Chapter Text
We make our own ghosts by looking
but pretending not to see...
and then forgetting ourselves altogether.
It is a terrible thing to look at oneself
and to all the while see nothing.
Surely this is how we make our own ghosts.
We make them out of ourselves.
I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, Oz Perkins
The sinkhole opens up a gash across central Illinois, spanning roughly forty miles.
It happens on a cloudless day, the sky painted a cheerful, kindergartener’s-idea of blue. It’s a day saturated with technicolor that only ever seems to really exist in childhood memories, painted baby-bright-sky blue. And it’s cold when it happens—but strangely windless. There’s a bite to the air that raises goosebumps, but it’s still and bright, like the world is holding its breath. Teeth clenched to keep it in, lungs burning.
Later, news stations will report that there were only three miraculous casualties.
All told, there is little significance to the things devoured when the ground gives way.
The sinkhole opens up in a stomach-snatching collapse that comes utterly out of nowhere, and it swallows up acres of cornfields, wind farms, abandoned barns, and—of fucking course—the haunted house that Claire is in the middle of exorcising.
It’d been three days since Claire had any human interaction beyond mutual, skittish eye contact at gas stations when she practically staggered into the case.
She tended to stop in Illinois whenever she inevitably passed through. Call it a morbid tradition, but she liked haunting her old haunts. She liked passing through the strip malls that were objectively nondescript, dime-a-dozen across the continent yet achingly, specifically familiar all the same. She liked drifting past the old house where a part of herself remains, still, frozen in time, suspended like those stained-glass murals that she used to boredly will into movement when her parents took her to church services.
But something sour opened up in her gut this time when she drove past her old elementary school, and she tasted bile in the back of her throat. There’s a bittersweet feeling to outgrowing a place, to feeling the mismatched parts of herself trying to align and just slipping, refusing to fit in any coherent way. There were students, achingly small, painstakingly filling in the old-school billboard, halfway done to advertising the upcoming Parent-Teacher Conferences.
With stiff, unfeeling fingers, Claire jammed her sunglasses on over her eyes and tore out of town. She ended up on Route 57. Heading south.
Her music was loud enough to muffle itself through her shitty speakers, an excess that doubled around to collapse in on itself, and Claire beat the flat of her hand against her steering wheel to the rhythm of it, hard enough to bruise. Eventually, dehydration got the best of her, and she reluctantly stopped at some town that, for all intents and purposes, could’ve been Pontiac. Small town America was all the fucking same once you drove through it enough. Passed enough identical exits on the highway, always in rhyme with each other. Fast food and gas joints peppering the edges of the highway. Ridiculously offensive billboards and badly paved backroads and perpetually ignored school-zone speed limits. Claire, feeling indulgent and morose, pulled into a Cracker Barrel parking lot because their bathrooms were usually reliably clean.
The hostess idly glanced at her while Claire lifted a silent 1 to indicate her lame party size, and she shrugged and grabbed the breakfast and lunch menus and sat Claire at a huge table by herself. The only other patrons were the typical scatterings of old people who liked to spend their days here. Claire drained a glass of tap water, and the hostess apparently juggled waitressing duties, too, because she propped her hip against Claire’s table and raised her eyebrows expectantly. “Know what you want?”
Claire gave the woman a once-over. Her nametag said Isa. She had a small-town face and small-town manners, and she looked like she’d learned how to sound homey and welcoming since the day she was born, but Claire thought she could see that there was an agitation to the way she held herself. Isa’s gaze jumped around, displaced, and her fingers tapped against her little notebook, and there was a tension to the arch of her brow. Claire let herself sprawl back in her chair, let her smile spread, warm and cynical and commiserating, and the pulse in Isa’s neck jumped. Claire bit the inside of her cheek. “Some more water and some pancakes,” she said after a pause long enough to make her feel wrong-footed.
“You’re not from around here,” Isa said. A declarative. Not a question.
Claire grinned. “Nah, I’m an Illinois brat. I just got out.”
Isa blinked. “Well,” she said, bright and just a touch breathless. She gave a wry twist of her lips, a silent self-deprecation that she apparently refused to voice as she pushed off the table. “I’ll put that order in for you.”
