Fic: Three's Company Too 5/7
“It’s a Woman in White,” Jess announced from the backseat of the car. They were well on their way to check out Sylvania Bridge, the moon bright enough to see by despite it being late at night.
Dean glanced back at her briefly before returning his eyes to the road. “You think so?”
“Yeah, it fits. Joseph Welch cheated on Constance, she goes into a jealous rage, kills her kids. Then, overburdened with guilt, she jumps the bridge.”
They had pulled up in front of the bridge in question, and Jess cautiously stepped out of the car.
“Makes sense,” Dean agreed. “Still have to do the usual, though. Find where she’s buried and burn the corpse.”
“And make sure it’s her, first of all,” Jess added.
The three of them walked towards the bridge in silence, ducking under the yellow tape that still marked off where Troy’s car was found. Jess kept a hand on the iron knife she had slipped up her sleeve. There was no way she was going on that bridge unarmed.
“Do you think Dad was here?” Sam asked his brother softly as they walked across the bridge, peering over the side to the river below. Nothing seemed unordinary about the structure so far.
“Well, he’s chasing the same story, and we’re chasing him,” Dean shrugged.
“Okay, so now what?” Sam asked.
“We keep digging ‘til we find him. Might take a while.”
“Dean…” Sam snuck a glance at Jess, “I’ve told you, I’ve got to be back by-”
“Monday,” Dean answered for him. “Right. The interview.”
“Yeah,” Sam nodded. Jess took a step forward, supporting Sam as much as she could.
“You’re really serious about this, aren’t you?” Dean asked. “And you too, Jess? You’re both going to just quit hunting and go back to your nice, normal life? Finish law school and what? Get married and have a bunch of kids?”
“Maybe,” Sam hedged.
Jess grabbed onto Sam’s hand. “Look, we both know what we want, Dean,” she told him. “I know for sure that hunting isn’t the life for me.”
Dean snorted. “You two can pretend all you want, but sooner or later you’re gonna have to face up to what you really are.”
“And what’s that?” Sam demanded.
“One of use,” Dean shrugged. “Now, I don’t pretend to know a lot about you, Jess, but Sam I know for sure. You’re a hunter, Sam. Nothing’s going to change that.” He turned to walk away, but Sam came after him.
“No. I’m not like you; this is not going to be my life. Jess and I are going back to Stanford.”
Jess was torn between admiration for Sam going after what he wanted and embarrassment for witnessing this very private family moment.
“We have a responsibility,” Dean told Sam, a dangerous tone creeping up in his voice.
“To Dad?” Sam questioned. “And his crusade? Spending our whole lives chasing after the thing that killed Mom? If it weren’t for pictures, Dean, I wouldn’t even know what Mom looks like. I was six months old when she died.”
A cold prickle crept up her spine, and she was no longer able to pay attention to the argument playing out in front of her. She had known that Sam’s mother had died when he was young. And the fact that it was at the hands of a supernatural entity made sense. But was it six months exactly? The story sounded eerily familiar, and she was desperate to find out more information.
But then, she saw a figure, clothed in white, standing on the railing of the opposite side of the bridge. She gazed at Jess with such a mournful expression; the pieces of her white dress blowing in the breeze created a perfect metaphor for the state of her soul.
“Sam. Dean.”
They looked over to where Jess pointed and their jaws dropped simultaneously.
The three of them watched, spellbound, as the woman stepped off the bridge and plunged down into the river. Like a shot had just been fired, Sam and Dean raced over to where the woman had gone over the edge.
Jess hung back, knowing that Constance wouldn’t be there anymore. Instead, she pulled out the iron knife and glanced warily around, ready for the ghost’s next appearance.
“Were did you get that?” Dean demanded, catching sight of the weapon.
“The trunk of your car,” Jess shrugged. “I thought it would be useful.”
“You went through the trunk of the Impala?” Dean growled. “How did you-”
He was interrupted by the sound of the car mentioned being started. The headlights flooded the bridge, and Jess couldn’t help squinting.
“Dean, who’s driving your car?” Sam asked, confused.
Wordlessly, Dean reached into his pocket to pull out the keys. As if in answer, the car roared loudly.
And then it was barrelling towards them.
Jess had never been much of a car person, but she had seen enough of Dean’s behaviour towards this car to know that he was unnaturally attached to the thing, treating it as if it was Apollo’s own chariot. And now the well-loved beast was charging towards them, showing off all the capabilities Dean had so carefully preserved in the machine.
There was no way they would be able to outrun it, Jess realized. Especially on a bridge where their escape options were limited. Turning sharply, she stopped, letting Sam and Dean run ahead of her.
