I'm not sure how well this story has aged. The show did their own thing with up-aged Claire Novak, but that was after I'd stopped watching, so. I still like this one, for whatever that's worth. This story was betad by castielpoops on tumblr, who also inspired it with her Claire/fallen angel graphics. It was made into a podfic by athornintheheart ( /works/965269). Content advisory for murder, scant affection for canon main characters, and discussion of American evangelical Christianity including loss of faith.
.
Judges 11:36
And she said to him, "My father, you have opened your mouth to the LORD; do to me according to what has gone out of your mouth, now that the LORD has avenged you on your enemies."
.
Claire Novak was still young enough not to shatter the first time she was taught that God didn't give a damn what human beings did to each other. She was a bright child, and earnest. When the pastor at her family's little Baptist church mentioned in one of his twice-weekly sermons how scandalous it was that so many Christians had never read the whole Bible, she went straight home and opened hers up to the first page: In the beginning, God created the heavens and earth.
She lost momentum when working her way through Leviticus. Even a smart ten-year-old could get bored with endless lists of measurements for a building that no longer existed. It got much more exciting in Joshua and Judges, with stories packed with gore and obscenity she barely understood. Claire made it to Judges chapter 11 before she started to wonder if the pastor really knew what he was doing, telling people to read this. The story of Jephthah's daughter, burnt on an altar of stone as the price for God's assistance in battle, made her cry hot, helpless tears.
Her faith didn't shatter, but when she put her Bible away, its shine was a little dimmer than when she started. It is difficult to be ten, and devout, and a girl.
The first time Claire met an angel face to face, he was walking her father's body out of her house, out of her family, into the cold. Snowflakes like splinters of sparkling glass fell from a hard, heavy sky and left dark marks on his trench coat. The air was frozen, but its cold didn't compare to her father's face, transformed into something ethereal and alien.
She didn't tell her mother what she'd seen, just retreated to her hollow bedroom and buried her face in her pillow. She was in the habit of praying every night: for her mother to be happy again, for the bank to stop sending letters about the mortgage, for the starving children in Africa. That night, though, as she choked her grief into her pillowcase, she took it all back. Please, God. I'll never ask for anything else, I'll give anything you want, anything. Anything. Just give me back my dad.
Every night after that for almost a year, she polished the same prayer over and over with every breath she took, until it was thin and fragile and as full of spider-webbed cracks as her heart.
Hi, baby.
For a long time- two hours, almost three- it seemed like God had answered her prayer freely, without a demand for a sacrifice in return. Her dad's voice was full of shaky tears, but he was real, and solid, and smiling as he helped her set the table. It was everything she'd dreamed about. Her family sat down to dinner, so normal it scared her, and she had to keep reminding herself that it was OK to move, to speak, that this wasn't an illusion about to shatter.
Claire could still see the cracks where each of them was broken, but for the first time in a long time all the pieces were gathered together and pressed tight at the seams until everything was the right shape, the kind of shape that might one day knit itself back together. It seemed like her father was back to stay. Didn't that mean that God was watching, that He'd listened to all the bargains she'd tried to make with Him? She even let herself hope that the price wouldn't be too great. Maybe God would ask for something she could give. When she grew up she could become a pastor's wife, or a missionary, instead of a surgeon like she'd wanted to be since she saw a National Geographic special on brain tumors. Maybe God would be appeased with that small sacrifice.
Then she stood frozen in the doorway as her father beat their next-door neighbor's skull in, his blood spraying across the living room, and she knew it wasn't going to be that easy.
Afterward, only fragments of memory remained. The cold sting of the slap when the demon inside her mother broke the world apart. The damp, iron smell of the warehouse. The shocking redness of the bullet wound against the white of her father's shirt. Her bitter, silent prayer: Me for him, that's the deal. You can do what you want with me, just save my dad. Everything else was erased in the searing white light of Grace.
It was unlike anything she'd ever felt before, so far beyond pain that she had no reference for it. Later, she tried to decide what she would say, if she ever found someone to tell, someone who could be trusted. It was like swallowing a volcano mid-eruption. Like diving into the heart of the sun. Like Hiroshima, like disintegration in one pure, perfect instant.
The words aren't sufficient to describe something that's beyond language, and eventually she stops trying. It's not like there's anyone to tell. The one person who would understand is out there in the world somewhere, walking around still on fire. Her bargain was stupid and pointless and didn't save her father, and she never opens her mouth to say a single word about it.
She's almost twelve now, and she's passed through the fire and out the other side. When the flames washed out the palms of her hands and back into the father who loved her, she was broken apart and remade. The volcano spat her back out fused into glass, a piece of obsidian with new sharp edges and hard surfaces that drank in every scrap of light. She knows things, sees the old familiar stories in a different way. Jephthah's bargain was a cheat, his god a betrayer who didn't notice his daughter's blood boiling on scorched stones. God doesn't remember the name of Jephthah's daughter any more than He remembers the people killed in the rage rained down on Earth by his children's squabbles. Asking Him for love is entirely pointless.
God's indifference isn't the only thing she saw in the fire. The angel Castiel became her and she became him. She knows him now, intimately, knows the architecture of his heart. Centuries of memory remain in her head. She can recall the textures of the streets of Heaven, the hidden corners and back alleyways and the beings who walk them. She's seen the true faces of Castiel's superiors, heard the voices of his brothers and sisters as they bounce through the spaces between atoms. She knows how they die.
The damage isn't visible from the outside, or maybe her mother is too shaken to notice. In their new town, Claire's new identity is unnatural and stiff, like a mask, and like a mask she can hide every ugly thing behind it. Joan Whittington is a shy, sweet girl who doesn't talk much in class, not a scorched cinder, not an empty vessel. Her new name makes it easier to hide, even from herself.
It gets smoother with practice. She learns to arrange her face into a smile again, and to respond when her teachers call her Joan. She tells her classmates that her parents are divorced. "My dad lives in Milwaukee," she says, and she doesn't cry herself to sleep at night. She also doesn't pray anymore. Things burned to ashes can't be remade.
The night the angels fall, Claire is rolling the trash can out to the curb in front of their builder-beige apartment in a Houston suburb. The first blazing streak ends over the horizon to the east. Then there are hundreds of them burning through the night sky, like Heaven is shaking in a windstorm and the angels are being knocked loose like rotten fruit.
She stands motionless in the quiet twilight for half an hour after the falling stops. She's waiting, stupidly, for the rest of the end of the world, for the whole sky to ignite, for the moon to turn to blood, for the peal of a trumpet to shake the ground beneath her feet. The air is still and breathless with anticipation. For the first time in a long time, the burned up place where her heart used to be is fizzing with sparks.
