A/N: Thank you so so much to ImpalaLove, SassyGrl23, and Wolflihood for reviewing! I appreciate it so much! I hope you all like this chapter.
Song: I Can't Tell You Why by the Eagles
CHAPTER 3
I Can't Tell You Why
He can't see. Not really. It's all just colors and moving shapes and lights. He feels blood leaking from his every orifice, flowing down his face. It drips on his clothes and on the grass where he's kneeling.
His own blood. Blood is always in such abundance that sometimes he feels the need to double-check, to clarify, that it's really his. His face is so swollen he can feel his skin split and stretch to the grisly visage of the dead man he will soon be.
"It was a good run. Your brother fought hard."
But he of all people knows the truth, knows he's still fighting. He will never stop fighting.
"Please, Sam," he begs. Luckily the voice that comes out of his mouth doesn't sound like his and he can pretend the words aren't his either. He doesn't recognize the poor fool speaking. It could be someone else pleading with their baby brother not to kill them, for all he knows.
"Oh, Dean."
Lucifer is so apt at sounding kind that he almost believes it's Sammy shining through the cracks.
"Sam is long gone."
No. I'm not gonna leave you.
Dean awakes, sweating, with unwanted tears stuck to his cheeks. "Shit," he grunts, squinting to read the muted green glow of the LED alarm clock. It's the middle of the night.
The scotch, thank god, is close by. He tries to be strong, but sometimes he drinks to unconsciousness because he cannot bear the dreams. The nightmares. His nightmares are his memories; even his twisted imagination could not conjure torments so great as the ones he has already endured. It used to be images of Hell that haunted him, now it's this.
Every night is a game of Russian roulette except all of the chambers are loaded. What horror will unfold tonight? Will he see Lucifer (wearing Sam's face)? His dead mother? His dead father? Or will he simply be flayed alive, like he was in Hell?
Lately, it's all Detroit all the time.
It is better not to dream, not to sleep. He drinks until it all goes black, until the shrieks stop ringing in his ears and the taste of his own blood has left his mouth.
People talk about dependency and addiction like they're the same thing, but they're not. Addiction implies there's a vice, sought out by some weakness of character. Dependency implies a physiological need.
He needs to be conscious or unconscious, on or off, like a light switch. He cannot stand the in-between.
Or maybe it is all an in-between.
He doesn't know. He doesn't want to think about it. He doesn't want to think about what the drinking is doing to his liver, what repressing all this shit is doing to his sanity. Carry on, the voice in his head that sounds suspiciously like John Winchester says. That's all he can do. Carry on.
In the morning, he feels a bit better apart from the dull, throbbing pain behind his eyes. He recognizes it abstractly as a hangover, a familiar and inconvenient pain in his ass. Looking again at the clock, he is surprised and dissatisfied to find that he has overslept.
Omens. He's gotta start looking for omens. Anything that could indicate a big-bad-demon-boss breaking into the world. This would be a lot easier with Bobby on his side, but lately he's not taking his calls.
I'll show him. It's not pointless, I'm not crazy.
. . .
They're just words.
When she wakes in the middle of the night, shaking in feverish anguish, it's just words that she sees. Simple, innocent words.
They're unrelenting, screaming themselves, repeating themselves over and over and over again until she can get them out, to purge her body of their sting. They run from her brain and shoot through her veins, struggling to burst from her fingertips. And just when she washes her face and thinks it's over, they return again. The words are always different, but the pain is the same.
She wonders if it's supposed to hurt so much.
Reading the label on her bottle of Imitrex fills her with dread. Same with the Prozac. Letters, letters anywhere, terrify her. It's not possible to live like this, she thinks incessantly. Something that was once so routine has become the monster lurking in every closet and under every bed.
And it has only been a week.
What's even worse is that there's no real productivity to it. When she reads what she writes, she either doesn't understand it or doesn't want to. The stories are empty, comprehensible only to those who already know how they go.
