Mistaken for Strangers (1/1)
Title: Mistaken for Strangers
Author: Bella Temple
Category: SPN, gen
Rating: Teen
Warnings: Some language
Spoilers: Everything aired, including 5x09, brief speculation into the future
Characters: Dean, Sam, OFC
Disclaimer: The characters and basic premise within are property of their original creators and producers. No money is being made off this work of fiction.
Author's note: I think this is dedicated to all of those who like to fuss about where the women are in Supernatural.
Summary: She said her name was Jenna and she saw right through Dean.
She said her name was Jenna, and though she was in Mrs. Millman's third grade class instead of Ms. Jackson's, she still came up to talk to Dean sometimes on the playground, when he was standing up against the wall. Dean spent a lot of recesses up against the wall in that school, and not just because he never really felt like playing with the other kids. Ms. Jackson didn't put up with talking in her classroom and said Dean had an "attitude problem."
Jenna had blue eyes and brown pigtails and wore hand-me-down t-shirts with GI Joe and Ninja Turtles on them. When she wasn't talking to Dean, she and her best friend, a little black girl with braids that went in every direction, would play at being sisters or college roommates, often times plagued with mysterious illnesses or haunted by ghosts. They had perfected the art of backing into each other "accidentally" and jumping like they were startled, like Scooby-Doo's friends did on TV. Jenna's father was in the air force, and she liked to talk about all the different places she'd moved with him, so far. Last year, she'd say, we were in Panama. They have jungles there. Real ones. And more different kinds of bugs than you could even imagine.
Most days, Jenna would only talk to Dean for maybe five minutes before Mrs. White, the recess lady, would remind her that Dean was being punished and didn't get to talk to his friends. She'd make a face, like she wanted to protest that she and Dean weren't friends, but go back to playing pretend with her friends without comment. Dean never saw her when they weren't at recess. Not at lunch, or before school on the playground, or even in the hallways. She was just the Recess Girl, full of stories about jungles and jet fighters.
The day before Dean's last day at the school, Mrs. White lead Jenna and a boy Dean didn't know up to the wall about ten minutes before recess was over and told them to stand there while she found someone to notify the principal. The boy had mulch in his hair and a rip in his t-shirt, and Jenna had dirt stains on the knees of her worn corduroys. They stood on either side of Dean, glaring out at the playground instead of at each other, until the boy turned to Dean with a sneer on his face and said "she's such a freak", which Dean didn't think people said about people who weren't Winchesters, and the next thing he knew, he was the silent filling in a screaming argument sandwich. Apparently, the boy had said something about boys being stronger than girls, which Dean figured was true, and Jenna had said something about being able to beat up her big brother and the boy had said that meant her big brother was a girl -- which Dean figured was also true -- so Jenna had decided to show him how strong she was by beating him up.
Dean had always kind of put up with Jenna, but at that moment he'd decided he actually kind of liked her. You know. As much as he liked any girl, which usually wasn't that much.
Jenna wasn't on the playground at all, the next day, and Dean didn't ask where she was, and the day after that, Dean was in the car with his dad and Sam so Dad could go hunt a poltergeist in Amherst. But from then on, any time someone tried the old line about boys being stronger and girls being smarter, Dean would think of Jenna and her dirty knees.
Then he'd tease Sam about how he was such a big girl.
* * *
She said her name was Jenna, and she sat at the next lab table over from Dean in Chemistry at his third school Sophomore year. She'd traded the pig tails for soft waves, by then, and her shirts were still worn-looking and faded, but they had pictures of cartoon cats on them or stripes or the school's field hockey team logo.
Her pants still had dirt on the knees.
She still spent much of her time talking, this time to her lab partner, all about going to visit her father in Turkey over spring break or the metaphors of marriage in Shel Silverstein books. Though the teacher made him go through the same "introduce yourself to the class" song and dance that every other teacher in the history of ever made new students go through, Jenna cast him little more than a glance before turning back to her friend, a fluffy haired guy whose claim to high school fame was apparently painting himself up in the school colors for sporting events and generally making a giant ass of himself. Every now and then, the teacher would stop by and remind her she was supposed to be focusing on Chemistry. Dean found himself surprised she hadn't spent as much time up against the wall at recess as he had.
Chemistry was the only class they had together, but Dean spotted her sometimes in the lunch room. Where in class she was boisterous and loud mouthed, in the lunch room she tended towards the end of the table, always with the same group of people, but always hovering on the edge of it, as if she hadn't yet been completely welcomed into their group. From what he gathered, she wasn't hopping from base to base and school to school with her father, any more, but that seemed to be a somewhat new development -- she had stories about almost as many places around the country as he did -- and Dean knew as well as anyone how hard it could be to break through the barrier of the "we've gone to school together since Kindergarten" cliques most high schools seemed to be full of.
Two weeks and the entire cheerleading squad under his belt, Dean decided it was time to properly break the ice. He sat down across from her, snagged a french fry from her lunch tray, and flashed her a broad smile.
"So," he said. "You still beating up boys who make fun of your big brother?"
She blinked at him and closed her binder over a brightly colored novel with some dude with a sword on the cover. "My god," she said, sliding her french fries closer to her body. "It speaks."
She was pretty enough, really, not as heavily made up and slightly fake looking as some of the other girls in their class, though her shirts weren't nearly as form-fitting or low cut as Dean normally liked. Still, he turned his charm up to eleven and leaned his elbows on the table. "Well," he said. "A guy's got to keep at least some mystery."
"Kind of hard to do when you're busy screwing your way through varsity athletes, isn't it?"
"You say that like it's a bad thing."