Claire sighed, watching her walk away. She gave a restless roll of her shoulders. Reluctantly, she fished her phone out of her inner jacket pocket and noted mildly that it had 3% battery. She had a few days-old texts waiting innocuously for her response. Jody updating her on the general goings-on and asking for a check-in. Alex sending her stupid memes that Claire couldn’t make heads or tails of. A few isolated texts from a group chat with Sam, Dean, and Jack. Sam had sent a picture of some ancient book, and a day after, Jack had asked if they could have breakfast for dinner. Claire could only assume that the question had been answered in person. She wondered if Jack was living with Sam or Dean right now.
She left all the texts unanswered except Alex’s, who she sent a :/ and nothing else.
Isa returned with a refill for her water, and Claire glanced up. “Hey, you guys got any newspapers?”
Isa shook her head, eyes lighting. “Y’know, you sound like an old man.” Her expression stilled, and then turned guarded, like she hadn’t meant to say that, and Claire let herself snicker, let herself watch Isa relax. She smiled, all honey-small-town warmth and troubled-small-town restlessness. “Somethin’ in particular you wanna know?”
Claire shrugged. “Well,” she started, not expecting much, “this place got any ghost stories?”
Isa laughed.
An hour later, Claire was readjusting her jacket and strolling back to her car, ready to idly check out the old farmhouse twenty miles outside of town.
It was something to do. Killing time, and sometimes monsters.
A year or so ago, after stalking a string of werewolf dens across the Midwest, Claire ran into Dean and Jack in the middle of a shootout.
She’d never met Jack. She’d heard about him. Castiel’s real kid. The one he decided was good enough to keep. Castiel had talked about him, the last time they saw each other, alone in a deserted bar on the west coast between apocalypses.
She remembers the way warmth curled around Castiel’s voice while he spoke. She remembers the way he said that Jack was wonderful. Claire remembers clenching her hands into fists beneath the table. Claire remembers the tick in her jaw while she waited to change the subject and continued to wait for what felt like fucking eons.
Sometimes Claire really lets herself think about it—think about the fact that the last time she saw Castiel, he spent the whole time talking about Jack. If she thinks about it too much, she realizes all over again that she knows what it’s like to really truly see red, knows the tunnel vision that comes with rage and grief and resentment, knows that it can boil together enough to suffocate.
And the thing was—when Claire met Jack, he was wonderful. Or whatever. The kid was literally impossible to hate.
It wasn’t too long after she last talked to Castiel when this happened, wasn’t too long since that weird week nobody seemed to be able to remember at all. And Dean was off-putting and quiet during the cleanup, and he went off to his motel alone without saying much.
And it left Claire and Jack alone. Claire kicked at a wet spot of dirt. She said, “Uh—” and Jack said, “Cas is dead,” with that paradoxical kid-matter-of-factness, and everything stuttered to a halt.
Claire stared. Jack took this as a cue to continue. “It seemed like nobody had told you.”
“Nobody told me,” Claire echoed in a croak. She blinked hard. Her extremities were numb with cold. “What—what did he—”
And then, Jack looked away, shoulders hunching in a guilt so visible that it was fucking impossible not to ache for the poor kid. “Well, um, that’s… a long story.”
But Claire decided she had time to hear it. She drove Jack to a diner, windows painted with wet slaps of rain, and neither of them touched their hot chocolates. Jack talked about the Empty or whateverthefuck, brows scrunching in frustration when Claire stared in blank incomprehension at his weird metaphysical explanations. Eventually, they reached a kind of understanding when Claire haltingly volunteered a metaphor.
“So—it’s—it’s like—” She cringed. “—like a whole universe that’s just a gigantic sensory deprivation tank.”
“Yes! Sort of!” Jack announced, perking up with relief. “What’s a sensory deprivation tank?”
“Uh, I dunno.” She rearranged her neat spread of salt packets. “Like, being in the ocean or something. I think. I think everything’s supposed to feel like a part of you, and then it ends up feeling like nothing.”
“Oh. Yes,” Jack agreed, more solemn. “That’s what it’s like.”
He explained his death, Castiel’s deal, and they sank into silence. Claire ripped open a salt packet and smeared lines of it across the Formica. Then, guilty, she gathered it in her palm and dumped it in her cooling hot chocolate.
“Dean and I are trying to find a way to get him back,” Jack added after a while, gazing out the window. He smiled. It was a nice smile. Even, kinda, reminded Claire of Castiel. Fuck. “We’ll find a way.”
“Sure thing, kid,” Claire whispered, and she suddenly felt absolutely ancient. And alone. And tired. She rubbed her eyes.