Last night, when she jerked awake, she felt indistinctly that Dean was up too, reliving what she was transcribing. The numbers 3:34 – the current time – came out on the page. Maybe their suffering was parallel, maybe they were plagued by different sides of the same coin.
There is no reason she should be involved in any of this. It's just bad luck.
She stops trying to sleep at dawn. The rising sun's pinkish light creeps through her blinds, warm with the promise of a new start. It's easy to be tricked into thinking this one will be better than the last.
Something about watching the birth of the new day makes her recall Dean's prayer to Castiel. The sunlight brings with it a niggling sense of hope – maybe she has a guardian angel watching over her, too. Surely she didn't before, not after everything, but maybe she does now. Maybe now that she's been "activated" there's someone looking out for her. It's worth a shot.
She kneels at the side of her bed like she used to do when she was a little girl and everything was still straightforward.
"Please," her voice cracks. "If anyone is listening… Please find someone else. Please. I can't do this. I'm not the right person for the job, I'm not strong enough. It's cruel to make me watch this, of all things, after what's already happened, what's already been taken."
Claire doesn't realize she is crying until her face feels damp. She doesn't know what she expected to happen, but she certainly didn't expect Castiel to appear. In her shock, she scrambles to a standing position.
There he is, in her bedroom. His brow is knitted into a frown, which she's beginning to suspect is his default setting. For a moment, he looks just as surprised to be there as she is to see him. However, he says, "There are a lot of angels out there who heard your call. At one time, only the strongest among us were tasked with protecting you."
She quickly wipes her face, embarrassed. Castiel tilts his head as if he doesn't understand the need.
"At one time?" she repeats.
"All the archangels are either dead or locked away," he says. "Lower-ranking angels, like myself, are the only ones left. Many were scrambling to come to your aid. It appears I got here first."
"I know you said there's no way out of this," she sniffs, "but isn't there any way you could transfer the abilities to someone else? I'm sure there's some religious nut out there who would be happy to have them."
"That's not how it works," he states flatly. "You are the prophet. You are the only prophet, until you die and the next one in the sequence takes your place. It is not an ability that can simply be 'transferred,' as you say. It is a part of you. It has always been a part of you, dormant, but present. You were born for this purpose, Claire. Many would consider it a great honor."
A stray, tearful laugh escapes her. "Not me."
"I am very sorry you feel that way. Truly, I am, and I wish there were a way for me to help you."
She pauses; Castiel does not seem to be in as much of a hurry as he was the previous day, so she takes a moment to collect herself.
"Why is it just the Winchesters?" she finally asks.
"I do not know," he answers honestly. "For whatever reason, recording the Winchesters' history post-apocalypse was your divine mission." His somber blue gaze flits to the empty prescription bottles on her nightstand. Some are old and some are new, some are visible and some are hidden beneath loose papers. "If the pain is truly unbearable," he starts ruefully, "there may be psychics out there who can teach you methods of managing it. You are not a psychic, but I believe some very strong ones also experience pain with their visions."
"Will being close to the Winchesters make any difference?"
"I don't see any reason why it would, apart from the fact that they would likely be able to interpret what you see. Perhaps that might offer you some solace, I do not know." He peers again disparagingly at the orange bottles. "You should not medicate yourself so heavily – it might make the visions more frequent. Anything that interferes with your…" he struggles to find the right word, eventually settling on, "sobriety makes you more receptive to messages from a different frequency, if you will."
"It just gets better and better."
The Imitrex to manage the migraines is new, but the Prozac predates this particular mental breakdown. I guess I'll add managing my anxiety to the long list of shit I'm supposed-to-but-can't deal with, she thinks.
"I must be going," Castiel says, as though he is afraid to leave her.
"Okay. Good b-" But he's already gone.
She knows what she needs to do: she needs to convince Dean to let her go with him. She needs help. She needs all the help she can get.
. . .