"Yeah," she said. "I guess I do." And she turned to the girl sitting nearby, ostensibly to ask about the particular flavor of soda the girl was drinking, shutting Dean out completely.
But the next day, it was Jenna sitting down across from him, reaching out to snag a chip from the bag he'd lifted from the lunch line.
"So," she said. "Now that we have the whole awkward flirting thing out of the way, how've you been?"
They struck up something that might be considered a friendship, after that, with her rolling her eyes any time Dean made a pass at one of her fellow students, and him rolling his in return when she started to talk a bit too much about literature or history. Mostly, they kept to family. Her big brother had joined the Navy, apparently, following in their father's footsteps but "in his own special way". He told her about Sam's science projects and soccer games, and she told him about Turkey and Germany and how it was, exactly, that she'd gotten herself stuck in Ohio instead of continuing to jet around the world with her father.
Istanbul was one of her favorite subjects. "There's this temple there," she said. "Like, five times more ancient than anything in America could ever dream of being. It started out as a temple to Apollo, then bounced back and forth between Christianity and Islam for awhile before ending up a museum. They have these angels without heads painted on the walls, like, ghosting through layers of paint and hovering over huge medallions devoted to Allah."
If Dean flinched a little at the word "ghosting", she didn't seem to notice. When she got started on the vampires in the catacombs beneath the city, Dean couldn't help but start rolling his eyes again.
"What?"
"Vampires. I mean, come on. No such thing."
"No one likes a skeptic, Dean."
And Dean snorted hard enough that he started choking, which set her laughing so hard that they started to draw stares.
When John pulled Sam and Dean out of school again a month later, Dean defended Sam's insistence that he get one final day of classes to say goodbye. Usually, Dean couldn't get out of a town fast enough, but for once, he had someone he might miss.
Jenna understood, better than anyone else probably ever would. She gave him a wry smile and said "and to think, I was just starting to think I might give you a chance." He told her he had five minutes and knew how to get into the broom closet and she laughed and punched him in the shoulder.
"I'd say never change, but I get the feeling that you probably should."
Dean scoffed. "Hey, I'll see you around, Jenna."
She shook her head. "Bye, Dean." And she walked away without a backwards glance.
* * *
They said her name was Juniper, but Dean was about 99.9% sure it was actually Jenna. Her hair was cut short in a bob, now, and her bare knees were dusted with a faint coating of glitter and the occasional bit of peanut shell stuck in the shimmering oil, but her eyes still held that faintly caustic spark when she happened to glance over her audience.
If he'd ever thought he'd see her again, it sure as hell wasn't in a skeezy strip joint outside of Lafayette, Louisiana. And even then, he'd have guessed she'd be more likely to be hanging out in the audience, some sort of ironic white trash send up or maybe even to actually ogle the bared lady-meat, than up on stage.
She swung by the bar after her set, fully dressed and damp-haired, to pick up a bottle of water and a medium-sized, efficient looking brown purse. She kept her eyes away from the customers, her body language small and contained so as not to draw the eye, but Dean had years of experience watching out for the things no one else was looking for, and he slid up next to her while she was cramming a carefully folded wad of bills into a zippered interior pocket.
"You know," he said. "I could have sworn your name was Jenna."
She spun, caught by surprise, a small spray can clutched at the ready in her right hand. She tilted her head as she looked over his leather jacket, then made eye contact and quirked a smile that'd grown more cynical in the years since he'd last seen it. "Dean Winchester. As I live and breathe."
"Told you I'd see you around."
She tucked the spray can back away in her purse and slung it over her head and across her chest. "Yeah," she said. "I guess you did."
She didn't seem terribly happy to see him.
"What's a smart girl like you doing in a place like this?"
"Would you believe I'm working my way through college?"
Dean laughed at that one, a soft chuckle more real than most he'd let out since Sam had headed west to greener pastures months before. "And I read Playboy for the articles."
"I hear they're very insightful." She flashed a grin at the bartender, then turned towards the door. Dean reached out to catch her arm.
"Hey. Why don't you let me buy you a drink? We can catch up on old times."
"Ooo, like that time you watched me dance around a pole in a g-string? Or, hey, how about when you spent a month in high school trying to get into my pants?"
Dean grimaced. "Hey, it's not like that." And it wasn't like that. Mostly. Hey, she'd been really hot up there with that pole. "And as I recall, I spent five minutes trying to get into your pants. You shot me down, then followed me back to my lunch table."
Her shoulders loosened slightly as he watched, and her expression became less angry and more apologetic. "I really can't, Dean. I've got an early class." She wrapped one hand around the strap of her purse. "Maybe tomorrow night?"
Dean rubbed the back of his head. "I'm leaving town tomorrow morning."
He wasn't sure, exactly, how to interpret her expression at that, but she nodded, anyway. "Still bouncing around from town to town. That's too bad."
He frowned. "It's what I do."
She held up her hands. "I get it. Goodbye, Dean." She turned and left, not even giving him a chance to get her number. He watched her go and thought of the girl in the field hockey shirt who raved about faceless angels in ancient temples.
"I'll see you around, Jenna."
* * *
The sign on the desk said her name was Jenna, and though her last name had far more letters tacked onto the end of it than the last time he'd seen it in print, there was no mistaking who she was.
"Holy shit," she said, peering up at him over the translucent purple rims of her glasses. "Dean Fucking Winchester."
"I actually had that middle name legally changed," Dean said. He glanced around the office, eyes landing for a long moment on one of the degrees on her wall. University of Louisiana, Lafayette. "I notice none of these say Juniper."
"Why couldn't I run into La Tina over and over again? She at least never stuffed bills in my panties."