She felt Jack’s gaze on her, tilting toward curious. She looked up at him with some dread, not knowing what she’d find in his expression. His face was split-open in that stupid little-kid way, too young not to know that it was wrong to be vulnerable and guileless and invested and earnest. “You don’t look like him,” he observed, sounding morbidly fascinated by it.
“Weird. You do,” Claire snapped, hackles raised.
Jack nodded sagely, seemingly unbothered by her agitation. “Dean thinks so, too.”
And what the fuck could she say to that? She didn’t want to say that it showed in the lines of Jack’s face, the way that Castiel chose to be his dad. She didn’t want to say that she knew she looked like her mom, but that after Jimmy disappeared, people who knew him and met Claire used to get this perturbed, haunted look when Claire made some movement that resurrected the ghost for an instant. She didn’t want to say that Castiel once pretended to be her father, and Claire had adjusted his tie and thought—just for a second—just for a snatch of an idiotic second—that maybe—maybe Castiel had ruined her fucking life, but maybe that wasn’t the last word between them. Maybe—
The bell over the door tinkled, and Jack and Claire both jerked, inordinately startled. As if conjured, Dean stood in the low, flickering neon light of the doorway, bracketed by uneven torrents of rain smacking half-sideways into the entrance.
He looked—bad. Claire watched him uneasily, feeling her muscles twitch to tense as Dean saw them and approached, the diner door slamming shut with a collision that muffled the noise outside. He stood over their table for a pause, frowning blankly between them, and Claire suddenly remembered first meeting him—the second time. Remembered his violence. Remembered Castiel’s haphazard defense of his actions. Remembered her simmering hatred.
“Jack,” Dean said, and he was looking right through them both, not seeing either of them. His jaw flexed. “Got something in OKC.”
Jack shot Claire a look, half-resigned, half-apologetic. “Okay. C,” he tried for a smile. Dean blinked slowly, unmoving.
“You don’t have to go with him,” Claire blurted out, a low, seething interjection that she hadn’t let herself think before it was out there, and then Jack was looking at her, wide-eyed and unsure, and Dean was looking at her, too. Looking at her for real, eyes adjusting and flashing in the low light.
Claire swallowed. Dean didn’t scare her anymore. He didn’t.
She watched Dean cant his head back, the uneven shave down his jaw catching against the movement. There was an apathy to the way he held himself that was freaking her out, an uncaring, slow, predatory ease that would’ve pinged her monster radar if she hadn’t known the guy.
Unbidden, she remembered her mom in the wake of Jimmy’s last disappearance. Hollow-eyed and already gone, piloting her body around like an extension of her slow, slow death.
Jack tugged at Dean’s sleeve. “It’s okay,” he whispered, and Claire was suddenly so fucking angry that she couldn’t see at all. She shoved to her feet, pushing at Dean’s shoulders, and Dean staggered half a step back.
“Fuck you,” she tried to snarl, and she tried to ignore the way her voice went molasses-thick. She bared her teeth. “You can’t fucking do this, you can’t do this to him—you can’t—”
Dean stared. “The hell are you talking about?”
Claire tossed a wild look at Jack. “He’s fucking imploding. You don’t need back-stage tickets to it.” Dean scoffed, and Claire whirled back to him. Jack said that Castiel died with Dean, for him—whatever. He wore it in every line of his body, the way the grief suffocated him, and Claire—Claire hated him. She hated him. She took a deep breath, trying to smother the trembling in her muscles, and she whispered, “You’re not gonna find a way to bring him back.”
She saw Dean retreat, but it was almost a footnote to the way Jack flinched—this full-body thing that Claire felt like a fucking slap. She wrenched herself away from them both, and she almost ran out of the diner, immediately engulfed in the freezing rain.
She inhaled thinly, desperately into it, choking on it, and she let out an involuntary, strangled cry of frustration, kicking at the gravel pavement. Her boot caught, and she lost her balance, slipping to catch herself hard on one knee. She felt the skin tear. There was a feeling in her chest, like a balloon that had spent years expanding until it filled up all of the hollow crevices within her, like it had just stretched that last, damning stretch to pop, to shatter within her skin.
She didn’t remember getting to her feet. She didn’t remember getting into her car or starting the engine or driving away.
What she remembers is this, like a skipping record player that refuses to distortedly warble itself to death:
The ticking cool of her truck’s dying engine. The half-hearted misting drizzle slowing to nothing. The twilight peeking through, casting Claire’s never-healed knuckles in grizzly illumination. Sitting on the highway shoulder just within the embrace of Illinois—a homecoming that was not a homecoming.
