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.fic: This Wide Night (4.20 tag; pairings and stuff behind cut)
This Wide Night (Amelia, Ellen, Jimmy/Castiel, Claire, Dean) PG13 | ~5,930 words
A tag to 4.20, Amelia-centric. I really like her a lot, and I think, as I mentioned yesterday she needs to go talk to Ellen. I stayed up until 4 writing the bulk of this--God, this episode has grafted itself to my brain--and wrote the rest in a sleep-deprived haze this morning. And don't even talk to me yet about Dean and Cas, or Cas and Jimmy, because my heart and head hurt way too much for them right now. Man, what an episode.
This Wide Night
She watches the man who is not her husband turn away. In the last moment she has to see his face before he leaves, a stranger gazes at her from beloved eyes.
She watches Jimmy--Castiel, Castiel the angel--turn away from Dean and Sam, saying words lost to her as she bends over Claire to soothe her. Under her hand, her daughter's hair is smooth and silky, and her cheek burns damp and fever-hot against Amelia's palm. If it's from crying, or from what happened to her, Amelia can't say, and doesn't want to. Bug, she whispers over and over, remembering the beginning of the nickname, when Jimmy, bemused, had remarked how Claire would roll over onto her back and curl up, like a tick or a beetle.
"Mrs. Novak?" The too-close voice startles her from Claire. "Amelia?"
It's the brother named Dean, she thinks, drawn and bloody, a knife in his hand. He seems to realize that when he catches her staring at it, and shoves it into a sheath hidden under his jacket. When he kneels down close he smells like sweat and more blood and leather. His eyes on her are tired and resigned.
"Listen, you two aren't--" He shakes his head, mouth thinning against some emotion. "You won't be safe on your own, or with family. My bet is, the person--the demon--who wanted to kill your husband isn't going to stop after one try. And your daughter." Dean shakes his head again. "I'm sorry."
"It's not your fault," Amelia says with as much earnestness as she can manage. Dean doesn't believe her, she can tell, although she doesn't know how he can find any blame in this for himself. "Jimmy... he chose." For Claire, she thinks, and when she presses her forehead to the smooth curve of her daughter's, Claire's scent is clean and young, like it always is.
"Here." Looking back up again, she sees a crumpled, grease-stained napkin in Dean's fingers. She takes it. Tally's Diner it reads in faded navy blue, and underneath is a phone number written down with a temperamental pen.
"It's the number for a woman named Ellen Harvelle," Dean tells her. "She can help you, just call her and tell her who you are. Tell her..." Dean's face twists with something like ruefulness. "Tell her I sent you. She'll, uh, probably say some pretty awful things about me. They're mostly true."
"That's... That's good to know?" She's probably holding onto the napkin too tightly, maybe smearing the ink, but can't bring herself to loosen her grip. Even as he'd said the words, she'd realized the essential truth of them. Nowhere safe, not for her, and not for her daughter.
She almost asks Dean what's happened, why this is happening. He doesn't look like the kind of man who believes in God, or at least the God Amelia had prayed to every day since she was old enough to recite bedtime prayers. And that God... She can't think about Him tonight, either, not when she can still look up and see Jimmy vanishing through an open door.
"I gotta go talk to my brother." Dean's face says he'd much rather be doing anything than that. "Do you have a cell?"
"Yes." She fumbles in her pocket, smooth and cool metal under her fingertips. She'd started keeping it close when Jimmy had vanished, or, no, those horrible weeks before, when she'd been half-convinced the next phone call would be from the hospital or police saying they needed to come pick her husband up and do something about him before he hurt someone else next time. When she'd come home to find him not at work but on the couch, looking off to some place where Amelia couldn't follow.
Well, she thinks bitterly, now she knows what he was looking at.
"Okay." Dean stands up slowly, painfully. Her own knees hurt, Amelia realizes, from kneeling on concrete, and her back from trying to shelter Claire from everything that's already happened to her. An angel. It's crazy now, she thinks, how people call their children that, can call them after something so indifferently inhuman and powerful she can't square it with what she's been taught all her life.
"We'll stick around," Dean's saying; Amelia tries to look like she's been paying attention, "make sure you get off okay. I wish we could take you ourselves, but... I kinda gotta see to something."
That something is his brother, it has to be. Amelia carefully doesn't look at Sam, or the exhausted grief on Dean's face, and concentrates instead on her cell phone, making her fingers cooperate enough to dial the number.
The phone rings five times. Amelia braces herself to leave a message, wondering what she could possibly say that would not sound insane.
"Hello?" A woman's voice, abrupt and gruff. "Do you have any idea what time it is? Hello?"
"Yes, I... I'm sorry." Amelia licks her lips and takes a breath that doesn't want to be taken. "This is... I'm Amelia Novak. You don't know me, but I know Dean Winchester."
"And you're still alive to tell about it," the woman says tartly. "That's something. What do you want, Amelia Novak?"
"Are you Ellen Harvelle?"
"I may be. What do you want?"
"I want. I need your help." She tries to picture this Ellen Harvelle and imagines Sister Constance, tall and menacing in her habit, her face lined from years working in the South Pacific. "My husband..." Just say it, she thinks furiously to herself. It's happened, you might as well begin to accept it. The resolution lasts until she opens her mouth to speak the words; what comes out instead is, again, pathetically, "I need your help."
"I suppose by 'help'," the woman says with a sigh, "you mean 'a place to stay.' I don't run the Roadhouse anymore."
"Yes. Yes, please. I promise..." She can't think of a single promise she can make, not one she's capable of keeping, anyway. Amelia wishes she could let go of Claire to close her hand over her mouth, to keep the sobs in. My husband is alive, but he's good as dead. I saw my girl... She can't even finish the thought. Explaining this to her parents, even coming up with a plausible lie, ties her brain in desperate, distracted knots.
Please slips out through her fingers.
A heartbeat of silence answers her. Claire's hesitant arms wind around Amelia's neck, and her hair tickles Amelia's nose.
"Okay," the woman says at last, and there's no chance for Amelia to keep back her gasp of relief. She wishes, God, she wishes, she hadn't come to depend on a strange voice on the other end of her cell phone, but she has. She has, on the strength of the few words of a man who tried to help them and can't anymore.
"You got something to write with?" She doesn't, oh Lord, and looks around in panic. Dean's by her side in a second, fumbling a pen from his jacket. Awkwardly, Amelia cradles the phone between her ear and shoulder, and writes on her palm. The pen is the same difficult pen that wrote the phone number, and it smears in a couple places, but she knows she won't forget 962 County Road 31.
"I'll be home tomorrow afternoon," her savior says, "but for now, I'm going to bed. You tell Dean he might be welcome around here. He'll have to turn up to find out."
"I... I will," Amelia promises. "Thank you. Thank you."
"You're welcome," Ellen says, and the line clicks off.
* * *
She has the road map for central Iowa spread out on her lap. It keeps sliding off with every turn and dip and descent down even the gentlest hill. Not long out of Pontiac, long enough for Claire to fall into a fitful sleep, the trip had turned to the tedium of the Midwest, and Amelia finds herself thinking of the night just passed as some kind of dream. Except there's that place down deep inside her, where her faith used to live, the place where she knows that's not true.