Dean wasn't sure who La Tina was. He didn't let it bother him. "You really were trying to pay your way through school?"
"Succeeding, even. What are you doing here?"
Dean suddenly wasn't certain of that, himself. The job required some professional know-how, and with Sam off doing whatever it was he was doing instead of hunting, Bobby brooding and refitting his house for his wheelchair, and Castiel searching for God, Dean had to take that know-how where he could get it.
It hadn't in a million years occurred to him that he might run into a girl he'd been sort-of friends with for maybe a month fifteen years ago.
"I, uh, I've got a question about the local folklore." He nodded to the office in general. "Which you're apparently a professional in."
She sighed. "Apparently." She gave him a long, discerning look. "Hey, didn't you used to wear some kind of amulet?"
Dean's hand went automatically to his chest where the amulet usually rested. "Uh. Yeah. Loaned it to a friend."
"And . . . what was your brother's name again?"
He was officially lost. "Sam. Look, can we get down to business, here?"
She started shuffling through books and papers on her desk as she spoke. Dean spotted something about anarchist theory in literature and something about evil plants. She finally pulled out a paperback with a black cover. "You know," she was saying. "I did my Masters thesis on the use of folklore and legend in modern popular culture." She held up the book, and Dean felt the blood drain from his face when he spotted the shirtless, Fabio-looking guy on the cover.
". . . I can explain that."
"I was pretty sure that Carver Edlund was engaging in some serious wish fulfillment with Sam and Dean," she said, "but, you know, I never would have guessed that he actually was Sam or Dean."
Dean blinked. "You think I'm Carver Edlund?"
"It's clearly a nom de plume."
"I don't know what that is, but it's totally not one of those."
"Pen name, Dean. And I must say, you've got the details of the legends and everything mostly right, but your prose is kind of terrible."
Dean had to laugh at that one. "Jenna. Seriously. I'm not Carver Edlund."
"Is it Sam, then? Do I get a shout-out in the acknowledgments if I help you?"
"It's not Sam, either. Look, he's just some guy we know."
She nodded. "Must've pissed him off something huge for him to kill you off and send you to Hell."
Dean snorted. "Yeah. Something like that. Look, are you going to help, or should I go find someone else?"
"That depends. You going to hit on me?"
He'd considered it. When she wasn't talking and peering at him over those glasses, she was pretty hot. And she'd definitely had some moves on that stage in Louisiana. "I guess not."
"Right, then. What do you need to know?"
* * *
The vehicle didn't actually have the letters on it, anywhere that Dean could see, but the truck parked out in front of the college's humanities building somehow screamed "Jenna" so hard that Dean found himself surprised that he hadn't noticed it the first time he stopped by. It was an old fifties Ford, hard-used but kept up, mud spattering the bumper like scuffs of denim-covered knees. He hadn't seen anything like it on the road in years.
"How the hell do you even find parts?" he asked.
Jenna smiled lightly, running on hand over the driver's side door before swinging it shut. "I've got a friend who's a machinist. Gets me good deals."
"Think he could hook me up with some parts for my Impala?"
Jenna folded her arms over her chest and pursed her lips. "Yeah, she probably could. Assuming you'd be willing to pay with something other than a fraudulent credit card."
Dean felt Sam stiffen at his side, then lean over. "Uh. How do you guys know each other, again?"
"Old friends," Dean said, smacking Sam gently in the stomach with the back of his hand, never taking his eyes off Jenna. "Hey, we, uh. Didn't see you at the convention, last week."
Jenna tilted her head. "I'm a first year professor, Dean. Some of us had to settle for following tweets."
Dean wondered what a 'tweet' was. "And here I thought you were a fan."
Sam leaned over again. "She's read the books?"
Dean smirked and didn't try to keep his voice down. "Afraid she's gonna start feeling up your chest?"
Sam squirmed, and Jenna laughed. "So, what's Carver got you looking up, now? More native legends? Or maybe a headless horseman, this time? Gotta make it quick, I've got papers to grade."
"Actually, something a little different. We're, uh. Looking for ways to kill the Devil."
Jenna frowned and gestured for Sam and Dean to follow her to her office. "Well, angelology isn't exactly my field. What about that gun from the earlier books? I'm sure you could deus ex machina that back into existence."
Dean shot Sam a look. Sam glanced away, and Dean turned back to Jenna. "Uh, yeah, that one didn't really work. Apparently 'anything' isn't all its cracked up to be, these days."
Jenna glanced back and forth between the two of them as she held the office door open, biting her lip. "Look, it's not that I mind helping you guys out, but . . . I gotta ask. Why are you coming to me with this?"
Dean frowned. "You're the professional. Right?"
"That's what the degrees say. But you guys . . . or Carver or someone . . . well, there's some serious research-fu going on behind the scenes of those books. St. Louis and Milwaukee, heck, even the jail in Colorado, those are easy. Hig profile cases -- though I'm not sure how your names ended up all over them, when you're obviously not blown up. But some of the other stuff, like Burkitsville? The disappearances, the orchard fire . . . I only found those because I knew what I was looking for. Whoever made that connection first time through must've been some kind of creative genius."
Dean glanced at Sam, only to find him glancing back. Sam tilted his head and subtly waved one hand -- she's your friend, it's up to you -- and Dean swallowed, looking back at Jenna, who was now leaning against her cluttered desk. "It's, uh. It's all true."
She lifted her chin and opened her mouth, then closed it. He could see the instinct to deny it written across her face, watched as it was overcome by the research she'd done and knowledge she'd acquired over the years. "That . . . would explain some things." She tapped her fingers on the desk, giving Dean a hard look. "Okay, so assuming I believe you. Why aren't you dead and in Hell?"