She scrambled fumblingly out of the car, chest heaving, hand snagging thoughtlessly to grab her angel sword. Shaking, she stood in the shadow of the Welcome to Illinois sign, and she plunged the blade into the ground like she could crack the world raw.
Places get sick, sometimes.
In the hunting world, everyone who’s anyone knows that Claire’s specialty isn’t ghosts. People call her when there are werewolves sometimes, but mostly—mostly—she gets the call when there are whispers of angels, lingering among the cesspools on Earth.
‘Course, that doesn’t mean that she doesn’t do hauntings—they’re a different pace, and she likes to mix it up every now and then.
When Claire rolled up to the abandoned farmhouse Isa had breathlessly described, she knew that this wasn’t nothing. The place felt sick, like a wound that heals itself over infected, gets split open again, infected again.
She sat in her car, gazing at the structure. There were two buildings nestled against acres of farmland reclaiming itself: a barn and a house. The barn looked alright, if a little bit sticky with oncoming rot, but the house itself…
It was big for this part of Illinois. At least two stories, shaped like an L. One arm of the house was folded inward on itself, maybe the victim of a tornado’s leaping path—maybe something else. She could see vegetation growing in the collapsed opening of the house. In the intact parts of it, there were big windows all along the outside. In the glare of the midday brightness, that should’ve meant a clear visual to the house’s interior, but all the windows were discordantly dark, except one on the ground floor that faced Claire like it was expecting her, watching her. Through it, Claire could see a cushioned rocking chair, swaying slightly against what had to be wind pushing into the opened hole in the other side of the house. And that was it.
Agitated, Claire exhaled and pushed herself out of the car, trying not to pause against the windlessness of the day. She rummaged through her backseat for her ghost hunting shit, arming herself with practiced ease while the house watched.
Based on what Isa said, there was a chance this might be a woman in white. Claire rolled her shoulders and strode up to the front door. She nudged it with her boot.
It swung inward with a low moan of rotting wood that reverberated throughout the structure, a domino effect of creaking groans that sounded way too loud for the stillness of the day. Ignoring her own goosebumps, Claire shuffled inside.
She scoped out the collapsed wing of the house first, veering to the right where the sweet smell of rot was stronger. The hairs on the back of her neck stood as she turned her back on the other half of the house, and Claire swallowed against it. She had to be thorough, here.
She stepped gingerly through floorboards dense with fungi, wondering vaguely if their spores were poisonous. Claire had always gotten a kick out of structures reclaimed by nature. There was something satisfying about seeing the battle of decomposition like a frozen snapshot. She flinched when a leaf she hadn’t noticed brushed against her arm. In the bowed ceiling, distended with decay, an austere chandelier clung precariously to the shot wiring, poised just askew of the center of the room she was in, and Claire had to duck beneath it to get to the edge of the house.
For a long moment, she stood in front of the open mouth of it, squinting at the bright sky. Something about it wasn’t right. She shuffled over filthy tiles to position herself within the opening, and she idly let her fingers drift along the splintered edges of the hole, the amalgamation of wood and drywall bowing out like something had punched out of the house from within.
Which just—shouldn’t be possible. This was the kind of damage that came from acts of God and forces of nature. Claire’s fingers twitched, a splinter of wood catching beneath her skin. Claire hissed and sucked the spear of wood out with her teeth.
The house groaned again, a low wail of protest against its intruder.
Claire hefted her shotgun, sent one last lingering look to the contours of the hole, and shuffled to retrace her steps, back to the intact wing of the house.
She intended to go upstairs first, but there was a shuffling noise from the front room with the rocking chair, and Claire paused in the doorway, heart in her throat.
There was someone in there.
The silhouette had her back to Claire, smoothing a careful, almost loving hand across the dust-thick mantle. She planted her hand on the right corner and slowly dragged it across her body to the lefthand corner. Seeing the dust undisturbed, she lifted her hand, stared at it for a long moment, then put it on the right corner again. Dragged with a shushing scrape loud enough to echo in Claire’s bones. Lifted her hand. Stared. Dragged.
Claire must’ve made some involuntary noise in the back of her throat that caught the ghost’s attention because between one moment and the next, she was in the doorway with Claire.