“Hey!” she shouted, brandishing her small knife, which now felt ridiculously inadequate. “Back off!”
The car swerved sharply, barely missing her. She ducked instinctively, wrapping her arms around her head to protect her most vulnerable areas.
And then the car stopped suddenly. Lifting her head cautiously, Jess saw it sitting silently beside her, profile fading in the dark. She took deep gulps of night air, the cool shock to her lungs helping to calm her nerves.
“Sam?” she called cautiously, swivelling around to try to find him.
“Jess!” he returned, climbing up over the railing of the bridge. Jess guessed that he swung over rather than risk getting hit by the car. “What were you thinking stopping in the path of a rampaging car? It could’ve killed you!”
“She’s a Woman in White,” Jess explained, stepping towards Sam on shaking legs. “She’s going to target men, especially men who have cheated. She’s not going to attack me.”
“Until you do something that makes her angry!” Sam snapped. “Like trying to stop her when she’s possessing a car.” His words were angry, but as soon as they were close enough he grabbed her and pulled her into the hardest hug she had ever received from him. His breath tickled her hair and she felt her pounding heart slow as Sam’s arms squeezed out all the adrenaline she had built up. “Just, be more careful next time, okay?” he murmured into her ear.
“Okay,” she agreed quietly.
“Dean,” Sam suddenly muttered, and he was gone from her instantly, leaving her rocking in place. “Dean!” he called loudly into the night, voice echoing off the steel beams of the bridge.
Jess couldn’t see Dean anywhere on the bridge, and she felt a surge of panic rush through her. “Dean!” she shouted, trying to keep the note of hysteria out of her voice.
“What?” came an irritated response, barely audible above the rush of the river.
Jess and Sam peered over the edge of the bridge. She could barely make out a small bedraggled figure, visible against the riverbank only because it was slowly crawling its way up.
Jess could practically feel the reverberations of Sam’s joyful relief, and she felt a smile stretch across her own face.
“Are you all right?” Sam shouted down to him.
“I’m super,” came the sarcastic response.
Jess felt a zing of happiness at Sam’s delighted laughter and she reached out to squeeze his hand. They had all made it out okay.
As much as she felt badly for Dean jumping into the river, she couldn’t help her laughter when she got a look at him up close. Every square inch of him was covered in mud. Flecks of the stuff fell off him whenever he took a step.
“Don’t laugh at me, princess. At least I know to get the hell away from a ghost when it’s charging at me with a car. What kind of idea was it to yell at it to stop? They don’t exactly listen to reason.” He caressed the side of the car before popping the hood open and investigating the engine.
“The car stopped for her, Dean,” Sam told his brother.
“Really?” He took a break from his inspection long enough to raise an eyebrow in her direction.
“She’s a Woman in White,” Jess explained, shrugging. “She was gunning for you two, not me.”
“For now,” Dean muttered. “You might have surprised her this time, but she’s not going to like you too much the next time we meet her.”
“I’ll be more careful next time, then.”
“How’s the car?” Sam asked, changing the topic.
“Whatever she did to it, it seems all right now,” Dean replied, closing it up. “That Constance chick, what a bitch!” he yelled the last part into the night, as if the ghost was still hanging around listening to them.
“So much for not antagonizing her,” Jess rolled her eyes.
“Well, she doesn’t want us digging around, that’s for sure,” Sam commented, moving to sit carefully next to Dean on the hood of the car. “So where’s the trail go from here, genius?”
Dean threw up his arms in frustration, and Jess ducked to avoid getting hit by mud flecks.
Sam was silent for a second longer before wrinkling his nose and turning to Dean.
“You smell like a toilet,” he informed his brother.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
In retrospect, it should have been one of the first places they looked for John Winchester, if they hadn’t gotten distracted with the case he had been investigating. There was only one motel in Jericho, so it shouldn’t have surprised them when the motel clerk recognized the fake last name on Dean’s card as belonging to another guest.
Jess watched, both impressed and surprised, as Sam easily picked the lock to the motel room that his father had rented out for the month.
She followed Sam into the room with the same amount of reverence a church deserved. In her head, she had been unable to call this man anything other than his full name: John Winchester. He existed only in one dated picture of Sam’s and in the handful of times Sam mentioned him. This was the man who raised her boyfriend, taught him everything he knew about hunting, and kicked him out for earning a full-ride scholarship to Stanford. Whenever their father was mentioned, the air between Sam and Dean became charged, crackling with repressed emotion and unspoken comments. This motel room would be her biggest clue so far in figuring out the man.