The road bumps and twists, gravel pings off the undercarriage of the car. The stolen car, Amelia thinks. Her heart bumps hard against her ribcage and she reflexively checks her rear view; she's never broken a law in her life, aside from one beer when she was seventeen, to prove to her friends she wasn't completely uptight. It had tasted like guilt, and anxiety the next morning when she'd wondered if her parents could smell it on her breath even after she'd spent ten minutes with toothbrush and mouthwash.
When the road angles hard right, Amelia almost misses it. The steady pinging of gravel becomes machine guns and the brakes aren't anti-lock on a car this old. For a moment of desperately held breath and holding onto the steering wheel for dear life, she loses the pictures that she sees instead of the road. Jimmy, worn, exhausted and desperate on her front step. Their friends, Claire's face covered in blood. Stepping into a filthy rest-stop bathroom, and blackness until cold concrete under her knees and Claire and Jimmy--
No. She presses hard on the gas pedal. The car's engine whines before catching on the next gear and sending them rocketing forward.
"Mom?" Claire stirs in the passenger seat and straightens to peer through the window. "What's going on?"
"We're almost there, sweetie," she says, "Just a bit longer." Claire, who hasn't spoken since ordering a breakfast she hadn't eaten, nods dully and lapses into silence again. The afternoon light has the odd quality of a spring not quite come, thin, trying and failing to bring much warmth, more silver-white than anything. It's a light that doesn't belong to any particular time, or else maybe it belongs to the light that's in dreams, that comes from everywhere. Under it, Claire is pale except for the dark circles under her eyes, the impression of tear-tracks still on her cheeks. Amelia forces down a surge of resentment, Castiel, and tries to keep her mind on the road. God knows, they're probably already lost as it is; Amelia can't bring herself to trust the map, or the gas station clerk.
At last, at last, the house she'd been told to look for looms out of the unruly grass. A battered mailbox stands sentry at the end of the drive. Amelia pulls in, heart thumping with terror all over again, even though this is supposed to be a place of safety. Even when the car groans to a stop and shudders noisily into park, the windows stay empty of life, and Amelia wonders if anyone's home, if Ellen's hiding and hoping they'll go away and not darken her doorstep. All the words she'd rehearsed on the drive, the pleas for help and for Ellen to believe her, to think of Claire, evaporate from her brain as though they had never existed.
"Honey, we're here." Claire goes tense under Amelia's hand before waking up fully, blinking and sitting up to look through the windshield. "Where's here?" she asks, and Amelia has to admit she doesn't entirely know. All she knows is "on the right, white three-story," and this house is on the right, and white, at least where the paint isn't abandoning the wood. A vintage truck hunkers in the shade of an oak old enough to tower over even the three turreted stories of a ramshackle Victorian farmhouse.
"Let's stretch our legs, okay? We might be a little early." Her watch says one; her body says it has no idea.
By way of agreement, Claire tumbles out of the car, feet scuffling on gravel before they squelch in mud. Amelia slams her door shut, and the noise ricochets around in the emptiness; the only other noise, aside from the exhausted buzzing in her head, its the wind in the grass and the oak's bare branches clattering together and... She squints at the oak tree. Wind chimes? She steps more fully under it, cranes her head up to see rocks and quartzes, some difficult-looking confections of leather and feathers, suspended there.
"Amulets," a rough voice says from behind her. "It's a good thing for you you got past them. Maybe not so good for me."
"What?" Amelia turns, flushing guiltily--for what, she isn't sure, but the woman in front of her could almost be Sister Constance, twenty years younger and somewhat shorter, in flannel and denim instead of a habit, and carrying a gun. With a gesture she knows is not subtle, Amelia herds Claire over to her. "I'm sorry. What?"
"Amulets," the woman says again. She's Ellen, she has to be. Amelia draws herself up and tries to remember the speech she'd prepared, and holds her daughter's hand for strength. Clasped tightly in her own hand, Claire's is small and hot. Amelia swallows back fear and memory of her daughter's strange face, the words Castiel had said. A gift?
"You look beat," Ellen observes, but she doesn't sound particularly friendly. "Just a few more things to go through, because the amulets... There's lots of things can get past them, so the next step is this." She produces something slender and silver from her back pocket. A flask, Amelia realizes, with an elaborate crucifix carved into it, and a rosary wrapped around the mouth, secured with tape.
"Drink it," Ellen says brusquely, shaking the flask under Amelia's nose.
Automatically, because this woman is not the sort of woman to be second-guessed, Amelia takes the flask and drinks. Water hits her tongue, cool and metallic. Almost before she can swallow around her distaste, the woman nods at Claire, "Her, too," and Claire, wide-eyed, drinks obediently.
"Okay, then," the woman, Ellen, says, warmer now. She takes the flask back, no explanations given; the smile she gives Amelia approaches being gentle, although Amelia suspects this person doesn't have much to do with casual kindness.
"I'm Ellen. Ellen Harvelle." The hand Ellen offers rasps against Amelia's palm, calluses and small scars, tanned. "You must be Amelia."
"Yes." The wind makes the oak branches rustle quietly, and the amulets in them chime their reply. "This is Claire."
"Well hey there, sweetie." Ellen's smile is more genuine this time, and Claire is brave enough to smile back, even if she doesn't let go of Amelia's hand. "Like I said, you two look pretty beat--not surprising, it's a miracle you don't look worse--so why don't you come in?"
"Thank you," Amelia whispers, and is horrified when tears rush to her eyes. Ellen turns away without acknowledging them, and Amelia finds herself grateful.
* * *
Ellen's house is ramshackle on the outside but tidy within, practical and efficient like Amelia's mother. All the furniture is second-hand, patches here and there, and the wood smells of orange oil and spit-and-polish. Claire relaxes a little and even lets go of Amelia's hand, moving away to peer into the living room, a study crammed with large, dusty books. "Mom, lookit," Claire says, pointing at the symbols painted and carved into the study walls, and Amelia murmurs for her to mind her manners even as she tries to get a look herself.
"Those're protection," Ellen says, materializing from the coat closet. She says it like any other person would point out any old piece of furniture, nothing special. "Some things, lots of things, we're better off keeping out, but that's a lesson for another time. You want a drink, honey?" The offer is for Claire, who jumps back from the study door, blushing. She nods shyly, and that earns another smile from Ellen; the smile fades when she turns to Amelia to make the same offer. "You all should have something better than a shot of holy water. I'd hand you a belt of whiskey, but believe me, no amount of alcohol in the world's enough for this."
"I... yes." Even as Amelia wonders what would be enough, Ellen says, "Time. Time helps, although it sure can hurt like hell. Doesn't heal all wounds, but hell, dealing with the supernatural means you play by a different set of rules. Most people who're touched by it? They don't forget it."
"I believe that."
Amelia slides into a chair at the kitchen table. Like Ellen herself, the kitchen is rough-and-ready, but warm, with the sun pouring in through the windows, warmer for its passage through glass. Claire collapses next to her, gaze darting back and forth between Amelia and Ellen, her shoes scuffing the tile.
Two glasses of juice thunk on the table, Ellen depositing them and then dusting off her hands with satisfaction. "That's cider, got some from a neighbor down the way," she tells them. Claire sips delicately at first, then with growing enthusiasm, and Amelia gives silent thanks her daughter was never picky about food. She drinks from her own glass and apple rolls sweet and tart across her tongue when she drinks, and she wishes she could savor it, but gulps it down.