Her arms extended outward, pressed to either doorjamb to bracket Claire in. With light bleeding in through the open windows at her back, the ghost gazed at Claire, backlit like her whole body was haloed, enough that her features were cast in shadow. And she was beautiful: uncannily, frighteningly beautiful in this ageless, frozen sort of way. She could’ve been Claire’s age or her mother’s age when she’d died. Claire held her breath, uncharacteristically paralyzed as the ghost watched her with this coiled sort of stillness that made the entire world feel stuck.
“You came home,” the ghost whispered. She took away a hand from the doorjamb, and Claire stiffened as she reached across the space between them to touch her cheek, the fingers curled in a half-step mimicry of rigor mortis. Absurdly, horrendously, Claire’s eyes fluttered at the touch, and she unconsciously tipped her face into it as the ghost said, “My love, you came home.”
Claire’s heart pounded. She couldn’t move. The shotgun felt like little-kid plastic in her hands. She kept her eyes shut.
The house moaned into the windless day.
There was a noise beneath it, though, like a building bellow straight from the center of the earth. It started distant and big and ended up humming in the center of Claire’s ribcage like the pounding of bass at a club. Still, she didn’t move, caught by the ghost’s hand still holding her face.
In the suspended moment, something breaks.
The ground gives way with a stomach-sickening drop. The house folds in on itself like a scream. Dirt and wood and furniture cascade in around her, consuming the light, the sky, and Claire’s cry of alarm. She scrambles to protect her head and neck with the cage of her arms, the ghost gone like nothing, and the earth swallows her up like nothing, too.
“Dear Castiel,” Claire once said, quaking with a rage that bled out of her in waves of excess. “Fuck you.”
Her grandmother had been dying—go figure. Half of Claire’s prayers to Castiel were damnations, spitting spite and loathing. The other half were, admittedly, pleas.
She wasn’t sure which one this was yet. She squeezed her eyes shut and banged her head back against the wall holding her up.
Castiel had possessed Claire for all of five minutes when she was a stupid kid, but sometimes Claire felt like she’d never really come back from that. The feeling of it had been incandescent, incomprehensible. She remembered looking at her dad after, witnessing the way Castiel had to contort himself to a claustrophobic crush within the lines of Jimmy’s body, and she remembered knowing that Castiel’s true form tore through space-time. That kind of thing fractured human minds.
But Claire was different. Claire was strong. Claire had looked at Castiel, had seen the terrible, indescribable expanse of him, and the only fear she’d felt had been for her dad.
Idiot.
Claire bowed her head, digging her chin into her collar hard enough to bruise, and on her exhale, she said, “Coward.”
It rang through her, a refrain that took up all the space in her body. Coward, coward, coward.
Claire feels the thick, cloying air as she slowly regains consciousness. It’s wet with the earth, and she gasps thinly, not sure if there’s no oxygen or if her ribs are too broken for her to inhale properly. She gropes around the narrow pocket of air around her, feeling the impossibly intact flat of a tabletop, slanted across her body. It must’ve stopped the rest of the house from collapsing on her, crushing her. “Fuck,” Claire hisses tearfully, smacking the heel of her hand against it. “Fuck.”
It's impossible to see shit. Claire’s had her fair share of close calls underground. Dealing in graves and crypts and tombs, it’s hard to avoid. But this—
Claire has figured since the moment Castiel crashed into her life that she’d die young and bloody. Asshole plummeting into the dirt like a death knell ripping backwards through time, heralding her end. She just—she just thought—she thought it’d be a monster.
She lurches onto her side to dry-heave, and something in her body shifts with the movement that definitely should not be shifting. Curled within herself, she dazedly recalls a nearly-forgotten moment from when she was still little enough to not understand God and angels, sitting and fidgeting in a church pew before service started. She’s got a sense memory of her dad’s big hand settled warm and heavy on the back of her neck, and she remembers turning her head to look up at him. She tries to remember what his smile looked like, and she thinks that it was kind and wide and easy—she thinks it came easy to him—but all she can see is his face, soft in its flatness, mouth in just barely a hint of an upward curve, eyes distant but still affectionate, all haphazardly haloed in the fluorescents. He squeezed her neck in the middle of explaining the answer to a question Claire forgot that she asked, and he said, saints die horrifically, or they don’t die at all.
Claire grinds her forehead into the bone of her forearm, tears leaking involuntarily from the corners of her eyes, and she thinks Fuck.
Above her, the tabletop groans.
I want to go home, the childish thought tears through her, incoherent and impossible. But all the same, she gasps around it, smacks her forehead against her arm again. I want to go home.
