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When Claire Novak was eleven her father told her that he wasn’t her father before walking out of her life.
Later she learnt that this hadn’t been her father at all, but an angel that stole him away without letting him say goodbye.
That didn’t make it any better.
Her father, not the angel but her father, came home the day after her birthday, and she was happy. He was different, inescapably so, but he was there, and that was all that mattered.
Then there were strangers in her house. Then he was gone again. Then her mother, or whatever had taken control of her mother, was hurting her. Was taking her somewhere she didn’t know. Was surrounding her with more people she didn’t know who were all also being controlled by creatures, by demons, who wouldn’t hesitate to hurt or kill her, and who were just waiting for the opportunity to do so.
Her father appeared, pleading for her release, and was shot for his trouble.
And then the angel spoke to her.
Claire Novak, it said, I am the angel Castiel, and I can save your family. Will you consent to be my vessel on Earth?
Claire said yes. Of course she said yes. She was scared, and she was a child, and an angel was offering to help her. Who wouldn’t say yes to that?
Castiel was hurt, had been hurt recently, had wanted to tell his friends, his human friends, this one human in particular that he trusted above all others, above even other angels, to tell him that Heaven was trying to end the world, was trying to free Lucifer, but he’d been hurt and he’d been threatened and tortured and told he couldn’t, shouldn’t, mustn’t warn the Winchesters. He served Heaven. He didn’t serve Man. He didn’t serve them. He had no obligation to keep any of his promises.
He wasn’t going to save her father.
She screamed. She screamed that he’d promised, he’d promised her that he’d save her family, and letting her father die and go to Heaven wouldn’t be saving him. She screamed that she’d let him in so he could save her family, not so he could use her to help end the world. She screamed that he’d lied to her, that he’d tricked her. She screamed and screamed and Castiel ignored her.
Her father begged for her to be spared, and Castiel listened to him.
By the time Claire was able to drag herself to her feet, her father and the angel inside him were gone.
The two men that the angel had considered friends were still there, but they didn’t stay for long. The taller one had drunk blood from the body of one of the possessed people, and the shorter one, the one that the angel had trusted more than anyone else, seemed angry about this.
Claire had been through so much in one day, and she was tired. If this guy wanted to drink blood from someone he’d just stabbed then, honestly, what difference did it make? Everyone had their coping mechanisms.
The men left her and her mother alone.
They tried to return to their lives, to the new normal they’d found without her father before his return, but it wasn’t the same. It couldn’t be the same. Claire’s mother jumped at every shadow, sure that the demons were back to hurt them again.
And Claire?
Her head ached where the angel had been. Her ears kept ringing. It felt like the first few moments of instability after getting off of a roller coaster, except the roller coaster was having an angel inside of her and solid ground was her control over her own body and no matter how much she staggered she couldn’t get her feet under herself again.
Humans weren’t designed to survive angelic possession. She knew this now. There were a lot of things she knew now that she hadn’t known before allowing the angel to use her, and this was one of them. From the dawn of time, humans taken as angelic vessels were usually stored and used as such indefinitely, and on the rare occasion they were released they didn’t tend to live much longer. Either the angel’s power burnt them out, or they couldn’t return to their life as it had once been.
The angel had taken a vessel before her father, but had no knowledge of what became of her after he released her. Maybe she'd lived, or maybe she hadn’t. There was no proof either way. The angel didn’t even remember her name.
There were lots of things the angel didn’t remember.
Claire was alive. The world was spinning, she was drowning in her grief, and she was still alive.
She would stay alive. She wasn’t going to let this kill her.
She’d heard that spite was an excellent motivator. She hadn’t realised how true that was. Every day she wanted to curl into a ball and will the world away, and every day she forced herself to get up and try to exist again. To do anything else was unthinkable.
The angel had ruined her life, but she still had her life. She wouldn't let him take that from her, too.
He’d promised to protect her, and he hadn’t. He’d just left. And her mother wasn’t paying any attention to her.
She would need to protect herself.
One day, when the world was spinning a little less and the pain had begun to recede and for the first time Claire thought that maybe there was an end to her suffering that wasn’t her own death, the angel died.
She couldn’t explain it, but she knew. She just knew. And just like she knew he was gone, she knew that her father had to be gone too.
She was surprised to realise that the angel being dead brought her no comfort. She grieved her father, but, weirdly, she also grieved the angel.
Days later the angel was back.
She had no idea if her father had been brought back with him. It wasn’t his life she was apparently able to track. Not her father’s life, but the life of the angel that tore her family apart and took her father from her.
A few months later, once Claire was finally able to forgo any painkillers and stand without risk of falling, her mother left her at her grandmother’s.
Claire’s grandmother looked after her. She fed her, clothed her, and took her to school. She meant well, and Claire appreciated that. But her grandmother didn’t believe her. When Claire tried to tell her about the angel, her grandmother would sigh, and shake her head, and say she wasn’t surprised that a child with such an active imagination would try to make sense of her father’s abandonment and her following illness in this way, but that it just wasn’t true. That a real angel would never be so uncaring. A real angel would never have hurt her like that, and if it had then it would’ve at the very least healed her before leaving. An angel couldn’t possibly have been involved.
She hated the angel, and she prayed to him every night, because while he was the one who’d taken her father away from her he was also the only one who could bring him back safely. She didn’t know if that was still possible, but she could hope.
The angel died again after she turned thirteen. She hadn’t seen her mother in nearly a year. The angel was dead only briefly, for less than an hour, but for the entirety of that time she couldn’t stop crying. Her grandmother left her to it, having decided that the best response to her talk of the angel was no response at all, seeing as Claire refused to listen to reason.
Claire refused to listen to reason because she knew her grandmother’s reason was wrong.
But the world didn’t end, and the signs that it was ending stopped.
She didn’t know how, but she knew that the angel had something to do with it.
A few months after she turned fourteen, she saw her father’s face again.
But not in person. That would’ve been too simple, too nice, too close to what she wanted.
She saw her father’s face on the news.
She saw it in security footage preceding a massacre. Her father’s face smiled at the camera, but it wasn’t her father behind those eyes, and Claire was willing to bet that it wasn’t the angel either.
The angel may have torn her family apart, he may have tricked her into nearly losing her own life in the process, and he may have left her alone in a body that had taken a while to obey her properly again, but he wasn’t needlessly cruel. He had a purpose and he served that purpose. This massacre served no purpose at all. It didn’t make any sense. Something Else had to be wearing his body.
Something Else had to be wearing her father’s body.
Something Else would’ve been wearing her body, had her father not begged to take her place.
Less than a week after the footage aired, the angel died again.
Less than a week after that, so did Claire’s grandmother.
The angel came back. Her grandmother didn’t. Her father was still gone.
Claire stopped praying after that.