"Got pulled out by angels to stop the apocalypse." The incredulity lit her face again, this time warring with what looked like an urge to laugh hysterically. Dean had a feeling that his blunt, almost absurd words would get that kind of reaction, but he was tired of trying to explain things any other way.
"Soooo, when you're talking about killing the Devil. . . ."
Sam flashed a weak smile. "We mean actually killing the actual Devil."
"And how did you end up serialized in pulp novels?"
Dean smirked. "Carver Edlund's a prophet." Her expression blanked out, and Dean wondered if he was about to get tossed out of the office on his ass. "Look," he said. "True or not, the fact is we want to know how to kill the Devil, and we think you're the one to tell us."
The fact that she had an out to admitting to believing or not believing their story seemed to reassure her, and she nodded, pulling her professionalism back over herself like a blanket. "Right. Okay." She turned to a set of hanging shelves next to her desk, running a finger over the spines of haphazardly stacked books before pulling one out. "There's stories all over folklore about tricking the Devil and winning. But it's always fooling the Devil, sending him packing, never about actually killing him. To kill the Devil is to kill evil itself, symbolically, at least. The Earth is a realm where evil and good mix freely. Get rid of evil and you might as well . . . not have an earth."
"So it'd be an apocalypse, either way."
Jenna shrugged. "Well, yeah. Probably. Apocalyptic lore isn't really my specialty, either."
Dean shifted his weight, rubbing the back of his head and running over what Zachariah had told him in the "green room". Heaven on Earth still cost too many billion lives for him to consider it a possibility. What they wanted was the status quo back. Lucifer in Hell and the angels in Heaven, not hanging around poking into things where they didn't belong. "Okay, so. To send him packing, then."
Jenna held out the book she'd selected, a volume the size of a dictionary with Folktales From Around the World in printed in green over the image of an elderly female storyteller. "There's a whole section of devil stories in there, but the gist of it is: be clever. Stay one step ahead of the other guy. Use your home court advantage." She looked at Sam for a long moment, then back to Dean. "Look, demons are evil, right? I mean blanket, flat out, capital E for evil. Even Ruby is clearly up to something, in the books." Dean cleared his throat into his fist and Sam seemed to find something intensely interesting in a blank spot of wall. Jenna grinned. "Oh my god, she really is. I totally freaking knew it." She collected herself with a faint grimace. "I mean, no offense if it was real, Sam, but from an objective perspective, it seemed pretty obvious."
Sam didn't quite look at her, but flashed her an 'it's okay, just shut up about it' kind of half-smile. Dean tried to cover his own smirk with his hand. "You were saying?"
"Right. Anyway. Demons are evil. Angels are good, capital G." She held up a hand to forestall any protests. "I'm talking conceptual Good, here, not how we as people view it. I mean, that's why in Christianity, the savior God sent man had to be human. Which is what I'm saying. Humans are, like, a mix. We've got the capacity for good and evil in equal measure, can hop from one to the other without compromising our whole being. We can be evil by being 'good' and good by being 'evil'." She cocked her head and thumped the book into Dean's chest. "So . . . be human."
Dean put his hand over the book against his chest automatically. He thought about angels and demons. About Ruby and Zachariah and good and evil and Good and Evil and scarecrows and gods and monsters and hunters. He thought about Michael and Lucifer, about being vessels and saying "yes" or "no". He looked down at the book as Jenna took her hand away, then over at Sam, who looked back, expression as thoughtful and perplexed as Dean figured his own had to be. He looked at Jenna.
"'Be human.' That's your answer."
She shrugged.
"That's, like, the least useful answer I've ever heard."
Jenna snorted. "Get the fuck out of my office."
* * *
When she answered the phone, she said "This is Jenna," and Dean heard "I will talk your ear off and kick your ass and strip for cash if it's what I've got to do."
"Hey," he said. "It's Dean."
"Hey, yourself," she said. "How's it going?"
"It's going."
"Did you stop the apocalypse?"
"You still grading papers?"
"No, I quit my job to sell handmade furniture out of the back of my truck."
"You're funny."
"I try."
"I read your book."
"I hope it helped. Don't worry about sending it back, I got myself another copy."
"Not that book." Dean leaned back behind the wheel of the Impala and ran his fingers over the slim paperback, the words Saving People, Hunting Things embossed in red on the cover. "'Fan essays on the family dynamics and folkloric aspects of Carver Edlund's Supernatural series, edited by Jenna "Juniper" MacLucky, Ph.D.' How the hell did you find a publisher for this thing?"
"I didn't. It's self-published."
"Yeah, you never could take 'no' for an answer."
"You say that like you know me."
"I gotta say, I thought 'Being Human' was a load of philosophical crap."
"My favorite is Becky Rosen's essay on the Dean character as a foil for Sam."
Dean laughed. "Yeah, well. Listen, Sammy and I are working a hunt up in Massachusetts. Thought you might be able to lend your professional opinion."
"Be human."
"I hate you."
"I know. Let me guess, headless horseman?"
"Spider Gates Cemetery."
"Ooo." He heard the shuffling of papers over the line, then the click of a mouse and the humming of a cooling fan. "That's a good one. Let me see what I've got."
"You're awesome. Hey. Maybe we should, ah. Get together for drinks, sometime."
"Maybe. When pigs fly."
"You know, I think that was one of the sixty-six seals."
"Put Sam on the phone. At least he can talk like a rational human being."
Dean glanced over at his brother, passed out in the passenger seat with a spoon balanced in his mouth. "I love you, too."
"You're a jackass, you know that?"