There’s another noise. It sounds like a wave, at first, and she deliriously thinks that she’s not anywhere near the ocean. But then the noise gets louder, and she realizes that something in the sinkhole is shifting, pushing the crush of debris to collapse in a new way, and it’s still getting louder. The tabletop groans, louder-still, and Claire’s muscles lock.
She’s not ready. She’s not fucking ready. She doesn’t want this—she doesn’t—
There’s a ringing in her ears.
The light that explodes into her little pocket of precarious safety is frighteningly familiar, and she cries out, half in despair, half in relief. She squeezes her eyes shut, not because she can’t withstand its brightness but because it hurts. Her head pounds, and the very air seems to exhale as the light punches through to reach her.
A big, cold, clammy hand touches the back of her neck. “Claire.”
“I don’t want this,” she chokes out, unwilling to look up at him. “I’m not ready, Castiel, I’m—”
He shushes her. “Wait,” he says, and he doesn’t tell her to close her eyes, so she stares at the filthy skin of her arm as light pours out of Castiel, brilliant enough to blind someone who can’t see the true faces of angels. But Claire can see the true faces of angels, can hear their voices and see the ways they leak out of this dimension. She curls over herself, unwilling to witness it.
Her stomach drops out from under her, and then they’re—somewhere else.
Claire lifts her head shakily. The sky is still that fake-looking technicolor sort of blue, unending above her. Cornfields stretch out as far as she can see. Distantly, she hears a bird trill.
Slowly, she pushes herself upright, and nothing in her body is broken.
Several feet away, Castiel stares down at her with a consternated little frown, and when he notices Claire watching him, his gaze flicks away. He turns over his hands, examining them for a moment, and then he drops them slowly to his sides. His version of fidgeting.
“So I’m dead,” Claire says.
Castiel shakes his head. “No,” he says, and then nothing else.
“Thought you were in the—the fucking—sensory deprivation chamber dimension.”
Castiel blinks.
“The Empty.”
“Oh,” he says. “Yes.” He doesn’t add anything. His intonation has been flat and inflectionless this whole time, and Claire has the wild, giddy thought that it feels like something else is possessing the guy that’s already possessing her dad’s reanimated carcass.
“What gives?”
He tilts his head in question, eyes blank.
“Why are you here?” she snaps, frustrated. Her body is still trembling from the swooping adrenaline rush of yet another close call, and she’s not really willing to fully believe that she isn’t dead yet.
Somehow, Castiel’s expression gets even blanker, even more shuttered and distant. He looks at the horizon. He says, “I woke up, and you were praying.”
She feels cold. “I was not—” she spits, and then Castiel looks back at her, and the words shrivel in her throat.
Castiel isn’t a man. He’s not her dad, and he’s certainly not human. But among the detritus of moments like fixing his tie and cradling the gift he bought her and listening to the alien rumble of his voice over the phone, it’s easy to—not forget, really, but—diminish it. Cas’s inhumanness. But it cascades into her all at once all over again. Her focus slips, and she can see the hint of his ruined true form, bleeding out of her dad’s walking corpse, bleeding out of this constraining, ill-fitting plane of existence, bleeding into Claire’s retinas.
Agonizingly slowly, Castiel crouches down at Claire’s side. He offers his hand.
Her dad’s hand but not. Big and cold and calloused from gripping a blade. A ghost in pantomime. His fingers are still as he waits, palm open to the unreal sky.
Claire puts her hand in his.
Dean and Jack ostensibly stopped their grief-crazed hunt to bring Castiel back, and Claire heard that Dean settled down somewhere out in the boonies, alone and rotting. Jody called him a pathetic Bobby-wannabe, whatever that meant, and Dean didn’t argue. Apparently. Not that Claire talked to him after their run-in at that diner.
She talked to Jack, though. Jack liked video chatting whenever they were both free, and Claire liked the kid more than she wanted to admit. They didn’t talk about Castiel much. They talked about Jack’s school and Sam and Eileen and Dean’s growing collection of throw blankets to populate his perpetually-freezing cabin. Claire knew that Jack alternated staying with Sam or Dean, and she never asked about the particulars of the arrangement. Didn’t want to re-invite her displaced rage into Jack’s business.
He was staying with Dean, halfway paying attention to Claire while he clicked through his Club Penguin account and Claire pretended to think about going out to hustle pool, when Jack said very matter-of-factly, “I don’t know how long this will last.”
