The Angel, The Hunter and The Nephilim (Destiel x Daughter)

48. Wayward Daughters

It's been two nights since she last had nightmares, and Leah finally feels better. The pills they gave her at the hospital have made her mood more stable. Dean makes obsessively sure that she takes them every morning with breakfast, and that she actually eats, not just drinking tea or orange juice.
Cas has been asking her if she doesn't wanna go to Bobby's, but she knows what that means, and she's reluctant. She can't face the child she bore and then abandoned. Her dads say that Mary is well rounded and sweet, and doesn't look at all like Michael, but it's hard either way, so they don't push it that far.
Another person who longs to see Leah is her boyfriend, Lucas. If he still is her boyfriend, she thinks. Dean made sure the car got back to him after the Detroit escape, but she hasn't seen him in almost three months. He must be sick and tired of her escapades and he's probably moved on.
So when Dean and Cas announce that they're going over to Sam's house for the night to take a few beers with "the guys", the guys being Sam, John, Lucas' father Mark and Jody Mills, they insist Leah has a visitor so she's not alone for the night. It's the first time in what feels like years since they leave her at home, because they trust that she's not gonna get up to any trouble. Leah tells them that she has a friend who can come over. Dean and Cas don't know her, they just took up after school one day and have been in contact the past few days. Leah's never really had a girlfriend before, so this is new for her. The girl, Clea, lives with a foster family in town who took her in a few years back.
"Alright, Leah, we're going," Dean calls up the stairs. They're both standing in the door with their coats on, dressed warm for the terrible snow storm outside. It's been way under zero degrees lately, and they've used the fireplace a lot.
Leah comes down the stairs, she knows to do that because Dean always has something he has to remind her of. She smiles when she sees them, and they instantly smile back, Dean looks so happy. After being so long at odds with each other, things are finally fine between them. He comes over to the stairwell and kisses her forehead.
"Alright, now remember, if you're gonna use the fireplace-"
"Make sure that I put the fire out before I go to bed. I know, dad."
"Okay, good. And if any-"
"Don't let any strangers in. Yep, got that covered."
"One last thing," Dean says, and he chuckles, she knows his rules inside and out by now, but seeing as she haven't had any friends over for ages, she doesn't know this one. He cups her face in his hand and smiles at her.
"Remember to have fun."
Leah smiles and rolls her eyes. "I will, dad," she promises, and he kisses her forehead one more time before he puts on his scarf.
"There's leftover dinner in the fridge if you get hungry," Cas adds from the door.
"Okay! Don't drink and drive," Leah calls after them as they leave. Cas sticks his head in the door again. "Jody is driving us home after."
"I know, I was just testing you," she jokes. "Have fun, say hi to grandpa and uncle Sam!"
"We will. Have fun, honey!"

Leah goes up to her room and sits down in the bed, just sitting in silence for a while. It's never been so quiet before, never as far back as she can remember. These past months have been a constant of parents not wanting to leave her alone, it's been hospitals and hunting and everything. She has a moment to herself, and then she's having a friend over. It feels almost surreal.
She jumps when her phone makes a noise and she looks down to read a text from Clea. She's right around the corner. Leah changes out of her sweats and puts on red and black checkered pants and a soft white hoodie and heads downstairs, and she's looking out the kitchen window when she sees her friend walking up the driveway in a black jacket, ripped jeans and spiky shoes, her wild, curly blond hair busting through the hood she's pulled over her ears to shield from the windchill. Leah goes to the door and lets her in.
"Hey, Clea," Leah exclaims, and Clea immediately springs into her arms.
"Dude, you've been gone so long, I never thought you'd come back!" Her leather bag slides off her shoulder with a clink when it hits the floor.
"Yeah, it's been a crazy few months. Or years. I don't remember anymore," Leah laughs. Clea kicks off her shoes and they walk into the living room, sitting down on the couch.
