair. You’re gonna wanna head to Greybull, Wyoming.”

Sam snaps his phone shut and stares into his duffel bag blankly. He’d thought all along that Lilith was orchestrating this whole thing alone, even if she wasn’t the one actually doing all of the dirty work herself. For example, he assumed that the witches raising Samhain were doing so at Lilith’s request. The knowledge that there are other high-ranking demons helping is disturbing.

“What’d she say?” Dean asks while picking up the stray articles of clothing he’s strewn around the motel room.

“It’s not good news,” he says slowly, still processing. “She said Lilith isn’t the only demon working on breaking the seals.”

“Who else?”

“Some demon named Alastair.”

All of a sudden, the blood drains from Dean’s face, leaving him looking uncharacteristically pallid. He freezes where he stands, jaw working.

“What?” Claire questions quickly, noticing the change in his demeanor. “You know him?”

“Y-yeah,” he breathes out. “I know him.”

Chapter Text

The next seal is sacrificing a reaper under the solstice moon. Dean comes up with the genius idea of using astral projection to warn the reapers and stop it. That’s what leads them to where they are now, in a woodland-themed motel room in Greybull, Wyoming. Dean and Sam called a psychic they’ve worked with before, Pamela Barnes, to help propel them into the spirit realm. 

Pamela’s hand is cool but firm as it holds onto Claire's. She remarks, “Well, well, well. What are you?”

The redhead looks between Dean and Sam in dismay, wondering whether or not to tell the truth.

“She’s a prophet,” Dean answers gruffly for her.

“Very interesting,” she replies. “You have a similar… signature to a psychic, but it’s a little different. A little more sparkly.” 

“Sparkly?” Claire repeats in disbelief. 

“God-given.”

Pamela then launches into a tirade about how ill-advised Dean’s plan is. It’s enough to make Claire nervous. 

“Maybe I should stay behind and keep Pamela company,” she suggests skittishly. “Learn some tips on how to deal with the visions.”

“That’s fine, if that’s what you want,” Sam says. “We can handle this on our own.”

“It’ll be safer that way,” Dean agrees. “You can be the eyes of the operation.”

“Nice,” Pamela drawls. 

“You know what I mean,” he amends.

Before long, the boys are both laid out on their respective twin beds, hands folded across their stomachs. Even before they drift into a dormant state, they look a bit too corpse-like for Claire’s liking. 

Pamela utters an incantation. When they don’t show any signs of waking, it becomes clear that the spell has worked. 

“Have you been psychic your whole life?” Claire asks.

“For as long as I can remember,” the other woman confirms. She’s sitting in a chair between the brothers’ beds, spine straight as an arrow. Her hands are clasped in her lap and her sunglass lens are staring sightlessly in front of her. Claire notes that her style of dress is oddly similar to Ruby’s, and briefly entertains the thought that maybe she ought to invest in a leather jacket.

“This one’s vegan,” she says, reading her mind.

Claire staggers back where she’s standing, bracing herself against a dresser. “How’d you do that?” 

“It’s one of my many talents. I may not be able to see you, but I’m lucky enough that I had an extra sense to start with.”

Slowly, Claire walks closer to the other woman, eventually leaning against the very edge of the foot of Dean’s bed. “Do your powers hurt?”

Pamela shifts her body in the direction of Claire’s soft, silky voice. “Only sometimes.” She removes her sunglasses to reveal two white, plastic orbs stuck in her empty eye sockets.

Claire gasps, which elicits a laugh from Pamela. She replaces her glasses swiftly.

“How did that happen?” Claire questions.

“I was visited by a fallen angel who was looking to find her grace. I found it for her, but it wasn’t pretty.”

“What’s that? Grace?”

“It’s what makes an angel an angel.”

“Otherwise they’re what, human?”

“Something like that.”

Claire chews her lower lip as she contemplates this, letting her words sink in. “My visions are excruciating,” she tells her eventually.

“Must be some sort of trend with these guys.”

“I don’t suppose you have any tips on making it more tolerable, do you?”

“I wish I did, but your gift is different from mine.”

A serene silence descends upon them for several minutes. Claire squirms into a more comfortable position, drawing her knees up to sit cross-legged on the bed. She casts a fleeting glance to Dean, who’s still in a sleeplike trance. His features have relaxed entirely into a rare, peaceful expression. The rhythmic rise and fall of his muscular chest is the only thing that assures her that he’s still alive. She stops herself as her eyes are tempted to wander further down his figure; it feels off-limits to be able to examine him like this, when he’s so vulnerable.

“So, is that the one you picked?” Pamela questions with a knowing smirk pulling her lips upwards.

Claire’s mouth parts into an oval of outrage, but Pamela cuts her off. “Please,” she says, holding up a hand. “Psychic, remember? I don’t blame you. They’re both hunks. I was only asking so I’d know which one to go after myself.”

She clamps her mouth shut before licking her lips. She doesn’t know what to say, so she says nothing.

“A little unsolicited advice?” Pamela goes on. “Life’s short. Too short to get in your own way.”