"Hey, sweetheart. I'm only human."
Author: Bella Temple
Category: SPN, gen
Rating: Teen
Warnings: Some language
Spoilers: Everything aired, including 5x09, brief speculation into the future
Characters: Dean, Sam, OFC
Disclaimer: The characters and basic premise within are property of their original creators and producers. No money is being made off this work of fiction.
Author's note: I think this is dedicated to all of those who like to fuss about where the women are in Supernatural.
Summary: She said her name was Jenna and she saw right through Dean.
She said her name was Jenna, and though she was in Mrs. Millman's third grade class instead of Ms. Jackson's, she still came up to talk to Dean sometimes on the playground, when he was standing up against the wall. Dean spent a lot of recesses up against the wall in that school, and not just because he never really felt like playing with the other kids. Ms. Jackson didn't put up with talking in her classroom and said Dean had an "attitude problem."
Jenna had blue eyes and brown pigtails and wore hand-me-down t-shirts with GI Joe and Ninja Turtles on them. When she wasn't talking to Dean, she and her best friend, a little black girl with braids that went in every direction, would play at being sisters or college roommates, often times plagued with mysterious illnesses or haunted by ghosts. They had perfected the art of backing into each other "accidentally" and jumping like they were startled, like Scooby-Doo's friends did on TV. Jenna's father was in the air force, and she liked to talk about all the different places she'd moved with him, so far. Last year, she'd say, we were in Panama. They have jungles there. Real ones. And more different kinds of bugs than you could even imagine.
Most days, Jenna would only talk to Dean for maybe five minutes before Mrs. White, the recess lady, would remind her that Dean was being punished and didn't get to talk to his friends. She'd make a face, like she wanted to protest that she and Dean weren't friends, but go back to playing pretend with her friends without comment. Dean never saw her when they weren't at recess. Not at lunch, or before school on the playground, or even in the hallways. She was just the Recess Girl, full of stories about jungles and jet fighters.
The day before Dean's last day at the school, Mrs. White lead Jenna and a boy Dean didn't know up to the wall about ten minutes before recess was over and told them to stand there while she found someone to notify the principal. The boy had mulch in his hair and a rip in his t-shirt, and Jenna had dirt stains on the knees of her worn corduroys. They stood on either side of Dean, glaring out at the playground instead of at each other, until the boy turned to Dean with a sneer on his face and said "she's such a freak", which Dean didn't think people said about people who weren't Winchesters, and the next thing he knew, he was the silent filling in a screaming argument sandwich. Apparently, the boy had said something about boys being stronger than girls, which Dean figured was true, and Jenna had said something about being able to beat up her big brother and the boy had said that meant her big brother was a girl -- which Dean figured was also true -- so Jenna had decided to show him how strong she was by beating him up.
Dean had always kind of put up with Jenna, but at that moment he'd decided he actually kind of liked her. You know. As much as he liked any girl, which usually wasn't that much.
Jenna wasn't on the playground at all, the next day, and Dean didn't ask where she was, and the day after that, Dean was in the car with his dad and Sam so Dad could go hunt a poltergeist in Amherst. But from then on, any time someone tried the old line about boys being stronger and girls being smarter, Dean would think of Jenna and her dirty knees.
Then he'd tease Sam about how he was such a big girl.
* * *
She said her name was Jenna, and she sat at the next lab table over from Dean in Chemistry at his third school Sophomore year. She'd traded the pig tails for soft waves, by then, and her shirts were still worn-looking and faded, but they had pictures of cartoon cats on them or stripes or the school's field hockey team logo.
Her pants still had dirt on the knees.
She still spent much of her time talking, this time to her lab partner, all about going to visit her father in Turkey over spring break or the metaphors of marriage in Shel Silverstein books. Though the teacher made him go through the same "introduce yourself to the class" song and dance that every other teacher in the history of ever made new students go through, Jenna cast him little more than a glance before turning back to her friend, a fluffy haired guy whose claim to high school fame was apparently painting himself up in the school colors for sporting events and generally making a giant ass of himself. Every now and then, the teacher would stop by and remind her she was supposed to be focusing on Chemistry. Dean found himself surprised she hadn't spent as much time up against the wall at recess as he had.
Chemistry was the only class they had together, but Dean spotted her sometimes in the lunch room. Where in class she was boisterous and loud mouthed, in the lunch room she tended towards the end of the table, always with the same group of people, but always hovering on the edge of it, as if she hadn't yet been completely welcomed into their group. From what he gathered, she wasn't hopping from base to base and school to school with her father, any more, but that seemed to be a somewhat new development -- she had stories about almost as many places around the country as he did -- and Dean knew as well as anyone how hard it could be to break through the barrier of the "we've gone to school together since Kindergarten" cliques most high schools seemed to be full of.
Two weeks and the entire cheerleading squad under his belt, Dean decided it was time to properly break the ice. He sat down across from her, snagged a french fry from her lunch tray, and flashed her a broad smile.
"So," he said. "You still beating up boys who make fun of your big brother?"
She blinked at him and closed her binder over a brightly colored novel with some dude with a sword on the cover. "My god," she said, sliding her french fries closer to her body. "It speaks."
She was pretty enough, really, not as heavily made up and slightly fake looking as some of the other girls in their class, though her shirts weren't nearly as form-fitting or low cut as Dean normally liked. Still, he turned his charm up to eleven and leaned his elbows on the table. "Well," he said. "A guy's got to keep at least some mystery."
"Kind of hard to do when you're busy screwing your way through varsity athletes, isn't it?"
"You say that like it's a bad thing."