"Sugar'll help." Ellen has a pitcher now, and bends over to refill Amelia's glass. She smells of lavender and polyurethane, and wood. "And sleep. I won't bother you to talk about it until you're ready, but I will say, the sooner, the better. These things, they fester, worse than any wound."
"I just... he's gone." The cider's cold enough and the kitchen warm enough to raise condensation; Amelia's fingers leave tracks in it, running and up and down the glass. Her wedding and engagement rings clink on the glass, on the table, when she makes her hands be still. "He was gone for so long and I didn't know why, and then he came back, and he left again." The words are needles on her tongue, in her ears. "We were married twelve years, you know? Right out of college."
"Yeah," Ellen says softly. She rubs the ring on her left third finger. "I know what that's like."
"I'm sorry."
"It was a long time ago." Ellen laughs and shakes her head. "Still miss the hell out of him, though. I got a daughter of my own--grown-up girl, but you'd never think it sometimes--and she... Well, she's alive, I know. At least I have that." Grief flickers over her face and is gone; she's a woman, Amelia decides, who's become way too used to loss. "What happened?"
"It was Castiel," Claire pipes up, looking more alert and peering at Ellen intently.
Amelia doesn't know if she'll ever not hate that name, or think of it without the slow, heavy rolling of grief. "Claire," she says, instead of the impossible, horrible words she wants to say. He took Jimmy from me, he almost took my daughter; if not for him we would still be a family, and I hate him.
"He's an angel," Claire continues, like she hasn't heard. "An actualangel."
"Claire!" Amelia barks, painfully aware of Ellen's sudden interest. "Enough."
"Honey," Ellen says reprovingly to Claire, who frowns at Amelia with some of Jimmy's obstinance. Amelia's heart clenches, thinking of the other things they have in common, and something in her breaks, thinking of that, that being here is to keep her daughter safe from whatever awful thing Jimmy's walked into.
Drink, she tells herself. Only when she picks up the glass it slips in fingers too shaky to hold it, and cider spills across the table, rushing over the edge into her lap.
"Dammit!" she snarls. God she wants to throw the damned glass, the brief satisfaction of hearing it shatter, the breaking a catharsis. In times like this she used to pray, but Amelia three days ago and Amelia today are so wholly different she doesn't know if she can pray anymore. Her husband had walked with Heaven, something she'd read about and been taught to hope for, and he'd come back and broken down at the thought of saying grace.
"It's okay, it's okay." Ellen materializes next to her, capably mopping up the cider and nudging Amelia from her chair. Woodenly, Amelia obeys. Her legs don't want to work, but Ellen's there to support her with curt encouragment, far more welcome at this moment than God would ever be, far more real.
"Sounds like she's in this as deep as you are," Ellen whispers to her. "She'll need to talk, too."
Of course she does, Amelia wants to snap, realizing with horror she's being selfish. She apologizes to Claire, whose wounded face cuts like a knife, low and mean somewhere between Amelia's ribs.
"Why don't you lie down? You've had a hell of a past couple of days." It isn't really a suggestion, and Amelia is more than happy to accept orders. "There's the solar--the, uh, sun room--right down the hallway," Ellen says, gesturing. "Comfy couch. I'll get your bedroom set up."
"I'm sorry to be such trouble," Amelia murmurs. The solar is at the end of the hall, she thinks dully, glass-encased and bright.
"Oh, believe me,' Ellen says wryly, "I've had much worse trouble than you come through my house. Now go get some rest."
* * *
"I saw it," she says not much later, after Ellen's straightened things and seen Claire through a snack and into the bath. These are Amelia's responsibilities; she shouldn't, Amelia knows, stop being a mother because her faith and her world have faltered, but Castiel still haunts her daughter, hovering invisibly around her whenever Amelia looks at her. She's more, Amelia thinks with a pang, Jimmy's daughter now, the two of them and their terrible mystery.
"Am I ever going to stop crying?" Amelia presses the heel of her hand to her eyes, as though that will stop the tears. The last time she'd cried this much, for so long, had been when Claire was three, and so sick the doctors had prepared her and Jimmy for the worst. Not even Jimmy's disappearance, not even that; she'd been so tired, by the time she'd been reconciled to his loss she'd been too far gone for tears. She'd only cried when she realized she was relieved, that her stranger-husband had gone and taken his Castiel with him.
"Eventually." Ellen nudges the mug of tea at her. Amelia sips it to be polite, even though the chamomile really doesn't soothe, and has faded to lukewarm. "Are you ready to talk?"
"No," Amelia says shakily, "but you're right, I should."
The sun room makes her drowsy, the edge of terror and grief finally blunting. Only, surrounded by windowed walls as she is, all she can see is light, concentrated and distilled after the glass has collected it. The light isn't kind to Ellen, shadowing the lines in her face and under her eyes, the cheap fabric of her shirt. In the light, though, she looks beautiful, the way Claire and Jimmy had looked, transfigured, light of heaven.
"Do you know about the... the demons and angels?"
"The demons, I know plenty," Ellen says casually. "The angels, not so much. I know about them through friends. Can't say I've had the privilege of meeting one myself."
"Privilege," Amelia snorts. Jimmy's word had been blessing. She says this, and then the words just spill out, how they'd met, when Jimmy had proposed right after graduation, Claire's birth, twelve years... twelve years, she can't quite believe it, how could a woman be so lucky--what were the odds, do you think, of being married to a man like that, who loved her and their daughter and their God in a way she can't put into words? And then he went crazy, or I thought he went crazy (she stammers over the correction) and praying to God for a miracle for him (not the kind of miracle he wanted, not that), to keep them together, for healing or for Jimmy to realize how far gone he was.
"He was gone for almost a year--just gone." The tea, by the time she has to pause for a dry throat, is cold and bitter. "And then he came back. And now he's gone again. He... he was dying! I shot him." Only vaguely does she remember holding the gun. She'd never held a gun before, and she remembers it for the strangeness, and how the metal felt in her grip, as though she had held it through thick gloves. "A demon possessed me and used me to kill my husband."
She stares at Ellen, willing her to understand the insanity of that, how that couldn't possibly have happened. Ellen's face gives back only acceptance
"Unless you had protection on you," Ellen says at last, "there's no way you could have stopped that demon. That's facts--awful facts, but facts. They don't teach courses in supernatural self-defense, but I'll teach you, when you're ready."
"I can't become like them," Amelia says, alarmed. "Like those men--Sam and Dean."
"Oh, those boys?" Ellen says off-handedly. "Well, there's no one like them, sweetie, and thank God for it I say. The two of them are trouble enough." She shakes her head and smiles, unexpectedly rueful. "It's not that they're bad, you understand me? But trouble's attached itself to them and it's gonna ride them all the way to the end of the world."
"It's riding my husband, too," Amelia whispers, and with only a sip of tea to steel herself, tells Ellen about Castiel and her husband and daughter.
She begins and ends in incoherence, struggling to explain herself to a woman who doesn't seem to have her faith. How she and Jimmy had wanted to do God's will in the simplest sense, to be good people, be charitable, raise their daughter to love and respect others. She hadn't meant for an angel to come like a meteor into their life, bringing fire and destruction behind it. Not for her daughter to be wrapped up in it, to have in her whatever awful secret thing it is that made it so Castiel could look out of her eyes. And what, she demands roughly, what kind of choice is that for an eleven-year-old? How can an eleven-year-old make that choice?
