A/N: Thank you so much to SassyGrl23 for reviewing! I really appreciate it!
Song: God & Guns by Lynyrd Skynyrd
CHAPTER 2
God & Guns
"You're the girl from the bar," Dean says unimpressively. His mind is reeling, and this is the most coherent thought he is able to articulate.
She cocks her head to the side and scowls, as if to indicate that they are past such trifling observations. "I'm a lot more than that, I think."
She stops wringing her hands nervously and instead stuffs them into the denim pockets of her shorts. He gives her a quick once over and determines she's cartoonishly leggy, to the point where her body looks disproportionate because she's not very tall - 5'3" or 5'4" max.
Dean blinks twice, expressionless, before dousing her with holy water.
She wipes her face with her wrist. The moisture causes her eyelashes to clump together and her mascara to streak. The black smear makes her eyes look strikingly blue. "What the hell?!"
"You've got five minutes."
He walks past her, forcing her to follow him if she wants to retain his attention. He hears her stomping angrily behind him, but doesn't bother to look. Not a demon, not important. Only when he's done unloading his gear into the Impala's trunk does he spin around to face her.
It is then that he really sees her – studies her – for the first time. He thinks offhandedly that she's cute, especially with saturated strands of ginger hair clinging to her face. She's not drop-dead-gorgeous, but pretty and wholesome-looking. In another life, maybe he'd chase after her like all the other waitresses and bartenders he's met, but nowadays he doesn't think much about girls. He's too tired.
"Shoot," he says. "Why aren't you freaking out?" He gestures pointedly to his ruined suit.
"We're really gonna have this conversation here?" They're standing far apart from one another on the side of the road behind his car – not exactly the prime setting for a serious discussion.
"Look, sweetheart, I ain't got all day," he says patronizingly.
She sucks her teeth and shuffles her feet in obvious agitation. "Fine. I know you."
Dean's eyebrows weave together. "No, you don't," he refutes.
"We'd never met before yesterday," she allows. "But I know you."
"How?"
"It's hard to explain."
"Try."
"I've seen you. In my dreams."
An errant bark of laughter erupts from Dean's throat and the conversation slows from its rapid-fire pace. "I'll hand it to ya, that's a hellova pickup line, babe, but I don't think now's the time."
She cringes visibly when he uses pet names. "I haven't seen you per se. I've seen your name. You must be Dean Winchester, right? And that guy from the photo you were looking at yesterday, I've seen his name too, I think."
"Sam." He forms the word with his mouth, but no sound actually passes his lips. Speaking Sam's name aloud is a little too much for him to manage just yet. More loudly, he says, "My brother."
"Yeah. I've seen both of you."
"In your dreams," he parrots, taking time to annunciate each syllable.
She bites her lower lip, disrupting the sheen of her pink lipgloss. "At first. But now, not just in my dreams – that's how I knew you'd be here. Sam Winchester is in deep trouble."
"Tell me about it," Dean snorts.
Evidently, she had not anticipated this sort of response, and her eyebrows shoot up. But Dean is now very grave. "What did you see?"
"Nothing that makes sense…"
He leans back against the trunk of his car, resigning himself to the notion that he's going to have to give her more than five minutes. "You said you saw me here?"
She nods. "When I say see, I don't mean see, though. I don't get visions, exactly. They're not images – only words. Sometimes the stories are out of order or the words don't make any sense together. Last night, I saw… something awful. When I was asleep. You on the ground, and your face…" She ghosts her fingertips over the space just below her left, the eye that Sam had punched shut in his dream. In his memory.
Dean does not make a sound, but there is a newfound clarity in his gaze. He understands. She read the transcript of his nightmare. His memory. He has to look away because her pity is suffocating him. There's nothing that makes his skin crawl more than the feeling of pitying eyes on him.
"Did that really happen?" she asks quietly.
He grits his teeth and the muscle in his jaw tenses. He turns his head back towards her, but he's not going to touch that question with a ten-foot pole. "You said you saw my brother – is that what you meant?"
"No," she replies slowly, deciding not to push the issue. "Not just that. I keep seeing stories of him on fire, screaming. I don't know if it's a metaphor or what, but –"
"Do you see anyone else?" he interrupts.
"No. Just you two. If you want, I can show you."
His brow creases again in bewilderment. "Show me?"
She nods earnestly. "I write it down – all of it. When the visions come… It's like a flood. I have to write it down. The pain doesn't stop until I write it down."
"Headaches?"
"Yeah. It feels like a laser carving the most horrible stories into my brain."
Dean starts towards the driver's seat, but quickly freezes in his tracks and swivels back around on his heel. "Wait a sec," he says. "If you only see words, how did you know I was... me?"
She's unfazed by the question. "I first suspected it when you walked into the bar last night and were asking Old Man McCarthy questions about the occult, and I thought maybe that guy in the picture you were looking at was your brother. But I wasn't sure you were really you until I had the vision about you coming here and massacring those demons."
"You know about demons?"
"Fragments. Only what I've learned through you in the past week."
Dean nods pensively to himself, processing the information. A week. Right after Detroit.