"Yeah," she said. "I guess I do." And she turned to the girl sitting nearby, ostensibly to ask about the particular flavor of soda the girl was drinking, shutting Dean out completely.
But the next day, it was Jenna sitting down across from him, reaching out to snag a chip from the bag he'd lifted from the lunch line.
"So," she said. "Now that we have the whole awkward flirting thing out of the way, how've you been?"
They struck up something that might be considered a friendship, after that, with her rolling her eyes any time Dean made a pass at one of her fellow students, and him rolling his in return when she started to talk a bit too much about literature or history. Mostly, they kept to family. Her big brother had joined the Navy, apparently, following in their father's footsteps but "in his own special way". He told her about Sam's science projects and soccer games, and she told him about Turkey and Germany and how it was, exactly, that she'd gotten herself stuck in Ohio instead of continuing to jet around the world with her father.
Istanbul was one of her favorite subjects. "There's this temple there," she said. "Like, five times more ancient than anything in America could ever dream of being. It started out as a temple to Apollo, then bounced back and forth between Christianity and Islam for awhile before ending up a museum. They have these angels without heads painted on the walls, like, ghosting through layers of paint and hovering over huge medallions devoted to Allah."
If Dean flinched a little at the word "ghosting", she didn't seem to notice. When she got started on the vampires in the catacombs beneath the city, Dean couldn't help but start rolling his eyes again.
"What?"
"Vampires. I mean, come on. No such thing."
"No one likes a skeptic, Dean."
And Dean snorted hard enough that he started choking, which set her laughing so hard that they started to draw stares.
When John pulled Sam and Dean out of school again a month later, Dean defended Sam's insistence that he get one final day of classes to say goodbye. Usually, Dean couldn't get out of a town fast enough, but for once, he had someone he might miss.
Jenna understood, better than anyone else probably ever would. She gave him a wry smile and said "and to think, I was just starting to think I might give you a chance." He told her he had five minutes and knew how to get into the broom closet and she laughed and punched him in the shoulder.
"I'd say never change, but I get the feeling that you probably should."
Dean scoffed. "Hey, I'll see you around, Jenna."
She shook her head. "Bye, Dean." And she walked away without a backwards glance.
* * *
They said her name was Juniper, but Dean was about 99.9% sure it was actually Jenna. Her hair was cut short in a bob, now, and her bare knees were dusted with a faint coating of glitter and the occasional bit of peanut shell stuck in the shimmering oil, but her eyes still held that faintly caustic spark when she happened to glance over her audience.
If he'd ever thought he'd see her again, it sure as hell wasn't in a skeezy strip joint outside of Lafayette, Louisiana. And even then, he'd have guessed she'd be more likely to be hanging out in the audience, some sort of ironic white trash send up or maybe even to actually ogle the bared lady-meat, than up on stage.
She swung by the bar after her set, fully dressed and damp-haired, to pick up a bottle of water and a medium-sized, efficient looking brown purse. She kept her eyes away from the customers, her body language small and contained so as not to draw the eye, but Dean had years of experience watching out for the things no one else was looking for, and he slid up next to her while she was cramming a carefully folded wad of bills into a zippered interior pocket.
"You know," he said. "I could have sworn your name was Jenna."
She spun, caught by surprise, a small spray can clutched at the ready in her right hand. She tilted her head as she looked over his leather jacket, then made eye contact and quirked a smile that'd grown more cynical in the years since he'd last seen it. "Dean Winchester. As I live and breathe."
"Told you I'd see you around."
She tucked the spray can back away in her purse and slung it over her head and across her chest. "Yeah," she said. "I guess you did."
She didn't seem terribly happy to see him.
"What's a smart girl like you doing in a place like this?"
"Would you believe I'm working my way through college?"
Dean laughed at that one, a soft chuckle more real than most he'd let out since Sam had headed west to greener pastures months before. "And I read Playboy for the articles."
"I hear they're very insightful." She flashed a grin at the bartender, then turned towards the door. Dean reached out to catch her arm.
"Hey. Why don't you let me buy you a drink? We can catch up on old times."
"Ooo, like that time you watched me dance around a pole in a g-string? Or, hey, how about when you spent a month in high school trying to get into my pants?"
Dean grimaced. "Hey, it's not like that." And it wasn't like that. Mostly. Hey, she'd been really hot up there with that pole. "And as I recall, I spent five minutes trying to get into your pants. You shot me down, then followed me back to my lunch table."
Her shoulders loosened slightly as he watched, and her expression became less angry and more apologetic. "I really can't, Dean. I've got an early class." She wrapped one hand around the strap of her purse. "Maybe tomorrow night?"
Dean rubbed the back of his head. "I'm leaving town tomorrow morning."
He wasn't sure, exactly, how to interpret her expression at that, but she nodded, anyway. "Still bouncing around from town to town. That's too bad."
He frowned. "It's what I do."
She held up her hands. "I get it. Goodbye, Dean." She turned and left, not even giving him a chance to get her number. He watched her go and thought of the girl in the field hockey shirt who raved about faceless angels in ancient temples.
"I'll see you around, Jenna."
* * *
The sign on the desk said her name was Jenna, and though her last name had far more letters tacked onto the end of it than the last time he'd seen it in print, there was no mistaking who she was.
"Holy shit," she said, peering up at him over the translucent purple rims of her glasses. "Dean Fucking Winchester."
"I actually had that middle name legally changed," Dean said. He glanced around the office, eyes landing for a long moment on one of the degrees on her wall. University of Louisiana, Lafayette. "I notice none of these say Juniper."
"Why couldn't I run into La Tina over and over again? She at least never stuffed bills in my panties."