But if she hadn't Jimmy would be dead, dead anyway. She'd heard those words, your true home, and anyone who believes in any sort of afterlife knows what those words mean.
"It's worse, though," she says into the handkerchief Ellen's pressed into her hands from nowhere. "He's alive but he's gone, he's locked up like a prisoner and God only knows..."
And Ellen's right, she thinks, breathing the humid air of her own stale breath and her tears, time can't heal this.
* * *
Later, she eats only because Ellen makes her, and Ellen is inexorable. Claire keeps quiet about the angel, thankfully. Other than the pot roast and glass of wine, she doesn't remember much, not even praying. The thought of skipping evening prayers doesn't bother her. She vaguely remembers climbing the stairs and brushing her teeth half-heartedly, doesn't remember lying down at all.
At first, when she wakes to darkness, she thinks that Jimmy's gotten up to check on something.
The memory he's gone, he was here, now he's gone rushes down on her hard, a heavy weight on her chest that she can't, can't breathe against. When her hands fly to her throat they find nothing but the collar of her borrowed nightshirt, her necklace, and the frantic gallop of her pulse.
A strange bed, then, she tells herself, or a dream, the kind that vanishes right when you wake up and you have no idea why you're upset and shaking.
Only, it's not that, either, it's some other disruption, like a power outage--that sudden absence of white noise, something so subconsciously present its absence registers as a surprise. The blue hour glows back at her, three in the morning, what's left of the moon making a silver rectangle on her bedroom floor.
She gets up, thinking it's ridiculous, even for the past two days. Despite the ridiculousness, she takes the quilt with her, reassured by the knobby stitches that trace out squares and stars on her back. Under her feet the wood floor is cold.
Her heart does something vicious in her chest when she sees him standing on the bare lawn, untouched by the shadow of the oak. She would know him anywhere, his shoulders, the dark, usually ill-disciplined fall of his hair, the contours of his body even under his coat. His face, too, without seeing it.
But he doesn't look up at her, as she half-wishes and half-fears he will. Instead he stands, wrapped in a light she knows doesn't belong to the moon or stars, and in the shadows there is the faintest suggestion that he's saying something, although she knows she'll never be able to undertand the words.
Something--power, presence, peace--smooths across her, a wave like cool water that passes to leave the sun to warm her skin again. Maybe, maybe, she thinks, she can see lines being laid down in the naked dirt, lines of the sigils she's seen scattered around Ellen's house. Protection, sanctuary. She watches for a time, despite herself, sighs into the waves and the quiet night.
Movement in the corner of her eye startles her from Jimmy--from Castiel, that's Castiel, god, not Jimmy, please, please don't forget again, Amelia. Her hand flies to her mouth, then to the window latch, when she realizes it's Claire, her blonde hair gone silver, and she's probably freezing to death in her nightgown.
Castiel does look up, and a sob chokes Amelia. That's not Jimmy in those eyes, it's something huge and powerful contained in a familiar body and a face that breaks her heart, she loves it so much, and it's quiet because it knows its power, not because it's a peaceful or gentle being. She can feel Castiel's eyes on Claire, as though they rest on her instead.
Claire jumps off the porch steps as though wanting to run to him, but then she catches herself, clearly remembering, and pulls back. That's her only hesitation; when she walks the rest of the way, her steps are steady and unafraid, almost formal. Castiel watches her with keen attention, hands at his sides, head tilted like a great predatory bird considering something small. Amelia bites her lip to keep back the warning she wants to shout, wants even though she knows a warning would be useless, and far too late.
She can't hear them through the glass, is afraid that if she goes downstairs, no matter how fast she runs, by the time she gains the front door he'll be gone and maybe Claire with him. She's as apart from them now as back in the warehouse, with the two of them wrapped in light and Jimmy saying the words that gave her back her daughter and took him from her forever. And even if she did make it, she doesn't know if she would want to hear anything.
Some of what Claire says comes through, her voice high-pitched enough, angling upwards into questions: --go away forever? --to him? To the first question Castiel nods, and Amelia closes her eyes so she does not have to see any answer to the second. No, you can't speak to him. Not anymore. Only knowing she might never see Jimmy's face again prompts her to open her eyes, and she does, frightened suddenly he'll have vanished.
But they're still there, standing close together. Peace decends again, insistent even though she fights against it, and Claire is nodding her head as though Castiel is explaining something, although Amelia can't see if he's speaking or not. Behind them the oak tree sighs and bobs in the breeze that's come up, and the breeze is like voices speaking a language Amelia's bones might know, but the rest of her doesn't.
After some untold time the breeze passes away, and the world goes silent except for Amelia's breath and her heart thumping away. Looking down on them, she tries to see them as father and daughter, stargazing maybe. It doesn't work. Castiel's too present, and Claire too comfortable beside all that power.
At last Castiel turns his head to look down at Claire, and he says something. Claire nods, wipes at her eyes with a hand. It's farewell.
Claire turns to come back inside, thank God, she'll catch her death, Amelia thinks idiotically. But she pauses, going still for a moment before whirling around and hurling herself at Castiel, small arms wrapping around his waist. And Castiel startles, freezes awkwardly--and Amelia would laugh, to see a being so utterly sure of itself so completely confused, but this, it's too much for her--and only after several seconds pass does he place his hands on Claire's shoulders and bend nearly double to press his forehead to hers.
Probably, Amelia thinks, she is crying, but she doesn't care. Her breath keeps catching on some difficult thing in her throat, but at least breath is coming, even if all she can taste is salt.
Castiel watches Claire head inside, and Amelia, impatiently brushing tears from her eyes (be strong, be strong, Ams, try to be like Ellen) prays it's with compassion. She's only a girl, she thinks at Castiel. Leave me my Claire, my Bug, at least, since you've taken him.
And then, then, Castiel looks up at her, and oh, it's him, she swears--swears, hopes, selfishly prays--for just a second. But even as the possibility registers it slips away, and the large blue eyes gazing up at her are liquid with secrets.
But, she sees his mouth move, and hears the words as though he's speaking to her ear.
* * *
He will, when he goes, walk into the shadows, but vanish before she can take her eyes off him. And she will try to forget that, and will fail, and will try to content herself with what he's said to her.
She'll hear, distantly, the door click shut, and Claire's soft tread on floors old enough to creak at even an eleven-year-old's weight. And she'll slip quickly back into bed, cold suddenly, without the warmth of anticipation and uncertainty in her. She will huddle under her covers and turn over the words she'll have to say to Ellen tomorrow, and the words she wishes she could have said to Jimmy, and the words she should have said, too.
And so she'll feign sleep when her door opens, and mumble drowsily when Claire whispers, "Mommy?" soft and tentative, like she hadn't decided two months ago "Mommy" was undignified for eleven-year-olds to use.
"Can I sleep with you?" Claire will ask, and she'll wait instead of taking the answer for granted, and the mostly-dark won't hide the relief on her face when Amelia, her own heart knocking with relief too, rustles the covers and moves over.
"Sleep tight, sweetheart," Amelia will say as Claire's night-cold fingers twine with hers, and she will hold to those small, familiar things in a strange and otherwise empty night.