"Should I make a fire?" the young Winchester asks, nodding at the fireplace. "You must be cold from the walk here."
"Ah, it's fine, my dad dropped me off a few blocks from here, he was going to a friend's place too. But if you're cold, I've got something else that can warm us up," Clea winks and reaches into her bag, pulling out a half empty bottle of Jack. "I swiped it from my dad's liquor cabinet right before we left. He'll never notice it's gone."
"We really shouldn't," Leah says hesitantly, taken aback a little from the proposition.
"Come on, don't be a square. Haven't you ever had a drink before?" Clea asks and pops open the bottle, taking a swig. She winces. "Oof. That'll do it."
"I actually haven't," Leah confesses. Looking nervous at her new but estranged friend, seeing her sense of adventure and fun, she changes her mind. Maybe a little drink won't hurt.
"Alright, hand me the bottle," she says, throwing herself into it head first. Clea laughs and hands her the bottle. "Yeah! That's what I'm talking about!"
Leah almost gags from the licorice taste, but she keeps it down. Feeling it run down her throat, her body suddenly feels warm and cozy. "Wow."
"Yeah, I know. It has a kick, but it gets the job done. You got some music in here?"
"My dad has a stereo. I can plug your phone up if you want to." She goes over to the stereo by the TV and turns it on, and hands her friend the cable. Clea immediately puts on a punk rock song Leah's never heard before. She's only really heard one type of music being played, and that's her dad's old classic rock collection. Cassette tapes, no less. He's refused to update anything in the Impala since he got it from John decades ago. And then there's Sam, who mostly listens to country music. Cas never developed his own music taste. Neither did his daughter.
Clea takes another sip from the bottle and takes of her hoodie, revealing a band shirt underneath.
"What band is that?" Leah asks, she doesn't know what to do with her hands or anything, she's perched on the side of the couch. It's a new kind of situation, but it probably gets better with time.
"It's the Pretty Reckless! Never heard of them?"
"No, I've really ever only listened to old music. Van Halen and Kansas and stuff. Do you want a glass?" she asks and walks over to the glass cabinet by the doorway, picking up two whiskey glasses without waiting for an answer. She puts it down in front of Clea, who immediately pours two drinks.
"You're from Kansas, aren't you?" Clea asks as she puts the glass in front of the timid Leah and insists she takes another sip. Leah cringes at the taste and sits down on the table while the girl waits for her answer.
"Yeah," Leah coughs. "Yeah, I grew up there, my dad is from Lawrence. My mom is from Detroit, though."
"No kidding! I thought you say you didn't know your mom?" Clea leans forward on the couch. She already seems mildly inebriated.
"Oh, that's a long, long, long story," the Winchester says, she'd rather talk about something else. Anything else.
"Yeah, I have one of those too. Long stories are the worst. You don't have to talk about it. I wanna get to know you as you are, not your story."
Leah feels the relief wash over her. She leans forward and leans her forehead against her new friend's. "God, you have no idea how long I've waited for someone to tell me that. All everyone wants to know is what happened to me." She leans back again and takes another sip. The warm feeling runs through her body. The taste isn't that bad when she gets used to it.
"You know what we should totally do?" Clea says enthusiastically. "We should do each other's hair and makeup!"
"Oh my god, yes! We should absolutely do that! Just bring your phone, I have a small speaker upstairs," she says and leads the way up to the second floor. Clea follows with the bottle and her glass, and she immediately falls into Leah's bed and takes another sip.
"God, is this bed made of clouds? It feels like I'm laying on nothing."
Leah laughs. "Yeah, that might just be the alcohol talking."
She's sitting on her chair in front of the mirror, looking through her makeup collection. Clea gets up and hangs over her friend's shoulder. "You're a total Betty, don't you have any black makeup? These are all pastel!" She looks at Leah's makeup palettes, visibly uninterested. She bottoms up her glass and goes to her bag, pulling out what she brought with her in case Leah actually felt adventurous. Putting her items on the desk, the dark hue palettes and black eyeliners and red lipsticks. Leah looks up at her friend in wonder and she takes her glass and bottoms it before she puts her hair up in a ponytail. "Okay, what if you do my makeup in your style and I do yours in mine?"