"C'mon," he instructs, yanking the door open.
. . .
She lives within walking distance from the church, but still Dean insists on driving. He parks the Impala on this town's semblance of a main street and follows her to her apartment; turns out, she lives in a loft above the local tattoo parlor.
"What's your name?" he asks abruptly, as though the concept that she might have a name has just occurred to him. They're midway through ascending the stairs to her home and he can't see her face, only her back and her... At any other time, he would have been more inclined to soak in his current vantage point.
She smiles a little melancholic smile to herself – she'd been wondering when he would care enough to ask. Being nameless and dispensable is something that comes with the territory of working in the service industry.
"Claire," she states without looking at him.
She unlocks the chipped door to reveal an apartment that appears to have been orderly at one time but was recently struck by a hurricane. There are pages strewn on every surface – every table, every chair, everything. He even thinks he spots a couple in the toaster. Some are typed and some are hand-written, some are in first-person, some in third, and some pages only have a couple of words on them. His hands find the nearest sheet of paper, which is on the kitchen counter.
There is a distinct pain in having your flesh ripped from your bones and lit on fire all at the same time, it reads.
"Awesome," he quips.
"Like I said, it doesn't always make sense."
Oh, but these make sense.
"So what, are you psychic or something?" he questions brusquely.
Claire dumps her keys onto her desk and the papers crackle noisily under the fresh weight.
"I was hoping you could tell me," she sighs, shrugging. "That's why I went looking for you this morning. I want this to stop."
Dean scratches the shorter hair at the back of his head in contemplation. "Psychics are usually born the way they are," he reasons out loud. "It doesn't just happen all of a sudden. You said this word vomit is just about me and my brother?"
Again, she nods vigorously in affirmation.
"Weird," he mutters, still rifling through the papers. There are so many… It seems impossible that she could have produced them all in just a week. "Do you see things before they happen?"
"I-I don't know. I'm not around for any of it, so I don't have any way of knowing."
"I could try something," he suggests. "I know a guy who might know what's going on. He's hard to get a hold of, but he usually knows his way around this kind of crazy."
"Whatever you think will work," she agrees.
"Okay, don't panic," he prefaces cautiously. "He might kind of just… appear."
When he's satisfied that she comprehends, he folds his hands and closes his eyes in a way that makes him feel absolutely ridiculous. Maybe that's the whole point. Who knows.
"Castiel," he starts, "wherever you are, we could really use your help down here."
His trench-coat-clad friend zaps into the center of the room, displacing a book's worth of papers in his wake. They flutter to the floor like fallen leaves.
Claire gasps audibly, but doesn't speak.
"What is it, Dean?" Castiel asks urgently. His blue eyes are wide and intense, as always. "I want you to know, I am doing everything in my power to find a way to help Sam," he tells him with grim sincerity.
"I know and I appreciate that, Cas, I do. But that's not why I called this time... Something real screwy is going on here," he replies. "This chick is writing all about me and Sam and she's seeing all sorts o' shit she shouldn't be seeing."
Castiel, bad posture and all, turns his attention to Claire, just now realizing that someone else is in this foreign room. "What is your name?" he asks her, though his intonation makes it sound more like an order than an inquiry.
"C-Claire," she manages, still in shock.
"Your full name," he clarifies impatiently.
"Claire Shurley. Who are you?"
Castiel doesn't answer, but clicks his tongue in recognition. "This is very strange indeed."
"What is?" Claire and Dean ask in unison.
"Claire." He glides over to her and places a heavy hand on her shoulder. She thinks fleetingly that he's trying to be reassuring, but somehow the action only makes him seem more ominous. "You are a prophet of the Lord."
Claire staggers back in horror. "A what?"
"A prophet. Or prophetess, if you prefer," he confirms. "You were meant to record the trials of Sam and Dean Winchester during the apocalypse – that is the strange part. The apocalypse has been averted. You should never have been activated."
"Activated?" Dean echoes.
"Yes," Castiel says. "Prophets are activated when their time has come to serve God."
"How do you know she's a prophet?" he asks.
"It's ingrained in all of our minds – I know the name of every prophet that ever was and ever will be born. Claire Shurley is one of them." He stares again at Claire. "Are your visions… complete?"
"N-no. They're not."
Castiel nods in apparent enlightenment. "Sam agreeing to serve as Lucifer's vessel must have triggered her activation. Her visions would have been complete if you had accepted Michael, but you did not, and so they are not."
"So, now what?" asks Dean.
"Now? Now, nothing."
"Is there a way to make them stop?" she asks hopefully.
"No," he replies bluntly. "You will continue to have these visions until the end of your natural life. If that is all, I must be going."
"W-" before she can get the word "wait" out, Castiel has vanished into thin air. She sinks onto the sofa, papers crackling furiously once more, and cradles her face in her palms.
"Who was he?" she mumbles.
"My friend, Cas. He's an angel."
"Of course. An angel…" she murmurs darkly, not bothering to further question the insanity of her newfound predicament. There are a few tense moments of silence, before she drones, "So this is really your life?"
"Yep."
"Must be tough."