A tag to 4.20, Amelia-centric. I really like her a lot, and I think, as I mentioned yesterday she needs to go talk to Ellen. I stayed up until 4 writing the bulk of this--God, this episode has grafted itself to my brain--and wrote the rest in a sleep-deprived haze this morning. And don't even talk to me yet about Dean and Cas, or Cas and Jimmy, because my heart and head hurt way too much for them right now. Man, what an episode.
This Wide Night
She watches the man who is not her husband turn away. In the last moment she has to see his face before he leaves, a stranger gazes at her from beloved eyes.
She watches Jimmy--Castiel, Castiel the angel--turn away from Dean and Sam, saying words lost to her as she bends over Claire to soothe her. Under her hand, her daughter's hair is smooth and silky, and her cheek burns damp and fever-hot against Amelia's palm. If it's from crying, or from what happened to her, Amelia can't say, and doesn't want to. Bug, she whispers over and over, remembering the beginning of the nickname, when Jimmy, bemused, had remarked how Claire would roll over onto her back and curl up, like a tick or a beetle.
"Mrs. Novak?" The too-close voice startles her from Claire. "Amelia?"
It's the brother named Dean, she thinks, drawn and bloody, a knife in his hand. He seems to realize that when he catches her staring at it, and shoves it into a sheath hidden under his jacket. When he kneels down close he smells like sweat and more blood and leather. His eyes on her are tired and resigned.
"Listen, you two aren't--" He shakes his head, mouth thinning against some emotion. "You won't be safe on your own, or with family. My bet is, the person--the demon--who wanted to kill your husband isn't going to stop after one try. And your daughter." Dean shakes his head again. "I'm sorry."
"It's not your fault," Amelia says with as much earnestness as she can manage. Dean doesn't believe her, she can tell, although she doesn't know how he can find any blame in this for himself. "Jimmy... he chose." For Claire, she thinks, and when she presses her forehead to the smooth curve of her daughter's, Claire's scent is clean and young, like it always is.
"Here." Looking back up again, she sees a crumpled, grease-stained napkin in Dean's fingers. She takes it. Tally's Diner it reads in faded navy blue, and underneath is a phone number written down with a temperamental pen.
"It's the number for a woman named Ellen Harvelle," Dean tells her. "She can help you, just call her and tell her who you are. Tell her..." Dean's face twists with something like ruefulness. "Tell her I sent you. She'll, uh, probably say some pretty awful things about me. They're mostly true."
"That's... That's good to know?" She's probably holding onto the napkin too tightly, maybe smearing the ink, but can't bring herself to loosen her grip. Even as he'd said the words, she'd realized the essential truth of them. Nowhere safe, not for her, and not for her daughter.
She almost asks Dean what's happened, why this is happening. He doesn't look like the kind of man who believes in God, or at least the God Amelia had prayed to every day since she was old enough to recite bedtime prayers. And that God... She can't think about Him tonight, either, not when she can still look up and see Jimmy vanishing through an open door.
"I gotta go talk to my brother." Dean's face says he'd much rather be doing anything than that. "Do you have a cell?"
"Yes." She fumbles in her pocket, smooth and cool metal under her fingertips. She'd started keeping it close when Jimmy had vanished, or, no, those horrible weeks before, when she'd been half-convinced the next phone call would be from the hospital or police saying they needed to come pick her husband up and do something about him before he hurt someone else next time. When she'd come home to find him not at work but on the couch, looking off to some place where Amelia couldn't follow.
Well, she thinks bitterly, now she knows what he was looking at.
"Okay." Dean stands up slowly, painfully. Her own knees hurt, Amelia realizes, from kneeling on concrete, and her back from trying to shelter Claire from everything that's already happened to her. An angel. It's crazy now, she thinks, how people call their children that, can call them after something so indifferently inhuman and powerful she can't square it with what she's been taught all her life.
"We'll stick around," Dean's saying; Amelia tries to look like she's been paying attention, "make sure you get off okay. I wish we could take you ourselves, but... I kinda gotta see to something."
That something is his brother, it has to be. Amelia carefully doesn't look at Sam, or the exhausted grief on Dean's face, and concentrates instead on her cell phone, making her fingers cooperate enough to dial the number.
The phone rings five times. Amelia braces herself to leave a message, wondering what she could possibly say that would not sound insane.
"Hello?" A woman's voice, abrupt and gruff. "Do you have any idea what time it is? Hello?"
"Yes, I... I'm sorry." Amelia licks her lips and takes a breath that doesn't want to be taken. "This is... I'm Amelia Novak. You don't know me, but I know Dean Winchester."
"And you're still alive to tell about it," the woman says tartly. "That's something. What do you want, Amelia Novak?"
"Are you Ellen Harvelle?"
"I may be. What do you want?"
"I want. I need your help." She tries to picture this Ellen Harvelle and imagines Sister Constance, tall and menacing in her habit, her face lined from years working in the South Pacific. "My husband..." Just say it, she thinks furiously to herself. It's happened, you might as well begin to accept it. The resolution lasts until she opens her mouth to speak the words; what comes out instead is, again, pathetically, "I need your help."
"I suppose by 'help'," the woman says with a sigh, "you mean 'a place to stay.' I don't run the Roadhouse anymore."
"Yes. Yes, please. I promise..." She can't think of a single promise she can make, not one she's capable of keeping, anyway. Amelia wishes she could let go of Claire to close her hand over her mouth, to keep the sobs in. My husband is alive, but he's good as dead. I saw my girl... She can't even finish the thought. Explaining this to her parents, even coming up with a plausible lie, ties her brain in desperate, distracted knots.
Please slips out through her fingers.
A heartbeat of silence answers her. Claire's hesitant arms wind around Amelia's neck, and her hair tickles Amelia's nose.
"Okay," the woman says at last, and there's no chance for Amelia to keep back her gasp of relief. She wishes, God, she wishes, she hadn't come to depend on a strange voice on the other end of her cell phone, but she has. She has, on the strength of the few words of a man who tried to help them and can't anymore.
"You got something to write with?" She doesn't, oh Lord, and looks around in panic. Dean's by her side in a second, fumbling a pen from his jacket. Awkwardly, Amelia cradles the phone between her ear and shoulder, and writes on her palm. The pen is the same difficult pen that wrote the phone number, and it smears in a couple places, but she knows she won't forget 962 County Road 31.
"I'll be home tomorrow afternoon," her savior says, "but for now, I'm going to bed. You tell Dean he might be welcome around here. He'll have to turn up to find out."
"I... I will," Amelia promises. "Thank you. Thank you."
"You're welcome," Ellen says, and the line clicks off.
She has the road map for central Iowa spread out on her lap. It keeps sliding off with every turn and dip and descent down even the gentlest hill. Not long out of Pontiac, long enough for Claire to fall into a fitful sleep, the trip had turned to the tedium of the Midwest, and Amelia finds herself thinking of the night just passed as some kind of dream. Except there's that place down deep inside her, where her faith used to live, the place where she knows that's not true.
The road bumps and twists, gravel pings off the undercarriage of the car. The stolen car, Amelia thinks. Her heart bumps hard against her ribcage and she reflexively checks her rear view; she's never broken a law in her life, aside from one beer when she was seventeen, to prove to her friends she wasn't completely uptight. It had tasted like guilt, and anxiety the next morning when she'd wondered if her parents could smell it on her breath even after she'd spent ten minutes with toothbrush and mouthwash.