"Yeah! Let's!" Clea exclaims again and pours them new drinks. Leah immediately takes another swig.

They've agreed not to look in the mirror before they've each done each other's makeup, so twenty minutes and two more drinks each later, Leah looks in the mirror to see an amazing dark red and black smokey eye look topped off with a long cat eye liner on herself. Her skin looks great; she's never seen herself like this before. She leans closer into the mirror and touches her face to make sure it's really her face and not Clea's. The alcohol is probably playing a big part in this, but it looks so unreal.
Clea laughs loudly at her friend and herself. "I look like a toned down fifties movie star," she proclaims, pointing out the red lipstick. She grabs her eyeliner and makes a cat eye on herself as well, to finish the look.
"We look great!" Leah declares, a little louder than she usually talks, but that doesn't matter, the only one who can hear her is her friend, and she starts laughing again. "Hell yeah, we do!" Her long, curly hair hangs over her shoulders and she almost looks more punk rock than Leah does, despite the dark makeup.
"Okay, we have a problem," Clea says a moment later after they've stared at themselves in the mirror for a minute. "We're out of booze."
Leah sighs deeply and closes her eyes, but she opens them again immediately when the world starts spinning, and she gets off the chair. "Get your stuff. Dad's probably got something." Followed by her friend, Leah leads the way into her fathers' bedroom, and she starts looking through the closets and nightstand drawers.
"I have no idea where he keeps it," Leah exclaims after she's looked everywhere.
"I do!" Clea crawls back up from under the bed with a bottle of Jägermeister. She laughs diabolically at her friend. "Do you think your old man will mind?"
"No, he never drinks at home anyway, he thinks it will have a bad influence on me or whatever," Leah says in a mocking voice. Her heart stings a little after saying it, though. Dean doesn't drink in front of her because he gets worried something will happen when he's had a few drinks, like an accident or something, and he has to be level headed or drive. He gets to unwind tonight, blissfully unaware what his daughter is currently doing.
The feeling of guilt quickly disappears when Claire laughs at Leah's mockery. "Come on, get your glass and let's go drink some more! I hope you like licorice, that's apparently the theme tonight."
The girls rush down the stairs, laughing and shouting and dancing. Clea brought down Leah's speaker from the bedroom, but connects her phone to Dean's instead and turns the music up loudly. "Is this okay?" she shouts over the noise to her friend.
"Yeah, it's fine, we don't have any neighbors," Leah laughs and dances, cradling the half full glass of liquor in her hand. The more she drinks, the easier it gets to let loose and actually feel the joy for once.

The girls eventually get tired and pull all the pillows and blankets off the couch, make a nest and lay down on the floor, staring at the ceiling in silence, Dean's classic rock collection playing on the speakers in the background. Leah sighs and finishes her drink and refills both glasses before she lays back down.
"Do you miss Kansas?" Clea suddenly asks as Kansas' Dust In The Wind is playing, her glass resting on her chest, glancing over at her new best friend.
Leah takes a moment to answer, taken aback by the question. "No, not really," she finally replies. Not wanting to dwell any further, she turns to Clea.
"Do you miss wherever you're from?"
"Illinois. And no. Or, we had our family home there, but both my parents left. I guess they're dead. My grandma is dead, that I know. I ended up in foster homes. It's fucked up."
"It's really fucked up. This whole entire world is fucked up." Leah bites her tears down, finishes her drink and starts drinking straight from the bottle instead. She leans her head against the glass table, and Clea sits up next to her. "Wow, you really have some damage, huh?"