Still, Claire says nothing. Every time she looks at Dean, she feels like she’s being stabbed in the stomach twice. One blade of guilt, another of desire. Her body is unable to untangle the two feelings, and now guilt and desire sting like one in the same.

It’s more than just desire, too. They’ve been through too much, known each other for too long, for it to not have transfigured into something more. Something totally unique, some nameless marker on the road between friends and lovers. They’re not quite either. They’re something in-between. And the type of love she feels for him is something in between that, too.

Because she does love him, in a way. She can at least admit that. She wouldn’t have prayed for him every night or cried herself to sleep over him if she didn’t.

She tries to banish these thoughts from her mind, and wonders briefly if Pamela can hear them. If she does, she doesn’t say anything about it, and she’s grateful for that small kindness.

A few hours pass before anything happens. They’re almost able to delude themselves that they’re going to get in and out of this mission completely unscathed. But before too long, there is a rustling at the window, and the front door begins to quake. They latch it shut. Sam and Dean left them Ruby’s knife, and Claire is gripping the hilt so tightly that all the color has left her knuckles and her nails are slicing into her palm.

Someone bursts through the door and goes straight for Pamela, slashing at her with a knife of his own. Claire leaps onto his back and tries to plunge the Kurdish blade into the meat of his shoulder, but he shakes her off and throws her against the wall. She hits her head hard and slides to the floor.

The rest all happens so quickly. 

Pamela screams the incantation to wake Sam and Dean. The demon’s blade slides into her gut. At almost the same time, Sam rises from the bed. He uses his power to corner the demon and pin it against the dresser. 

“Sam, no!” Claire shouts, her voice sounding foreign and distant to her own ears. “You said you wouldn’t!”

Sam ignores her. He pours his full energy into exorcising the demon, and only when he’s done does Dean wake up. He rushes towards Claire, who’s still crumpled against the wall. Her hair forms a long, shiny curtain, obscuring half of her face. He crouches in front of her and pushes it away, holding his hand to her head to keep it pulled back. His eyes dart back and forth as he inspects her for damage.

“Are you okay?” he demands urgently. His nose is two inches from touching hers, and she can feel the warmth of his breath on her face.

“I’m fine,” she says uncertainly. She lets him help her into a standing position.

“Pamela,” he murmurs, watching her clutch her stomach.

“It’s okay,” she says. “No one dies in this town, remember?”

“I think that’s about to change,” Sam says. 

As if on cue, blood starts spurting from the wound. It slides between her fingers, bright red and viscous. She falls into Sam’s arms and clutches him tightly as she whispers something inaudible into his ear. And then, she’s gone.

“Fucking A, man!” Dean shouts, hands interlocked at the back of his head. “Can we not have a single win?” His inquiry is directed upwards, towards the ceiling. Maybe to the angels. Maybe to God himself. Or, more likely, to nothing in particular. 

“Did you stop it?” Claire asks quietly.

“Yeah,” Sam replies, still cradling Pamela’s limp form.

“What did she say to you?” Dean demands.

Sam looks away, brows knitted tightly together. 

“You didn’t,” his brother accuses, a look of realization washing over him.

“I had to,” he insists. 

“The knife is right there, Sam!” he yells. He beckons wildly to Ruby’s blade lying uselessly on the floor. 

“There wasn’t time. He had already stabbed Pamela. He was going for Claire next.”

Dean’s expression softens as he redirects his attention to Claire, as if to confirm this statement. If it was the only way to save her, maybe he could forgive his brother’s betrayal. However, whatever he reads in her eyes causes his features to rearrange into a piercing glare.

“Bullshit,” he snarls at Sam. He turns towards the door and storms out of the room.

The close encounter that killed Pamela has put the fragility of their situation into sharper focus. Claire isn’t a fighter. That much is clear to Dean, and he didn’t even see the way the demon swatted her away as though she was nothing more than a gnat. This epiphany fills him with abject dread. 

Women can do the job, he’s always said. But they need to have the gumption and the skills. It doesn't appear that Claire has either.

It’s this realization that prompts him to take her aside after Pamela’s funeral. They just buried one friend. He’s sure as hell not going to bury another. 

At first, Claire is having flashbacks of Jess’s memorial service back in Palo Alto. But no, this is totally different. For one, it’s freezing cold. The air nips at the skin on her face, turning her nose and cheeks pink. She pulls her inadequate wool jacket tighter around her throat, moving out of the shade of the church steeple and into the sun’s inviting warmth. The days are short this time of year, and it’s at its highest point in the sky right now. Her eyes squint to scan the horizon. The landscape in their immediate vicinity is totally flat, but it’s a clear day, and in the distance they can see the Rockies.

When Dean begins to speak, he thinks for a moment that this is the most beautiful Claire has ever looked, all rosy cheeks and gleaming eyes. It makes his heart twinge in his chest like it’s being constricted in barbed wire.

“We need to teach you how to defend yourself,” he says without preamble.

She flits her pure blue gaze to his. Her pupils have been reduced to mere pinpricks in the sunlight. “Do you think it’s my fault?” she asks cautiously.