When the road angles hard right, Amelia almost misses it. The steady pinging of gravel becomes machine guns and the brakes aren't anti-lock on a car this old. For a moment of desperately held breath and holding onto the steering wheel for dear life, she loses the pictures that she sees instead of the road. Jimmy, worn, exhausted and desperate on her front step. Their friends, Claire's face covered in blood. Stepping into a filthy rest-stop bathroom, and blackness until cold concrete under her knees and Claire and Jimmy--
No. She presses hard on the gas pedal. The car's engine whines before catching on the next gear and sending them rocketing forward.
"Mom?" Claire stirs in the passenger seat and straightens to peer through the window. "What's going on?"
"We're almost there, sweetie," she says, "Just a bit longer." Claire, who hasn't spoken since ordering a breakfast she hadn't eaten, nods dully and lapses into silence again. The afternoon light has the odd quality of a spring not quite come, thin, trying and failing to bring much warmth, more silver-white than anything. It's a light that doesn't belong to any particular time, or else maybe it belongs to the light that's in dreams, that comes from everywhere. Under it, Claire is pale except for the dark circles under her eyes, the impression of tear-tracks still on her cheeks. Amelia forces down a surge of resentment, Castiel, and tries to keep her mind on the road. God knows, they're probably already lost as it is; Amelia can't bring herself to trust the map, or the gas station clerk.
At last, at last, the house she'd been told to look for looms out of the unruly grass. A battered mailbox stands sentry at the end of the drive. Amelia pulls in, heart thumping with terror all over again, even though this is supposed to be a place of safety. Even when the car groans to a stop and shudders noisily into park, the windows stay empty of life, and Amelia wonders if anyone's home, if Ellen's hiding and hoping they'll go away and not darken her doorstep. All the words she'd rehearsed on the drive, the pleas for help and for Ellen to believe her, to think of Claire, evaporate from her brain as though they had never existed.
"Honey, we're here." Claire goes tense under Amelia's hand before waking up fully, blinking and sitting up to look through the windshield. "Where's here?" she asks, and Amelia has to admit she doesn't entirely know. All she knows is "on the right, white three-story," and this house is on the right, and white, at least where the paint isn't abandoning the wood. A vintage truck hunkers in the shade of an oak old enough to tower over even the three turreted stories of a ramshackle Victorian farmhouse.
"Let's stretch our legs, okay? We might be a little early." Her watch says one; her body says it has no idea.
By way of agreement, Claire tumbles out of the car, feet scuffling on gravel before they squelch in mud. Amelia slams her door shut, and the noise ricochets around in the emptiness; the only other noise, aside from the exhausted buzzing in her head, its the wind in the grass and the oak's bare branches clattering together and... She squints at the oak tree. Wind chimes? She steps more fully under it, cranes her head up to see rocks and quartzes, some difficult-looking confections of leather and feathers, suspended there.
"Amulets," a rough voice says from behind her. "It's a good thing for you you got past them. Maybe not so good for me."
"What?" Amelia turns, flushing guiltily--for what, she isn't sure, but the woman in front of her could almost be Sister Constance, twenty years younger and somewhat shorter, in flannel and denim instead of a habit, and carrying a gun. With a gesture she knows is not subtle, Amelia herds Claire over to her. "I'm sorry. What?"
"Amulets," the woman says again. She's Ellen, she has to be. Amelia draws herself up and tries to remember the speech she'd prepared, and holds her daughter's hand for strength. Clasped tightly in her own hand, Claire's is small and hot. Amelia swallows back fear and memory of her daughter's strange face, the words Castiel had said. A gift?
"You look beat," Ellen observes, but she doesn't sound particularly friendly. "Just a few more things to go through, because the amulets... There's lots of things can get past them, so the next step is this." She produces something slender and silver from her back pocket. A flask, Amelia realizes, with an elaborate crucifix carved into it, and a rosary wrapped around the mouth, secured with tape.
"Drink it," Ellen says brusquely, shaking the flask under Amelia's nose.
Automatically, because this woman is not the sort of woman to be second-guessed, Amelia takes the flask and drinks. Water hits her tongue, cool and metallic. Almost before she can swallow around her distaste, the woman nods at Claire, "Her, too," and Claire, wide-eyed, drinks obediently.
"Okay, then," the woman, Ellen, says, warmer now. She takes the flask back, no explanations given; the smile she gives Amelia approaches being gentle, although Amelia suspects this person doesn't have much to do with casual kindness.
"I'm Ellen. Ellen Harvelle." The hand Ellen offers rasps against Amelia's palm, calluses and small scars, tanned. "You must be Amelia."
"Yes." The wind makes the oak branches rustle quietly, and the amulets in them chime their reply. "This is Claire."
"Well hey there, sweetie." Ellen's smile is more genuine this time, and Claire is brave enough to smile back, even if she doesn't let go of Amelia's hand. "Like I said, you two look pretty beat--not surprising, it's a miracle you don't look worse--so why don't you come in?"
"Thank you," Amelia whispers, and is horrified when tears rush to her eyes. Ellen turns away without acknowledging them, and Amelia finds herself grateful.
Ellen's house is ramshackle on the outside but tidy within, practical and efficient like Amelia's mother. All the furniture is second-hand, patches here and there, and the wood smells of orange oil and spit-and-polish. Claire relaxes a little and even lets go of Amelia's hand, moving away to peer into the living room, a study crammed with large, dusty books. "Mom, lookit," Claire says, pointing at the symbols painted and carved into the study walls, and Amelia murmurs for her to mind her manners even as she tries to get a look herself.
"Those're protection," Ellen says, materializing from the coat closet. She says it like any other person would point out any old piece of furniture, nothing special. "Some things, lots of things, we're better off keeping out, but that's a lesson for another time. You want a drink, honey?" The offer is for Claire, who jumps back from the study door, blushing. She nods shyly, and that earns another smile from Ellen; the smile fades when she turns to Amelia to make the same offer. "You all should have something better than a shot of holy water. I'd hand you a belt of whiskey, but believe me, no amount of alcohol in the world's enough for this."
"I... yes." Even as Amelia wonders what would be enough, Ellen says, "Time. Time helps, although it sure can hurt like hell. Doesn't heal all wounds, but hell, dealing with the supernatural means you play by a different set of rules. Most people who're touched by it? They don't forget it."
"I believe that."
Amelia slides into a chair at the kitchen table. Like Ellen herself, the kitchen is rough-and-ready, but warm, with the sun pouring in through the windows, warmer for its passage through glass. Claire collapses next to her, gaze darting back and forth between Amelia and Ellen, her shoes scuffing the tile.
Two glasses of juice thunk on the table, Ellen depositing them and then dusting off her hands with satisfaction. "That's cider, got some from a neighbor down the way," she tells them. Claire sips delicately at first, then with growing enthusiasm, and Amelia gives silent thanks her daughter was never picky about food. She drinks from her own glass and apple rolls sweet and tart across her tongue when she drinks, and she wishes she could savor it, but gulps it down.
"Sugar'll help." Ellen has a pitcher now, and bends over to refill Amelia's glass. She smells of lavender and polyurethane, and wood. "And sleep. I won't bother you to talk about it until you're ready, but I will say, the sooner, the better. These things, they fester, worse than any wound."