Leah hands her the bottle and nods. The whole world is spinning, and her feelings somehow seem stronger now that she's drunk for the first time. But she pushes them down. She's done with being open. She decides that right now.
The bottle changes hands every few minutes as they're sitting there in silence listening to The Eagles' Hotel California. As the chorus begins, they both start singing as loud as they can, and the slump is finally over. They pour their glasses again and get up, turn up the music so loud they can barely hear themselves think, and they block out everything that has to do with feelings.

Then ten minutes more pass, and the stereo starts playing Queensryche's Silent Lucidity, a song Dean used to sing to Leah when she was little and had nightmares. What she didn't know then was that the nightmares stemmed from memories she had from the homes she was in before she and Dean found each other.
The girls turn the volume down a little and sit back down on opposite sides of the coffee table.
"I used to be in foster homes too, you know," Leah pipes up and drinks, leaning her head over the side of the couch so she can see the living room upside down, the lights turned off, the only light comes in through the window from the street lights.
Clea turns and stares at her. "No shit?"
"Yeah, from I was, like, a week old until I was five or something. It's a bit scrambled, really."
"For real?"
"My mom didn't want me, so she gave me to the system and I was in some really bad homes. To think I was fostered by vampires for a while," Leah adds and snickers.
She looks at her friend across the room, who's still staring while cradling her drink close to her chest. "What do you mean vampires?"
Leah finishes her sixth or seventh drink and fills the glass up again, showing no signs of stopping anytime soon. "Vampires," she exclaims and gets up, walking in circles around the living room. "Blood suckers. Supernatural monsters. Fanged assholes. I'm running out of ways to describe them."
The girls haven't looked at the clock for hours, and the music from the stereo drowns out the sound of the car stopping outside and letting off Leah's parents, while Leah is drunk in the living room at two in the morning, going off on a tirade about her life. About how the world is unfair, how she's been dealt shitty cards, how all she wants is to hold it in and put it in a box, lock the box and dump it in the bottom of the deepest ocean. How she wants everything to just be okay and forget that she was raped by her boyfriend, was forced to give birth, and she lists up all the ways she's thought about killing herself. Drowning, hanging, overdose, jumping from the roof, get eaten by bears at the zoo...
And then she turns around to see Dean and Cas standing in the doorway, both with horrified looks on their faces. Leah stops in her tracks for a second and looks at them, then, unfazed, goes on listing. Clea peeks over the side of the couch to see what Leah was looking at, and sees the faces of the shocked fathers. She immediately drops her glass when she sees who it is, and she gets up. While Dean takes off his coat and walks over to his daughter, forcefully taking the glass away from her and pulling her in, Cas turns to look at Leah's friend and lets out a gasp.
"Claire?"
Dean looks up, he hasn't noticed the other girl until now. Leah is still listing the ways she could commit suicide, but it's getting incoherent against Dean's chest
"You have got to be kidding me," Claire sneers, staring at Cas. "I thought something was familiar about the name Winchester, but coming here to see it? What kind of sick, twisted joke is this?"
"Claire, what are you doing here?"
"You abandoned me! That's what you do, don't you? That's why your daughter is all messed up. Look at her, she's fucking broken!"
Claire Novak, the daughter of Castiel's vessel, points directly at Cas and Dean's child who's by now passing out in Dean's arms. Dean picks her up and puts her on the couch for a moment, trying to wake her up by slapping her face lightly and checking her pupils. He then proceeds to pick her back up and carrying her up the stairs to the bathroom. Claire is about to follow Dean up the stairs when Cas grabs her arm. "What are you doing? We need to talk."
Claire rips her arm back. "I'm here for her. And when I know she's okay I'm leaving. What the hell did you do to her?" she asks and goes up the stairs. Her alcohol tolerance is a lot higher than Leah's, since Claire has been drinking a lot over the last few years to forget. Her new friend has never tasted alcohol in her life until tonight, and has so much emotional baggage she might have drunk herself to death if Dean and Cas hadn't interfered.