The walls were covered with pictures and diagrams and labels. She stepped over a wide line of salt, glancing at the half-eaten food and open suitcase in the room. Either the man was a slob, or he had left in a hurry. Judging by the meticulous organization of the information on the walls, she guessed the latter.
“Is this normal?” she asked the brothers, approaching one of the walls that contained photographs and descriptions of all of the missing persons.
“Not to this degree,” Sam replied. “At least not when I left. Dean?”
“The case stuff is normal, but not usually this much,” Dean agreed. He sniffed experimentally at a burger lying on the bedside table. “I don’t think he’s been here for a couple days at least.”
“Salt and cat’s eye shells,” Sam announced. “He was worried. Trying to keep something from coming in.”
Jess walked along the length of her chosen wall, passing a casual eye over the papers John Winchester had taped to the wall. There were the victims laid out in chronological order, connecting lines drawn between some of them. On the next wall, the man had taped up the same article that Dean had found about Constance’s suicide, a picture of a woman standing by a road, and, then, a small piece of paper with marker scrawled across it.
“Ha!” Jess remarked in triumph, jabbing the paper. “I told you. A Woman in White. Your dad figured it out, too.” Sam joined her at her side, giving her shoulder a squeeze.
Dean scanned the wall of the various victims. “You sly dogs.”
“Okay, so, Woman in White,” Jess spoke. “We have to find and destroy the corpse.”
“She may have another weakness,” Sam offered.
“Dad would have found the corpse,” Dean shook his head.
“The article doesn’t say where she’s buried,” Jess told the brothers, skimming over it again to make sure. She broke away from Sam and Dean, more interested in exploring the room than in the case they were currently working.
“If I were Dad, I would ask her husband. If he’s still alive.” Sam tapped the picture of Joseph Welch in the article.
Jess’ gaze fell on a battered photograph that was stuck into the frame of a mirror. Surprisingly, it was John Winchester she recognized first, his face having grown more lines and his eyes holding much more sadness than in the picture Sam had in their apartment. And then there were the two boys on either side of the man.
Sam looked no older than seven, and Jess was able to see for the first time why Dean called his brother ‘Sammy’. Dean looked delightfully awkward, with teenage growth having begun to set in and hair much too long and wavy to be considered manly. They were all squinting in the sun and sitting on a car that Jess recognized as the one Dean was still driving around.
Sam had mentioned back at the library that he had grown up on the road, had even commented a few times at Stanford how his family moved around a lot when he was growing up. But this picture somehow made it all the more clear to her. That car had essentially been their home; two boys growing up in the backseat as their father chased down a nameless monster that had killed their mother when Sam was just six months old.
Six months exactly? The question dug at the back of Jess’ skull, demanding an answer. Coincidences were not something you were allowed to believe in as a hunter.
“Okay, I’m gonna take a quick shower,” Dean announced suddenly, startling her enough to jump a little. “Sammy, you try and find an address for Joseph Welch. We’ll go pay him a visit.”
“What, now?” Jess asked dumbly.
“Yeah,” Dean shrugged.
“Dean, it’s, like, eleven o’clock,” she countered. “Closer to midnight by the time we get out to wherever Welch is living. He’s not gonna want to talk to anyone, especially people asking him where his dead wife is buried.” She glanced over at Sam for support.
“She’s got a point, man,” Sam shrugged.
“Look, we already paid for a room. Let’s get a real night’s sleep and take a fresh crack at it in the morning.”
Dean hovered, considering. “Okay,” he finally agreed, turning around to leave his father’s abandoned motel room.
“Hey, Dean,” Sam took two quick steps to catch up to his brother. Jess hung back a little, sensing an apology building on Sam’s tongue and wanting to give them a moment. “What I said earlier,” Sam continued, “about Mom and Dad, I’m sorry-”
Dean’s hand came up and cut Sam off. “No chick-flic moments,” he told his brother.
Sam huffed a laugh. “All right. Jerk.”
“Bitch,” Dean replied. He left the room and strolled over to his car, grabbing his duffle from the trunk.
Jess watched in stunned disbelief as Sam followed. They jostled each other and exchanged a few light punches as Sam reached to grab his and Jess’ bags out of the car.
That was how they worked things out? The argument that had almost come to blows on the bridge had been solved by half of an apology and an exchange of insults? The Winchester method of nonverbal communication had been raised to a new high.
“Okay,” Jess spoke to Sam as she entered their room. The shower was already running and Dean was nowhere in sight. “I understand that you and your brother avoid actually talking as much as possible, but I am a chick, and I need my moments. What just went on between the two of you?”