"I just... he's gone." The cider's cold enough and the kitchen warm enough to raise condensation; Amelia's fingers leave tracks in it, running and up and down the glass. Her wedding and engagement rings clink on the glass, on the table, when she makes her hands be still. "He was gone for so long and I didn't know why, and then he came back, and he left again." The words are needles on her tongue, in her ears. "We were married twelve years, you know? Right out of college."
"Yeah," Ellen says softly. She rubs the ring on her left third finger. "I know what that's like."
"I'm sorry."
"It was a long time ago." Ellen laughs and shakes her head. "Still miss the hell out of him, though. I got a daughter of my own--grown-up girl, but you'd never think it sometimes--and she... Well, she's alive, I know. At least I have that." Grief flickers over her face and is gone; she's a woman, Amelia decides, who's become way too used to loss. "What happened?"
"It was Castiel," Claire pipes up, looking more alert and peering at Ellen intently.
Amelia doesn't know if she'll ever not hate that name, or think of it without the slow, heavy rolling of grief. "Claire," she says, instead of the impossible, horrible words she wants to say. He took Jimmy from me, he almost took my daughter; if not for him we would still be a family, and I hate him.
"He's an angel," Claire continues, like she hasn't heard. "An actualangel."
"Claire!" Amelia barks, painfully aware of Ellen's sudden interest. "Enough."
"Honey," Ellen says reprovingly to Claire, who frowns at Amelia with some of Jimmy's obstinance. Amelia's heart clenches, thinking of the other things they have in common, and something in her breaks, thinking of that, that being here is to keep her daughter safe from whatever awful thing Jimmy's walked into.
Drink, she tells herself. Only when she picks up the glass it slips in fingers too shaky to hold it, and cider spills across the table, rushing over the edge into her lap.
"Dammit!" she snarls. God she wants to throw the damned glass, the brief satisfaction of hearing it shatter, the breaking a catharsis. In times like this she used to pray, but Amelia three days ago and Amelia today are so wholly different she doesn't know if she can pray anymore. Her husband had walked with Heaven, something she'd read about and been taught to hope for, and he'd come back and broken down at the thought of saying grace.
"It's okay, it's okay." Ellen materializes next to her, capably mopping up the cider and nudging Amelia from her chair. Woodenly, Amelia obeys. Her legs don't want to work, but Ellen's there to support her with curt encouragment, far more welcome at this moment than God would ever be, far more real.
"Sounds like she's in this as deep as you are," Ellen whispers to her. "She'll need to talk, too."
Of course she does, Amelia wants to snap, realizing with horror she's being selfish. She apologizes to Claire, whose wounded face cuts like a knife, low and mean somewhere between Amelia's ribs.
"Why don't you lie down? You've had a hell of a past couple of days." It isn't really a suggestion, and Amelia is more than happy to accept orders. "There's the solar--the, uh, sun room--right down the hallway," Ellen says, gesturing. "Comfy couch. I'll get your bedroom set up."
"I'm sorry to be such trouble," Amelia murmurs. The solar is at the end of the hall, she thinks dully, glass-encased and bright.
"Oh, believe me,' Ellen says wryly, "I've had much worse trouble than you come through my house. Now go get some rest."
"I saw it," she says not much later, after Ellen's straightened things and seen Claire through a snack and into the bath. These are Amelia's responsibilities; she shouldn't, Amelia knows, stop being a mother because her faith and her world have faltered, but Castiel still haunts her daughter, hovering invisibly around her whenever Amelia looks at her. She's more, Amelia thinks with a pang, Jimmy's daughter now, the two of them and their terrible mystery.
"Am I ever going to stop crying?" Amelia presses the heel of her hand to her eyes, as though that will stop the tears. The last time she'd cried this much, for so long, had been when Claire was three, and so sick the doctors had prepared her and Jimmy for the worst. Not even Jimmy's disappearance, not even that; she'd been so tired, by the time she'd been reconciled to his loss she'd been too far gone for tears. She'd only cried when she realized she was relieved, that her stranger-husband had gone and taken his Castiel with him.
"Eventually." Ellen nudges the mug of tea at her. Amelia sips it to be polite, even though the chamomile really doesn't soothe, and has faded to lukewarm. "Are you ready to talk?"
"No," Amelia says shakily, "but you're right, I should."
The sun room makes her drowsy, the edge of terror and grief finally blunting. Only, surrounded by windowed walls as she is, all she can see is light, concentrated and distilled after the glass has collected it. The light isn't kind to Ellen, shadowing the lines in her face and under her eyes, the cheap fabric of her shirt. In the light, though, she looks beautiful, the way Claire and Jimmy had looked, transfigured, light of heaven.
"Do you know about the... the demons and angels?"
"The demons, I know plenty," Ellen says casually. "The angels, not so much. I know about them through friends. Can't say I've had the privilege of meeting one myself."
"Privilege," Amelia snorts. Jimmy's word had been blessing. She says this, and then the words just spill out, how they'd met, when Jimmy had proposed right after graduation, Claire's birth, twelve years... twelve years, she can't quite believe it, how could a woman be so lucky--what were the odds, do you think, of being married to a man like that, who loved her and their daughter and their God in a way she can't put into words? And then he went crazy, or I thought he went crazy (she stammers over the correction) and praying to God for a miracle for him (not the kind of miracle he wanted, not that), to keep them together, for healing or for Jimmy to realize how far gone he was.
"He was gone for almost a year--just gone." The tea, by the time she has to pause for a dry throat, is cold and bitter. "And then he came back. And now he's gone again. He... he was dying! I shot him." Only vaguely does she remember holding the gun. She'd never held a gun before, and she remembers it for the strangeness, and how the metal felt in her grip, as though she had held it through thick gloves. "A demon possessed me and used me to kill my husband."
She stares at Ellen, willing her to understand the insanity of that, how that couldn't possibly have happened. Ellen's face gives back only acceptance
"Unless you had protection on you," Ellen says at last, "there's no way you could have stopped that demon. That's facts--awful facts, but facts. They don't teach courses in supernatural self-defense, but I'll teach you, when you're ready."
"I can't become like them," Amelia says, alarmed. "Like those men--Sam and Dean."
"Oh, those boys?" Ellen says off-handedly. "Well, there's no one like them, sweetie, and thank God for it I say. The two of them are trouble enough." She shakes her head and smiles, unexpectedly rueful. "It's not that they're bad, you understand me? But trouble's attached itself to them and it's gonna ride them all the way to the end of the world."
"It's riding my husband, too," Amelia whispers, and with only a sip of tea to steel herself, tells Ellen about Castiel and her husband and daughter.
She begins and ends in incoherence, struggling to explain herself to a woman who doesn't seem to have her faith. How she and Jimmy had wanted to do God's will in the simplest sense, to be good people, be charitable, raise their daughter to love and respect others. She hadn't meant for an angel to come like a meteor into their life, bringing fire and destruction behind it. Not for her daughter to be wrapped up in it, to have in her whatever awful secret thing it is that made it so Castiel could look out of her eyes. And what, she demands roughly, what kind of choice is that for an eleven-year-old? How can an eleven-year-old make that choice?
But if she hadn't Jimmy would be dead, dead anyway. She'd heard those words, your true home, and anyone who believes in any sort of afterlife knows what those words mean.
"It's worse, though," she says into the handkerchief Ellen's pressed into her hands from nowhere. "He's alive but he's gone, he's locked up like a prisoner and God only knows..."