Claire didn’t ask what he meant specifically by that. She felt too afraid to know. So, like a coward, she said, “Shut up and put your penguins in a club or whatever.”
Jack smiled without looking at her. “Okay.” She listened to the sound of a mouse clicking. She stared at the water stain on the ceiling of her motel room, and she thought about how long it had been since she’d last seen Jody or Alex or Jack in person. An itch started beneath her skin, and Jack said, “I miss you,” with that thoughtless earnestness that always made Claire want to lash out, made her want to shake him, made her want to demand, What gives you the right to be so soft?
Eyes burning, Claire choked it down, the poison that’d been building within her since Castiel moseyed his way down to the dirt. She said, “Yeah,” too strangled to be casual, and she said, “Listen, I gotta go.”
“Okay,” Jack said easily. “Talk to you tomorrow.”
“Yeah,” she agreed, and she turned off her phone and threw it across the room. She pressed her hand to her mouth. She breathed harshly through her nose.
Above her, the water damage stain burned itself into her eyes, and after staring at it long enough, it looked distended, like the world itself was bloated enough to burst.
Claire doesn’t know how long they drive.
She put her foot to the gas once Castiel took her to the truck, miraculously untouched, and she didn’t look in the rearview while they tore away from the sinkhole. Castiel sat quietly in her passenger’s seat, hands folded neatly in his lap while he stared sedately at the windshield. They didn’t speak.
She finds herself tapping her fingers restlessly against the wheel while the sun dips below the horizon, and before she consciously makes any sort of decision, she peels off the next exit into a motel parking lot. Castiel follows her easily enough while she books a room.
Once she tosses her bag in the canyon between the far bed and the wall, she flounders a little bit. Castiel sits creakily in one of the chairs by the tiny table at the door, and he waits like he’s a statue. Claire watches him remain unmoving. She starts rifling through her bag mostly to have something to do with her hands, and she pauses when her fingers pass over a mangled cord.
“Do you want to—uh—charge your phone or something?”
Castiel glances at her in mild surprise, and then fishes his phone out of the inner pocket of his trench coat. He eyes it with a little frown, and Claire decides not to wait for his response. She grabs her charger and Castiel’s phone, and she plugs it into the wall and collapses into the chair opposite him.
The phone lights up, and it isn’t until it does that Claire really notices the darkness of the motel room—she forgot to flip on the light switch. The glow casts them in blue-tinged shadow, and it darkens the crevices in Castiel’s face, deepening the hollows of his eyes. It almost looks like grace, sick and waning. Claire swallows heavily while the home screen flashes to life and informs Castiel that he needs to unlock it. He doesn’t. Instead, they watch with placid blankness as it starts to buzz, and then it continues to buzz. A Noah’s-arc-style fucking flood of notifications. They watch, silent, as the voicemail inbox fills itself up. They watch the texts pour in. Carefully, Castiel reaches out, and then very gently flips the phone over so that they don’t have to look at it. Darkness. It buzzes again.
“You must want to get back to them, huh,” Claire says, staring at the tabletop.
“Who?”
“Dean and—Jack.”
“Oh,” Castiel says. He shifts once in his seat, and the movement strikes Claire as deliberate and artificial. Castiel learned how to wear this body in a way that forced his uncanniness to retreat inward. He learned that he had to breathe and move and blink, and he contorted himself to fit into that framework so that he’d stop freaking people out. Despite the gap between being possessed by him when she was a kid and seeing him, awkward and fumbling, when she was almost grown, Claire knows this. She identified this, gave breath to this when she said, now you’re just… I don’t know. Nicer. Only now does she recall with clarity that it is a performance. It’s like the stage lights have cut out, curtain’s closed, and Castiel’s still there, trying to remember his choreography.
Agitated, Claire adds, “You came straight to me from the Empty, right?”
It’s less a question than it is a demand. She can’t see Castiel’s expression, but she watches him dip his head. She doesn’t know if it’s in meekness or evasiveness or confirmation or apology. He says, “Yes.”
“Well, why?” She throws an arm out, blindly trying to release some of her building hysteria. “You got family waiting for you.”
Castiel doesn’t reply directly. He exhales [remembering his stage directions] and says, “Did I hurt anyone else?”
“What?” Claire says, bewildered.
“When I opened up the earth,” he explains, and Claire would have thought his tone patient if this were Jimmy. Explaining that saints don’t die.
“The sinkhole was you, too?”
Castiel nods, a gash of shadow in lesser shadow. “Leaving the Empty was…” he trails off. He shrugs, stilted. “Disruptive.”