“No,” he replies, maybe too quickly. “No, that’s not why. It’s not your fault. But if Sam hadn’t woken up in time…”

He doesn’t need to finish the sentence. She nods and looks down at the hardened earth beneath her boots.

“You can do this,” he goes on. “I know hunters even smaller than you who can still kick some serious ass. But you have to want to learn.”

“I do,” she says, but he’s not convinced.

“Then why haven’t you ever asked?” He pauses for a moment, waiting for a reply that never comes. He goes on, “You need to get mad. Think about everything they took from you.”

She looks at him again, and he can feel her eyes searing into his soul. “Should I ask Cas to undo it?”

He looks away, raises his eyebrows in a pained expression, and scrubs his hand over the stubble on his face. “I’m not sure.”

“What do I need to learn?” she asks, changing the subject.

“How to shoot, for one. How to fight.”

“So you’re gonna train me in hand-to-hand combat?” she asks with a quirked eyebrow and the phantom of a smile.

It takes some effort for him to keep his mouth pressed into a straight line. Is she flirting with him? He shakes the notion from his head. “You wouldn’t be the first, sweetheart. Who do you think taught Sam?”

So, it’s settled. They start tomorrow.

The workouts they get on hunts are more than enough to keep Sam and Dean in fighting shape. Dean isn’t sure if he’s ever actually set foot in a gym before now. But that’s where they are currently, under harsh fluorescent lighting that still isn’t enough to dull how attractive Claire looks in her black yoga pants and skimpy tank top. 

He’s beginning to think that maybe this wasn’t a good idea, after all. 

But he’s in too deep now to back out. He’s wearing his typical jeans and t-shirt, and the pair of them probably look like some strange self-defense charity case next to the hanging punching bag. The heat is cranked in the gym and it’s borderline too-hot, the scent of sweat and disinfectant mingling humidly in the air.

He starts with the basics: how to throw a punch without breaking your hand. How to strengthen your wrists. How to protect your major internal organs. 

Claire’s wrist, by the way, is barely larger than the circumference of a silver dollar. He feels ill at the thought of how easy it would be to snap it as he shows her how to hold it steady. 

He soon finds that she actually has a surprising amount of strength packed into her unassuming body, and great stamina to boot. 

“Did you do any kind of training before this?” he asks as he holds the punching bag steady.

“I ran. A lot,” she says in between blows. 

“You’re actually pretty strong.”

“Don’t sound so surprised,” she snorts. Her knuckles come into contact with the synthetic material one more time.

“You have good balance,” he comments.

“I was a cheerleader in high school,” she says a bit sheepishly, stopping to wipe her hairline with the back of her hand.

He gives her a roguish smirk and tries to picture it in his head. It’s surprisingly easy to imagine her in a pleated skirt with pompoms in her hands, doing high kicks and back handsprings. He would've liked to see it, in another life, and he doesn't allow himself to contemplate why.

After a few days, they graduate to actual fake fighting. They don’t exactly have the luxury of time, so he’s trying to jam in as many of the essentials in as short of a period as possible. What they don’t know is that while they’re at the gym, Sam’s undertaking a sort of training of his own alongside Ruby. Not only did he not heed Pamela’s warning, he’s actively flouting it.

And Sam’s training is leading to just as many compromising positions as Claire’s. When the simulated fighting begins, it means Dean’s hands are all over her. Lifting her up, pushing her down. Her heart is working a mile a minute thanks to more than just exertion. If he notices that she’s frazzled, he doesn’t comment on it. Doesn’t comment on her thighs wrapping around his neck, on his groin digging into her ass as she tries to get out of a chokehold. This alone is a shock. Maybe it’s because he’s using every shred of concentration he has to stop his body from reacting the way that it wants to. Forty hellish years below followed by four bone-dry months above have made certain parts of him extremely sensitive.

There is one particular moment when he throws her down on the mat and drives his forearm into her throat that Claire feels especially tingly about. He presses his body into hers to pin her in place. It doesn’t hurt, and she’s not afraid. It’s fun to have the movement without the fear, almost as though it’s choreographed. Her legs wrap securely around his waist, and she uses the whole of her bodyweight to flip them over, switching their positions. She feels a thrilled, whooshing sensation in her stomach in the commotion. Her hand falls squarely on his Adam’s apple, pressing probably too hard. His fingers do a double tap on her outer thigh. The signal to let up. 

“Easy there, champ,” he coughs out.

She climbs off of him and stands, pushing stray wisps of hair out of her face. “Sorry.”

He offers her a slanting grin and rubs the skin on his neck. “Choking’s not really my thing.”

And there it is. His first attempt at flirtation – she’d been expecting it imminently. She raises her eyebrows in response and puts her hands on her hips. She’s enjoying this far more than she should, she realizes suddenly. They’ve found a way to tangle their bodies together in an activity that isn’t forbidden, but she likes it so much because it’s one step closer to what she actually wants. And that’s wrong.

“How much more of this do you think I have to do?” she asks abruptly.

His forest green eyes are dancing with mischief, but he decides to play it straight. “I’d say things are coming along pretty well. We’re probably good to move on to the next case. Next stop is Cheyenne.”