Dean wasn't sure who La Tina was. He didn't let it bother him. "You really were trying to pay your way through school?"
"Succeeding, even. What are you doing here?"
Dean suddenly wasn't certain of that, himself. The job required some professional know-how, and with Sam off doing whatever it was he was doing instead of hunting, Bobby brooding and refitting his house for his wheelchair, and Castiel searching for God, Dean had to take that know-how where he could get it.
It hadn't in a million years occurred to him that he might run into a girl he'd been sort-of friends with for maybe a month fifteen years ago.
"I, uh, I've got a question about the local folklore." He nodded to the office in general. "Which you're apparently a professional in."
She sighed. "Apparently." She gave him a long, discerning look. "Hey, didn't you used to wear some kind of amulet?"
Dean's hand went automatically to his chest where the amulet usually rested. "Uh. Yeah. Loaned it to a friend."
"And . . . what was your brother's name again?"
He was officially lost. "Sam. Look, can we get down to business, here?"
She started shuffling through books and papers on her desk as she spoke. Dean spotted something about anarchist theory in literature and something about evil plants. She finally pulled out a paperback with a black cover. "You know," she was saying. "I did my Masters thesis on the use of folklore and legend in modern popular culture." She held up the book, and Dean felt the blood drain from his face when he spotted the shirtless, Fabio-looking guy on the cover.
". . . I can explain that."
"I was pretty sure that Carver Edlund was engaging in some serious wish fulfillment with Sam and Dean," she said, "but, you know, I never would have guessed that he actually was Sam or Dean."
Dean blinked. "You think I'm Carver Edlund?"
"It's clearly a nom de plume."
"I don't know what that is, but it's totally not one of those."
"Pen name, Dean. And I must say, you've got the details of the legends and everything mostly right, but your prose is kind of terrible."
Dean had to laugh at that one. "Jenna. Seriously. I'm not Carver Edlund."
"Is it Sam, then? Do I get a shout-out in the acknowledgments if I help you?"
"It's not Sam, either. Look, he's just some guy we know."
She nodded. "Must've pissed him off something huge for him to kill you off and send you to Hell."
Dean snorted. "Yeah. Something like that. Look, are you going to help, or should I go find someone else?"
"That depends. You going to hit on me?"
He'd considered it. When she wasn't talking and peering at him over those glasses, she was pretty hot. And she'd definitely had some moves on that stage in Louisiana. "I guess not."
"Right, then. What do you need to know?"
* * *
The vehicle didn't actually have the letters on it, anywhere that Dean could see, but the truck parked out in front of the college's humanities building somehow screamed "Jenna" so hard that Dean found himself surprised that he hadn't noticed it the first time he stopped by. It was an old fifties Ford, hard-used but kept up, mud spattering the bumper like scuffs of denim-covered knees. He hadn't seen anything like it on the road in years.
"How the hell do you even find parts?" he asked.
Jenna smiled lightly, running on hand over the driver's side door before swinging it shut. "I've got a friend who's a machinist. Gets me good deals."
"Think he could hook me up with some parts for my Impala?"
Jenna folded her arms over her chest and pursed her lips. "Yeah, she probably could. Assuming you'd be willing to pay with something other than a fraudulent credit card."
Dean felt Sam stiffen at his side, then lean over. "Uh. How do you guys know each other, again?"
"Old friends," Dean said, smacking Sam gently in the stomach with the back of his hand, never taking his eyes off Jenna. "Hey, we, uh. Didn't see you at the convention, last week."
Jenna tilted her head. "I'm a first year professor, Dean. Some of us had to settle for following tweets."
Dean wondered what a 'tweet' was. "And here I thought you were a fan."
Sam leaned over again. "She's read the books?"
Dean smirked and didn't try to keep his voice down. "Afraid she's gonna start feeling up your chest?"
Sam squirmed, and Jenna laughed. "So, what's Carver got you looking up, now? More native legends? Or maybe a headless horseman, this time? Gotta make it quick, I've got papers to grade."
"Actually, something a little different. We're, uh. Looking for ways to kill the Devil."
Jenna frowned and gestured for Sam and Dean to follow her to her office. "Well, angelology isn't exactly my field. What about that gun from the earlier books? I'm sure you could deus ex machina that back into existence."
Dean shot Sam a look. Sam glanced away, and Dean turned back to Jenna. "Uh, yeah, that one didn't really work. Apparently 'anything' isn't all its cracked up to be, these days."
Jenna glanced back and forth between the two of them as she held the office door open, biting her lip. "Look, it's not that I mind helping you guys out, but . . . I gotta ask. Why are you coming to me with this?"
Dean frowned. "You're the professional. Right?"
"That's what the degrees say. But you guys . . . or Carver or someone . . . well, there's some serious research-fu going on behind the scenes of those books. St. Louis and Milwaukee, heck, even the jail in Colorado, those are easy. Hig profile cases -- though I'm not sure how your names ended up all over them, when you're obviously not blown up. But some of the other stuff, like Burkitsville? The disappearances, the orchard fire . . . I only found those because I knew what I was looking for. Whoever made that connection first time through must've been some kind of creative genius."
Dean glanced at Sam, only to find him glancing back. Sam tilted his head and subtly waved one hand -- she's your friend, it's up to you -- and Dean swallowed, looking back at Jenna, who was now leaning against her cluttered desk. "It's, uh. It's all true."
She lifted her chin and opened her mouth, then closed it. He could see the instinct to deny it written across her face, watched as it was overcome by the research she'd done and knowledge she'd acquired over the years. "That . . . would explain some things." She tapped her fingers on the desk, giving Dean a hard look. "Okay, so assuming I believe you. Why aren't you dead and in Hell?"