“I shouldn’t have said what I did to Dean,” Sam shrugged. “I know what I want to do, but that’s no reason to antagonize him.”
“So, what, he’s going to be okay with you going back to Stanford?” She dug through her bag, searching for something comfortable enough to wear to bed.
“Sure.”
“Even if we haven’t found your Dad yet?” Jess pressed.
Sam shrugged out of his jacket and laid it over the back of a chair. His shoulders were tense and his movements were slow, just a tad too clumsy to be normal for Sam. The long day had taken it out of both of them.
“Dean knows what I want in life,” Sam finally spoke. “He may not understand it, but he’s willing to accept it.”
“Sam, you hadn’t talked to him in two years,” Jess told him gently. “How is that accepting?” She had given up on finding something to wear in her own bag, and pulled a soft t-shirt out of Sam’s things for her to wear.
“That wasn’t all his fault,” Sam admitted quietly, sitting on the bed he had claimed for the two of them. “I needed to get away from that whole lifestyle. I wanted a break. We just sort of… stopped talking at the same time.”
“And now?” Jess pressed gently, running Sam’s shirt through her fingers. “Sam, I can see that you and Dean are close. You’re beyond finishing each other’s sentences; you just look at each other and you know what the other one’s saying.
“I’m not saying I’m going to start ignoring Dean all over again,” Sam told her. “That was a mistake, and this trip has made me realize that.”
“You missed him,” Jess grinned, pulling her own shirt off and replacing it with Sam’s. The shower was still running, so Jess figured it was safe to change in the room without Dean walking in on her.
“Yeah,” Sam agreed, rolling his eyes a little. “If you want to put it in a girly way like that.”
“I do,” Jess nodded. “So, what, you’re going to be pen pals now? Have a scheduled phone date every week?”
“We’re going to talk,” Sam corrected. “Not ignore each other like we did before. But, Jess, I’m not going to start road-tripping with him around the country, searching for our Dad.”
“If he comes by again? Looking for help?”
Sam paused, not making eye contact with her.
“Sam. You’ll help him out if he needs it,” she told him. “Of course you will. I’ll kick your ass if you don’t. And I’ll double kick your ass if you don’t invite me along to help.
“Okay,” Sam smiled. The shower screeched as it turned off, audible even through the closed door. Sam lowered his voice and continued. “But my life will be at Stanford with you, Jess. I’m not like Dad and Dean. They’re obsessed with finding what killed my mom. But for me, it’s like you with your dad. I don’t want that obsession to ruin my life. Yes, I lost my mom. But it was a long time ago; I was so young, I don’t even remember it.”
Six months old, Jess remembered. And again, the question nagged at her: Six months exactly?
“Sam-”
“God, that’s more like it.” Dean exited the bathroom in a cloud of steam. He was clad in only a pair of boxers, water still dripping down his chest as he scrubbed his hair with a thin towel.
“Oh put a shirt on.” Jess rolled her eyes. Like he didn’t know the kind of free show he was giving her.
“What, you don’t appreciate the view?” Dean grinned.
“Yeah, sure.” Jess grabbed her toiletry bag and headed for the bathroom. “Just let me grab my roll of quarters and I’ll toss a couple your way.”
She shut the door as she heard Dean wonder to himself. “Only quarters?”
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Later that night, Jess lay awake in bed despite how tired she felt. She and Sam were sharing a bed while Dean slumbered nearby. Despite the potential awkwardness of all three of them sharing a room together, this arrangement fit her college-student budget and also made more sense, safety-wise.
Sam muttered something in his sleep, and rolled over. She reached out a sleepy hand to pat him clumsily, and he flinched away, muttering again.
“No… Jess…”
Jess frowned, concerned. Sam was growing continually more agitated and she didn’t want him to wake up Dean.
“Hey. Sam,” she whispered. “Wake up, you’re dreaming.”
“Jess…” He threw back the covers and tossed over to his opposite side.
“Sam!” she whispered again, and pinched the skin of his arm.
He stilled immediately and turned towards her, eyes still closed.
“Jess?” He was clearly still asleep, barely aware enough to make complete words.
“Yeah, it’s me.” She nuzzled in close to him, letting his arms come around her and pull her tight.
“You’re okay,” he whispered into her hair. “You’re safe.” And he lapsed into steady breathing that indicated he was completely asleep, nightmare forgotten for now.
And she was okay, Jess decided, taking comfort in the words Sam had meant for his own reassurance. No matter what happened, she would always have Sam to protect her and make sure that she was safe.
And with that thought, she was finally able to drift to sleep.
Chapter Six