"It is."
Another pause.
She eventually says, "I can't live like this. With these headaches, this need to write."
Dean shifts uncomfortably beside her, but can't help but feel a tug of sympathy in his chest. "Some of this stuff is pretty good," he tries, thumbing through a handful of pages. "Super depressing, yeah, but not bad if you're into that sort of crap. Maybe you could fill out the details and publish it. Just change my name. I don't want my and my brother's business out there for the world to know." It's clear to her that he's floundering to find a silver lining.
"Thanks for the vote of confidence," she drawls. "I've already considered that. But if there's a way to make any of this coherent, I don't have the time for it."
He shifts again, not knowing what to say. He was never good with this sort of thing – the whole comforting-the-downtrodden BS was Sammy's gig for a reason. You need to learn how to do the job without him. Just in case, a dark recess of his mind nags.
Out of the blue, Claire is hissing and moaning as if she is in agony. Her eyes are screwed shut and her hands are over her ears.
"What? What is it?" Dean asks frantically.
"Pen. Paper." She reaches for him, features still contorted in pain.
Dean rummages through the squalor to procure both, handing them to her. She hurriedly scribbles down something and the migraine seems to subside. Even though her handwriting is messy, he can read the seven words she has written from over her shoulder:
Someone else is in here with us.
He rips the paper out of her hands. "What does this mean?" he demands, shaking it in her face.
He immediately feels remorseful upon seeing the glimmer of absolute terror in her eyes. It's not him she's scared of, but the prospect of living the rest of her life saddled with this burden. It pains him to realize that he, albeit indirectly, is the cause of this. He is the cause of so much suffering. Always the cause. Never the solution.
"I don't know," she squeaks. He knows she doesn't know. He doesn't know why he even asked.
He exhales in agitation and runs his hand over the top of his hair, trying to figure out what to do. There's a temporary lull – the only sounds filling the room are Dean's shoes crunching papers as he paces.
Surprisingly, it is Claire who breaks the silence.
"Before, were you praying to Castiel?" she asks.
Dean looks taken aback by the question, but nevertheless answers, "Yeah, why?"
"He answers your prayers?"
He regards this as a gross over-simplification of circumstances. "Sometimes."
She pauses, gathering her thoughts, before continuing, "Can anyone pray? Will they answer anyone?"
"I don't know," Dean admits quietly. "But you're not just anyone."
"That's right," she scoffs. "I'm a bartender-slash-prophet of the Lord."
Carefully, Dean brushes the papers off of the space beside her and takes a seat. "It might be a good time to rethink your career path," he says gently. "Cas didn't seem to think there was a way out of this."
Claire laughs a jaded sort of laugh that doesn't jive with her innocent appearance. "Bartender wasn't exactly the job I chose at the career fair back in middle school. Neither was prophet. No, I got out. I went to college. I tried to have a life… I got out."
"Why'd you come back?" He sounds appalled by the very idea.
She laughs again, that laugh he finds unnerving. "The same reason anyone ever comes back here: a series of unfortunate events. Anyway, it doesn't matter. Now I get to be a prophet. There's gotta be a way to turn that into a marketable skill." All at once, her expression reverts to that pure, hopeful one he had caught a glimpse of earlier. "I could go with you," she proposes.
Dean shoots into a standing position like he has been electrocuted. Now it's his turn to laugh.
"I don't think so," he says, backing away like he's trying to ward off an unwanted suitor.
"Why not?"
"In case you haven't noticed from your visions, my job is pretty friggin' dangerous."
"I could be useful."
"I doubt it."
"You're trying to find your brother. What if I see something that could help?"
"Call me up. I'll leave you my number."
"I don't want to stay here."
"You said you got out once before – obviously you have your reasons for coming back, whatever they are."
"Yeah, well, fuck that. A lot of good that did me. It's time I do what I want."
"Uh huh. As glad as I am that you're finding yourself and all that spiritual self-discovery jazz, it's still gonna be a no."
"Come on."
"You don't know the first thing about hunting."
"I know a little. You could teach me."
"Hell no. Do I look like a babysitter to you? You'll just slow me down. Or worse, get yourself killed."
"I can take care of myself."
"Yeah. Right."
"Please?"
"Why do you even want to come? You don't know me. You don't have any idea what you would be getting yourself into. And don't give me that 'visions' bullshit. Reality and words on a page are two totally different things."
"This is rural Illinois and my dad is ex-military. I know enough about how to survive. And I know that you know the sorts of people that might be able to help me – to help me find a way to make these visions stop."
"Nope. I don't know anyone like that."
"You're a lot more likely to meet someone who knows than I am."
"What part of 'no' aren't you getting?"
He's starting towards the door and she's following him again, nipping at his heels like an incensed spaniel.
"Dean."
It sounds strange to hear her say his name. For a second she reminds him of Jo and he feels sick to his stomach.
"No."
And then he's gone, and neither of them realizes that he's forgotten to leave his phone number.
A/N: Let me know what you think! In this AU the whole Chuck Shurley thing never happened and instead we have Claire as the prophet. I hope you all liked it!