"Got pulled out by angels to stop the apocalypse." The incredulity lit her face again, this time warring with what looked like an urge to laugh hysterically. Dean had a feeling that his blunt, almost absurd words would get that kind of reaction, but he was tired of trying to explain things any other way.
"Soooo, when you're talking about killing the Devil. . . ."
Sam flashed a weak smile. "We mean actually killing the actual Devil."
"And how did you end up serialized in pulp novels?"
Dean smirked. "Carver Edlund's a prophet." Her expression blanked out, and Dean wondered if he was about to get tossed out of the office on his ass. "Look," he said. "True or not, the fact is we want to know how to kill the Devil, and we think you're the one to tell us."
The fact that she had an out to admitting to believing or not believing their story seemed to reassure her, and she nodded, pulling her professionalism back over herself like a blanket. "Right. Okay." She turned to a set of hanging shelves next to her desk, running a finger over the spines of haphazardly stacked books before pulling one out. "There's stories all over folklore about tricking the Devil and winning. But it's always fooling the Devil, sending him packing, never about actually killing him. To kill the Devil is to kill evil itself, symbolically, at least. The Earth is a realm where evil and good mix freely. Get rid of evil and you might as well . . . not have an earth."
"So it'd be an apocalypse, either way."
Jenna shrugged. "Well, yeah. Probably. Apocalyptic lore isn't really my specialty, either."
Dean shifted his weight, rubbing the back of his head and running over what Zachariah had told him in the "green room". Heaven on Earth still cost too many billion lives for him to consider it a possibility. What they wanted was the status quo back. Lucifer in Hell and the angels in Heaven, not hanging around poking into things where they didn't belong. "Okay, so. To send him packing, then."
Jenna held out the book she'd selected, a volume the size of a dictionary with Folktales From Around the World in printed in green over the image of an elderly female storyteller. "There's a whole section of devil stories in there, but the gist of it is: be clever. Stay one step ahead of the other guy. Use your home court advantage." She looked at Sam for a long moment, then back to Dean. "Look, demons are evil, right? I mean blanket, flat out, capital E for evil. Even Ruby is clearly up to something, in the books." Dean cleared his throat into his fist and Sam seemed to find something intensely interesting in a blank spot of wall. Jenna grinned. "Oh my god, she really is. I totally freaking knew it." She collected herself with a faint grimace. "I mean, no offense if it was real, Sam, but from an objective perspective, it seemed pretty obvious."
Sam didn't quite look at her, but flashed her an 'it's okay, just shut up about it' kind of half-smile. Dean tried to cover his own smirk with his hand. "You were saying?"
"Right. Anyway. Demons are evil. Angels are good, capital G." She held up a hand to forestall any protests. "I'm talking conceptual Good, here, not how we as people view it. I mean, that's why in Christianity, the savior God sent man had to be human. Which is what I'm saying. Humans are, like, a mix. We've got the capacity for good and evil in equal measure, can hop from one to the other without compromising our whole being. We can be evil by being 'good' and good by being 'evil'." She cocked her head and thumped the book into Dean's chest. "So . . . be human."
Dean put his hand over the book against his chest automatically. He thought about angels and demons. About Ruby and Zachariah and good and evil and Good and Evil and scarecrows and gods and monsters and hunters. He thought about Michael and Lucifer, about being vessels and saying "yes" or "no". He looked down at the book as Jenna took her hand away, then over at Sam, who looked back, expression as thoughtful and perplexed as Dean figured his own had to be. He looked at Jenna.
"'Be human.' That's your answer."
She shrugged.
"That's, like, the least useful answer I've ever heard."
Jenna snorted. "Get the fuck out of my office."
* * *
When she answered the phone, she said "This is Jenna," and Dean heard "I will talk your ear off and kick your ass and strip for cash if it's what I've got to do."
"Hey," he said. "It's Dean."
"Hey, yourself," she said. "How's it going?"
"It's going."
"Did you stop the apocalypse?"
"You still grading papers?"
"No, I quit my job to sell handmade furniture out of the back of my truck."
"You're funny."
"I try."
"I read your book."
"I hope it helped. Don't worry about sending it back, I got myself another copy."
"Not that book." Dean leaned back behind the wheel of the Impala and ran his fingers over the slim paperback, the words Saving People, Hunting Things embossed in red on the cover. "'Fan essays on the family dynamics and folkloric aspects of Carver Edlund's Supernatural series, edited by Jenna "Juniper" MacLucky, Ph.D.' How the hell did you find a publisher for this thing?"
"I didn't. It's self-published."
"Yeah, you never could take 'no' for an answer."
"You say that like you know me."
"I gotta say, I thought 'Being Human' was a load of philosophical crap."
"My favorite is Becky Rosen's essay on the Dean character as a foil for Sam."
Dean laughed. "Yeah, well. Listen, Sammy and I are working a hunt up in Massachusetts. Thought you might be able to lend your professional opinion."
"Be human."
"I hate you."
"I know. Let me guess, headless horseman?"
"Spider Gates Cemetery."
"Ooo." He heard the shuffling of papers over the line, then the click of a mouse and the humming of a cooling fan. "That's a good one. Let me see what I've got."
"You're awesome. Hey. Maybe we should, ah. Get together for drinks, sometime."
"Maybe. When pigs fly."
"You know, I think that was one of the sixty-six seals."
"Put Sam on the phone. At least he can talk like a rational human being."
Dean glanced over at his brother, passed out in the passenger seat with a spoon balanced in his mouth. "I love you, too."
"You're a jackass, you know that?"
"Hey, sweetheart. I'm only human."