Dean has put Leah in the bathtub he's now filling with ice cold water to wake her up. He's holding her head steady and letting the water flow over her hair, a bucket placed in front of her in the tub. Claire sits down on the other side of the tub and repeats Leah's name over and over.
"Claire, what are you doing here?" Dean asks as Cas shows up in the doorway and joins them, helping to hold his daughter up.
"I didn't know you were her parents," she says with her teeth clenched. "Believe me, I wouldn't go near her if I knew. And I would never have even suggested drinking if I only knew what had happened to her beforehand."
"Where have you been all this time?" Cas asks, and she turns to glare at him as Dean hands him the shower nozzle and checks if Leah is regaining consciousness.
"Leah?" he says calmly, and gets a groan in reply. He nods. "Honey, this is gonna be really uncomfortable, and I'm sorry, but I have to."
Without further warning, he sticks two fingers down her throat to make her throw up. It takes a few tries but Leah hurls out everything she's had to drink all day and night until now. Dean frowns as he holds her hair back and Claire holds her steady. "What the hell did you drink?"
"I brought some Jack! I'm sorry, Dean, we went looking for liquor and she just drank and drank and..."
"It's okay," he says as Leah half consciously leans her head to his chest and he pulls her into his warm embrace. "It's okay, you didn't know."
Leah comes to a little and starts her list all over again as if she's said all this to herself in her head since she blacked out. "Hanging, overdose..." she mumbles faintly. Dean leans down and kisses the top of her head. "Leah, shh. Calm down. You're okay."
"Is she gonna be in trouble tomorrow?" Claire asks. "I'm sorry, it's my fault, but please, don't blame her."
"I think the hangover is gonna speak for itself. Alcohol poisoning is no joke. But does this look like enough?" he asks and looks into the bucket. He's seen worse, but when it comes to his child, no stone goes unturned.
Cas shakes his head, and Dean apologizes to Leah again before he makes her throw up once more.
"I'll go get some water," Claire says and runs downstairs. Cas shoots Dean a look, and Dean sighs. "I know. This has to be dealt with. We'll get some answers out of her when we know that Leah's safe." He cradles his daughter closer and shushes at her when she whimpers. "I think that's enough, just turn off the water," he instructs and lets the young girl rest her head against the side of the tub while he pulls out the drain.
Claire comes up with the biggest glass of water she could find.
"Is she awake yet?" she asks, and Cas shakes his head.
"You're not going anywhere. We need to talk," Dean chimes in as he looks at his daughter, checking her consciousness again. "This is why I don't drink," he says through gritted teeth. "Cas, call 911. She's not responding."
As Cas runs out of the room and straight down the stairs to get his phone, Claire climbs over to the bathtub, now starting to get frantic. "Oh god, Leah, I'm so sorry, you're gonna be fine, okay?"
"We're taking you too," Dean proclaims as he pulls his lifeless daughter out of the bathtub and holds her tightly to his chest. "Who can we call, where's your mom?"
"My mom left right after you guys did," she cries. "She never came back, I never saw any of my parents again. But Jimmy's not in there anymore, is he?"
Dean shakes his head as Cas shows up in the door. Claire looks up at him, she sees the concern in his eyes for both of the girls, and she feels bad for a moment for implying that he was a bad parent. He was never her father. Jimmy was. But Castiel was to blame for his death.
"Okay, come on," Dean says and picks his daughter up from the floor and rolls her into a blanket that Cas brought up. "It's gonna be fine," he whispers to Claire as he follows her down the stairs and down to the front door where Jody is waiting with a police car, ready to take them to the hospital. Dean gets in and pulls Leah with him, and he and Cas cradle her as Claire gets in the front with the sheriff.
"Who are you?" Jody asks the stranger beside her as they put their seat belts on.
"She's family," Dean replies before Claire can think up something. Claire turns her head away from everyone and cries quietly.