Since he forgot to leave her his number, Claire has no way of knowing where to find Dean apart from intuition. But it's 6:30 AM and she has to catch him before he leaves, so she uses the shards of knowledge that she has to try to piece together a complete puzzle.
He's probably in a motel. There are a few in town, but he was coming from Detroit and the first one on his way would be a place called Trader Springs Motel. It's the seediest of them all.
Once she's there and she sees his sleek Impala parked in front of room 22, she can't help but feel an alien swell of pride. She pulls her navy Jetta into the space beside it and slides out of the car.
With trepidation, Claire knocks on the door, and Dean opens it with a blunt and unhappy, "You again."
"I spoke to Castiel," she tells him, pushing her way inside. The bed is a wreck of cheap, tangled sheets and there are several empty bottles of alcohol scattered on the nightstand, much in the same way as her prescription bottles. The clock looks like the description she wrote and its battery is buzzing dully like a trapped fly.
"Whaddyou mean you 'spoke to him'?" he questions.
"I prayed to him and he came."
Dean's eyebrows shoot up. "He did?" he asks in undisguised astonishment.
"Yeah." She sits on the edge of his muddled bed. He remains standing, knees wide in a defensive stance, by the door. "He said that I'm important, that there are a lot of angels looking out for me. So you see, Dean, I have built-in protection. You wouldn't have to worry about me slowing you down or getting myself killed."
"Look…" He pauses and considers calling her sweetheart or babe or something similarly condescending, but instead says, "Claire, I'm glad to hear those fluffy-winged assholes are lookin' out for you. I am. But that don't change anything. This is between me and my brother and there's no room for a third party."
"You're forgetting," she replies, voice deathly calm, "I'm already the third party. The passive observer, fated to record all the horrible shit you go through. Even if I'm not with you, you two will always be with me. The least you can do is make it an equal arrangement, at least until I figure out a way to manage this."
"I can't," he grinds out. "I'm sorry, I can't."
She feels tiny needles pricking the backs of her eyes but she doesn't want to cry in front of him, so she turns her gaze to the whitish, mildewed ceiling.
Dean wants to jump out of his skin at the sight. His fingers twitch at his sides. He's deliberately avoided these situations his entire life, and still it's playing out in front of him. Granted, the circumstances are vastly different from any scenario he's ever imagined.
Crying girls, man, he remembers once telling a teenaged Sam over a couple of illicit beers. The worst. You get in – if ya know what I mean – you get out, and you don't look back for nothin'. Suffice it to say, Sam had never really taken this advice.
"Hey," he tries, itching to make it stop. He sits beside her but she keeps her gaze averted. "You'll be okay." He has no idea what he's doing. He has no idea what he's saying. "I probably won't be around much longer, anyway. Maybe when I die the visions'll stop."
She snaps her head to look at him, features darkened in dour confusion. To his horror, he recognizes it as an expression he's seen his brother wear many times. "Why would you say something like that?"
Dean coughs out something that resembles a laugh. Now it's his turn to look away from her. He fixes his eyes on his folded hands. "Me and Sam… we're not the types to die peacefully in an old folks' home, let's just put it that way."
"Sam is already dead," she says, still confused. She'd begun to notice that Dean talks about him like he's taken a temporary leave of absence, not rotting in Hell.
"For now."
There's a heavy pause.
"Please," she tries for the millionth time, "please let me come with you. I'm begging you."
Once again, he feels extraordinarily uncomfortable. He doesn't know how to respond, how to speak to someone who's addressing him like he has some sort of power. It always seems to be him doing the begging – never the other way around. In fact, he can't even recall a time when he hadn't been the one with the disadvantage. He can barely save himself (really, the jury's still out on that one), but she's talking to him like he can save her, like she needs him.
He's not a bad guy. He's not cruel. But he's not equipped to deal with this.
"Coming with me won't solve anything," he eventually manages. "Your problems… They'd only be multiplied by a thousand if you came with me. You'd lose a lot more than you'd gain, I promise you that."