And Ellen's right, she thinks, breathing the humid air of her own stale breath and her tears, time can't heal this.
Later, she eats only because Ellen makes her, and Ellen is inexorable. Claire keeps quiet about the angel, thankfully. Other than the pot roast and glass of wine, she doesn't remember much, not even praying. The thought of skipping evening prayers doesn't bother her. She vaguely remembers climbing the stairs and brushing her teeth half-heartedly, doesn't remember lying down at all.
At first, when she wakes to darkness, she thinks that Jimmy's gotten up to check on something.
The memory he's gone, he was here, now he's gone rushes down on her hard, a heavy weight on her chest that she can't, can't breathe against. When her hands fly to her throat they find nothing but the collar of her borrowed nightshirt, her necklace, and the frantic gallop of her pulse.
A strange bed, then, she tells herself, or a dream, the kind that vanishes right when you wake up and you have no idea why you're upset and shaking.
Only, it's not that, either, it's some other disruption, like a power outage--that sudden absence of white noise, something so subconsciously present its absence registers as a surprise. The blue hour glows back at her, three in the morning, what's left of the moon making a silver rectangle on her bedroom floor.
She gets up, thinking it's ridiculous, even for the past two days. Despite the ridiculousness, she takes the quilt with her, reassured by the knobby stitches that trace out squares and stars on her back. Under her feet the wood floor is cold.
Her heart does something vicious in her chest when she sees him standing on the bare lawn, untouched by the shadow of the oak. She would know him anywhere, his shoulders, the dark, usually ill-disciplined fall of his hair, the contours of his body even under his coat. His face, too, without seeing it.
But he doesn't look up at her, as she half-wishes and half-fears he will. Instead he stands, wrapped in a light she knows doesn't belong to the moon or stars, and in the shadows there is the faintest suggestion that he's saying something, although she knows she'll never be able to undertand the words.
Something--power, presence, peace--smooths across her, a wave like cool water that passes to leave the sun to warm her skin again. Maybe, maybe, she thinks, she can see lines being laid down in the naked dirt, lines of the sigils she's seen scattered around Ellen's house. Protection, sanctuary. She watches for a time, despite herself, sighs into the waves and the quiet night.
Movement in the corner of her eye startles her from Jimmy--from Castiel, that's Castiel, god, not Jimmy, please, please don't forget again, Amelia. Her hand flies to her mouth, then to the window latch, when she realizes it's Claire, her blonde hair gone silver, and she's probably freezing to death in her nightgown.
Castiel does look up, and a sob chokes Amelia. That's not Jimmy in those eyes, it's something huge and powerful contained in a familiar body and a face that breaks her heart, she loves it so much, and it's quiet because it knows its power, not because it's a peaceful or gentle being. She can feel Castiel's eyes on Claire, as though they rest on her instead.
Claire jumps off the porch steps as though wanting to run to him, but then she catches herself, clearly remembering, and pulls back. That's her only hesitation; when she walks the rest of the way, her steps are steady and unafraid, almost formal. Castiel watches her with keen attention, hands at his sides, head tilted like a great predatory bird considering something small. Amelia bites her lip to keep back the warning she wants to shout, wants even though she knows a warning would be useless, and far too late.
She can't hear them through the glass, is afraid that if she goes downstairs, no matter how fast she runs, by the time she gains the front door he'll be gone and maybe Claire with him. She's as apart from them now as back in the warehouse, with the two of them wrapped in light and Jimmy saying the words that gave her back her daughter and took him from her forever. And even if she did make it, she doesn't know if she would want to hear anything.
Some of what Claire says comes through, her voice high-pitched enough, angling upwards into questions: --go away forever? --to him? To the first question Castiel nods, and Amelia closes her eyes so she does not have to see any answer to the second. No, you can't speak to him. Not anymore. Only knowing she might never see Jimmy's face again prompts her to open her eyes, and she does, frightened suddenly he'll have vanished.
But they're still there, standing close together. Peace decends again, insistent even though she fights against it, and Claire is nodding her head as though Castiel is explaining something, although Amelia can't see if he's speaking or not. Behind them the oak tree sighs and bobs in the breeze that's come up, and the breeze is like voices speaking a language Amelia's bones might know, but the rest of her doesn't.
After some untold time the breeze passes away, and the world goes silent except for Amelia's breath and her heart thumping away. Looking down on them, she tries to see them as father and daughter, stargazing maybe. It doesn't work. Castiel's too present, and Claire too comfortable beside all that power.
At last Castiel turns his head to look down at Claire, and he says something. Claire nods, wipes at her eyes with a hand. It's farewell.
Claire turns to come back inside, thank God, she'll catch her death, Amelia thinks idiotically. But she pauses, going still for a moment before whirling around and hurling herself at Castiel, small arms wrapping around his waist. And Castiel startles, freezes awkwardly--and Amelia would laugh, to see a being so utterly sure of itself so completely confused, but this, it's too much for her--and only after several seconds pass does he place his hands on Claire's shoulders and bend nearly double to press his forehead to hers.
Probably, Amelia thinks, she is crying, but she doesn't care. Her breath keeps catching on some difficult thing in her throat, but at least breath is coming, even if all she can taste is salt.
Castiel watches Claire head inside, and Amelia, impatiently brushing tears from her eyes (be strong, be strong, Ams, try to be like Ellen) prays it's with compassion. She's only a girl, she thinks at Castiel. Leave me my Claire, my Bug, at least, since you've taken him.
And then, then, Castiel looks up at her, and oh, it's him, she swears--swears, hopes, selfishly prays--for just a second. But even as the possibility registers it slips away, and the large blue eyes gazing up at her are liquid with secrets.
But, she sees his mouth move, and hears the words as though he's speaking to her ear.
He will, when he goes, walk into the shadows, but vanish before she can take her eyes off him. And she will try to forget that, and will fail, and will try to content herself with what he's said to her.
She'll hear, distantly, the door click shut, and Claire's soft tread on floors old enough to creak at even an eleven-year-old's weight. And she'll slip quickly back into bed, cold suddenly, without the warmth of anticipation and uncertainty in her. She will huddle under her covers and turn over the words she'll have to say to Ellen tomorrow, and the words she wishes she could have said to Jimmy, and the words she should have said, too.
And so she'll feign sleep when her door opens, and mumble drowsily when Claire whispers, "Mommy?" soft and tentative, like she hadn't decided two months ago "Mommy" was undignified for eleven-year-olds to use.
"Can I sleep with you?" Claire will ask, and she'll wait instead of taking the answer for granted, and the mostly-dark won't hide the relief on her face when Amelia, her own heart knocking with relief too, rustles the covers and moves over.
"Sleep tight, sweetheart," Amelia will say as Claire's night-cold fingers twine with hers, and she will hold to those small, familiar things in a strange and otherwise empty night.
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Thanks for making my crappy morning so much better.
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I am absolutely delighted to be reading your entries unobscured by Feedreader! I did read them, but this is so much better.*hugs*
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Thank you!!!
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This is wonderful - the story of "now what", when nothing is safe and everything is real. I liked both Amelia and Claire in this episode, what we got to see of them, and adding Ellen to that equation grounds their terror and flight beautifully.
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(And I should take the opportunity to say hi, since I subscribed to you a few days ago but haven't commented yet. Hi!)
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Thanks for a great story!
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