Disruptive. Claire stares at his silhouette in disbelief. “Let me see.”
“Claire.”
“Let me see, Castiel,” she snaps, upset enough that she lurches to her feet, smacking her hands onto the table.
He looks up at her in the dark, and the hollows of his eyes are pitch black, sightless enough to swallow her up if she lets it.
He always capitulates to her if she pushes. This is one thing that’s been made clear to Claire ever since they re-collided in that awful fucking group home. She sees why he’d be a good dad, belated sucker for a tantrum like he is.
The first time Claire saw Castiel’s true form, she was too little to think anything in particular about it except that it was big and frightening and made her special. She remembers, though, remembers looking at her dad through eons of remove, terrified and saying yes yes yes
Castiel relinquishes his hold on her dad’s corpse just slightly, like an exhale that he actually knows how to breathe through. He yawns outward, Jimmy’s body sagging like the opening of a maw.
He’s a black hole.
It stuns Claire, the way that Castiel’s true form cuts a wound into the world. She once thought that Cas was excess incarnate, spilling light and sound and wings across dimensions that just couldn’t hold him. But it’s like all that excess has doubled back in on itself, collapsed inward like a singularity, like an explosion decayed to implosion. The space where his wings should occupy sucks at the motel room like they’re trying to consume the matter they once traversed. At the center of Castiel’s true form, Claire can only see the sinking threat of his many, many eyes, hollowed out in void-like darkness.
He's nothingness, Claire thinks in horror. He’s consuming everything that touches him, and he’s turning it all to nothing.
Castiel retreats within the confines of his body, and he curls one hand into a loose fist. He says nothing.
“What—” it bursts out of Claire, small and afraid and involuntary. She swallows convulsively. “What are you?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“But you—”
“Sleep, Claire,” Castiel says, and his voice is almost gentle, almost fond. He brushes his knuckles along the tense line of her forearm, and Claire doesn’t know if she wants to collapse into him or yank herself away, so she stays immobile. He’s not her dad, she thinks with a ferocity that always makes her feel miniscule. He’s not her dad.
But what the fuck else is she supposed to do? She pushes away from the table and almost violently flicks on the light switch. Castiel doesn’t even pretend to squint at it, doesn’t even pretend it hurts him. Claire shuts herself in the bathroom to brush her teeth and get the taste of bile out of the back of her throat. She’s hungry, she suddenly remembers. The last thing she ate was Cracker Barrel sometime this morning.
God, she was in Pontiac this morning. She bows her head to the mirror, squeezing her eyes shut against the fluorescents, against her reflection.
If she were a good person, she’d call Jack or Dean. She’d tell them, hey guess what—turns out we were both wrong about Castiel. She’d share their disbelief and maybe their joy if they let her. She’d nudge Castiel back into the arms of his family who always want him to come back. She’d video chat with him twice a month, and she’d see him in person when she passed through Dean’s hermit cabin in the boonies, and she’d let it go. She’d forget what she’d seen. She wouldn’t hoard him to herself, this last tie to who they once were, to everything they lost before they had to lose the rest of it. She’d tell Jack, I found your dad, and that would be that.
She turns off the light in the bathroom to brush her teeth in the dark. Castiel is still sitting at the table when she exits and crawls into bed. He doesn’t look at her when he flicks off the light.
Angelic grace lingers in a vessel they possess if they ever decide to abandon it. Like the way light stains vision once it's been cut out. Like a wound healed over infected. Like the hum of a note trying to fill up space.
Claire didn't know about this when she was little. She didn't know about this when Castiel found her again in that group home. She learned about this like she learned anything else, drawn out in blood. She gathered up her knowledge on angels almost without her own consent when she started hunting them. She didn't think she'd need to know anything beyond what she already did by virtue of being able to see their true forms. She didn't research this, still isn't sure if she really ever wanted to know about it. Still, she remembers the angel who divulged it, offhand like the left-behind grace was an angelic form of detritus. An unpleasant consequence to evacuating a vessel, akin to getting dead skin scraped off to leave behind skin that is slightly too raw.
She wonders how much is left within her sometimes. How much of Castiel's grace is left rotting in her stomach. How much of her has been built up like scaffolding around this thing in her, hiding it, enshrining it, hollowing out space for it. And maybe it is just a hollow space, a testament to nothing, glory to nothing, mourning to nothing, eroded and gone long before Claire ever knew that it was there at all.