"Let me make that choice, then. You're not responsible for what happens to me."
It feels so good to hear her – to hear someone – absolve him of this that he almost changes his mind.
"If I let you come with me, I am responsible for what happens to you. You can't."
She gnaws heatedly on her lower lip, self-respect finally getting the better of her.
"Fine," she snaps, shooting to her feet.
She looks as though she is going to storm straight out of the motel room and out of his life, never to be seen again, so he stops her. "Wait," he says. He pulls a faded receipt out of his pants pocket and quickly jots his phone number down on the back. The motel's thick, plastic courtesy pen feels strange between his fingers.
"Call me if you ever need anything," he says, like it's some consolation.
First she glares at him, and then she eyes the parcel warily. Apparently unable to resist, she violently snatches it out of his hand and leaves in a flurry.
. . .
It's nighttime when her mind starts boiling again.
The forest is dark – he doesn't know how or when he got there. It feels as though he hasn't been there long and yet he cannot remember the moment he arrived. He wasn't born here, after all, and even what feels like an eternity he knows must have had a beginning.
The text dances on a backlit screen.
Claire reads what she has typed on her computer. The keys are so worn and discolored they don't make clicking noises anymore and she can barely make out the tiny letters and numbers and punctuation. Her hands fly silently and blindly across the keyboard, and yet by some miracle, there are no typos.
"Sam," she murmurs to herself.
She digs around in her camel-colored handbag, desperately searching for the paper Dean gave her. After finding it, she punches the numbers into the touchscreen of her phone, wishing she could feel concrete buttons beneath her fingertips.
"Hello?" comes a gruff, masculine voice. She can hear the purr of an engine (or is it an electric guitar?) in the background and the distant rumble of tires on asphalt.
"Dean?"
"Yeah? Who's this?"
"Claire."
"You okay? What is it?"
"I had another vision. About Sam. They're changing. Fast, I think."
She thinks she hears him pull over and knows she hears him cuss loudly, away from the mouthpiece. He's irate because while he could just trust her to continually update him on her "changing" visions over the phone, it'd be far more sensible to have her with him. Trust was never his strong suit. What if she forgets to tell him something, or doesn't mention an essential detail because she doesn't think it's important? No, it's more foolproof to keep her around so he can keep track of what she sees. If you want the job done right, you do it yourself.
"Changing? Whaddyou mean changing?" he demands.
"He's… He's not in Hell anymore, or at least I don't think he is."
Dean is 40% certain his heart stops for longer than is anatomically possible for him to still be alive. His world is careening, spinning out of control, and he attempts to compose himself long enough to ask for clarification.
He doesn't know what words come out of his mouth, but evidently, he's accomplished this task because Claire answers, "He was in some sort of woods. I don't know where it was. He didn't know where he was. But it's definitely not Hell."
His heart starts beating again, but now it's his lungs that are rebelling. Through the stale breath of air trapped in his throat, he chokes out, "I'm only a half hour outside town. I'm coming back to get you."
All she hears is the deafening screech of tires on pavement before the line cuts out.
A/N: If anyone is curious, I'll delve more into Claire's background in the later chapters. I didn't want to do like a massive backstory dump because I thought it might interfere with the flow of the story. Also I apologize if the plot is not airtight or completely logical - my main reason for wanting to write this was that I felt like Lisa was a total cop-out and I think something different could have been done. Dean has such strong and overpowering emotions that I think it would be fascinating to see him in love, and I didn't get that at all from his relationship with Lisa. It just felt... hollow. I don't know, I was just never really sold on the whole Dean-wants-a-normal-life thing and the Dean/Lisa dynamic was painful. Plus, I wanted to explore how he would deal without Sam, because we never really saw much of that in the show.
Please let me know what you think of Claire! Any constructive criticism is very much appreciated! I didn't want to make her super angsty because generally I don't like OCs like that, but Chuck and Kevin were pretty messed up so I thought it would be fitting to make her at least a little bit similar.