Run Like Hell, part two
Part one
It was being cold that woke him up. He unstuck his eyes open with effort. They felt puffy and sensitive, and his head pounded steadily. He was alone in the bed, but someone had folded the bedspread over him, wrapping him inside like a burrito. He pushed himself up in a sitting position, blinking slowly. Light was filtering through the blinds and his eyes hurt like he’d slept with sand behind his eyelids. He’d rarely ever felt so shitty, and hoped that his inhuman recovery reflex was going to kick in sooner rather than later.
As he was debating over getting out of bed or staying there a little while longer, the door gaped in slow motion to reveal Ben pushing it open with his elbow, his hands full with a serving tray. It was a wooden thing, yellow with garlands of olive tree leaves painted on the side. Jesse marveled that such an object could be found in the Winchesters’ kitchen.
“What, no pancakes?” he said, and winced: he sounded clogged and raspy.
Ben shot him a carefully neutral look. “Don’t push it.”
“Is it morning?” He felt like he’d slept for days, years even.
“Yeah. You slept through the night for once. You must have been exhausted.”
Ben dropped the tray on Jesse’s lap, then climbed on the bed and sat cross-legged next to him. Jesse gave him a tentative smile and looked at the fried eggs, buttered toasts, and orange juice offered to him. His stomach did a nauseous little flip, but Ben was looking at him so hopefully that Jesse grabbed a fork and planted it into one of the eggs’ yolk, which deflated and spread in little rivulets around the plate.
“How are you feeling?” asked Ben as he stole a bit of egg white dripping with yolk.
Jesse shrugged and stuffed his mouth with food so he had an excuse for not voicing a more detailed answer. Ben seemed to see the strategy for what it was though, because he sighed almost inaudibly and his eyes dropped to the foot he had crossed over his ankle, fingers playing with a hole in his sock. Jesse’s eyes lingered over the line of his neck, where his dark hair curled slightly.
“I’m sorry about yesterday,” Ben said, drawing a harsh breath. “I shouldn’t have freaked out. You had enough on your plate already.”
Jesse chewed his food - a bit of eggshell crunched under his teeth - and rolled a shoulder to signify Ben that they were cool before he swallowed his mouthful.
“You apologized already, mate. It’s fine.”
He didn’t like fighting with Ben, but with everything else it didn’t rank very high on the scale. Ben still looked troubled, so Jesse made a valiant effort to smile at him.
“Where’s everyone? Where’s Dean?” he asked, realizing that he’d chased Dean from his own bed by passing out on it. Couldn’t be good on the old man’s back.
“Claire’s in the shower. The Winchesters left a few hours ago. I say we swing by Long Beach to get some stuff, and…”
Jesse dropped his fork and it clattered loudly against the plate. “Wait, what?”
“Well, we don’t know how long we’ll stay in Alliance, so…”
“Alliance? You mean that - you mean that the Winchesters left for Alliance to-”
“Hunt for whatever killed your parents, yeah. It’s what they do, man. They’re hunters.”
“Are they still even on the payroll? I thought they’d left the playing field and were now acting as graybeard mentors. You know, passing the torch.”
“Well, with Sam recovering and all they have been taking it easy, but-” Ben grimaced. “Look, I know that Dean isn’t always full of warm and fuzzy with you, but he didn’t forget what you did to help Sam.”
“Okay. I’ll grant you the Winchesters. And you and Claire, what are you going to do?”
Now Ben looked slightly annoyed. “We’re going to help, of course.”
“Did you tell them? Because I’m not sure they’d be too keen on that.”
“I’m not asking for their permission.” Ben’s foot shot off to hit Jesse in the knee, making the breakfast tray tremble and the plate, glass, and cutlery rattle. “And I know where you’re going with this, so don’t waste your breath. We’re helping. You’re not going after this thing by yourself.”
“Demon.”
“What?”
“It’s a demon that killed my parents. I could smell it when I was in their house. Ben, it’s going to be…”
“Dangerous?” Ben uncrossed his legs and scooted closer, getting up on his knees. The rise in height allowed him to loom over Jesse, his eyes flashing. “You know, this thing where we share a bed and we occasionally fuck? It also means that I care. I’m not going to leave you to deal with this alone.” Then his mouth lost its grim set and he grinned. “You can try to convince Claire to stay out of it, though.”
“Ha. Your sense of humor floors me.”
“I’ve seen demons before,” Ben said, serious again. He lost his balance, flailed a little and caught himself on Jesse’s collar, leaning close, his breath tickling the side of Jesse’s face. “I’ve been kidnapped by demons. I’ve run into a battlefield full of demons and angels fighting. You can’t scare me off.”
Jesse thought that Ben would do better to be a little more scared, but he knew him well enough by now to be aware that you couldn’t change his mind when it was made up. Honestly, Jesse hadn’t really thought about going alone after the demon who had killed his parents. He hadn’t thought about anything at all, had merely borne the blow and reacted. It filled him with shame to realize that other people had been making plans while he mopped around and slept like a log. He pushed the tray off his knees. Ben looked like he wanted to protest about the fact that Jesse hadn’t eaten much, but one glance at Jesse’s face and he shut his mouth, sliding off the bed to accommodate him. Jesse stretched, making his spine pop and his joints crack. He didn’t feel tired anymore and his headache had vanished, but his body felt sort of weightless, like at any sudden movement he would float off the floor.
“Jesse?”
“A little dizzy, that’s all.”
Ben’s hand dropped to his shoulder, a familiar weight, his thumb brushing close to the spot where the scarred mark was, and Jesse thought about asking Ben to redo it. The thought made him flush, absurdly.
“What’s the matter?”
Jesse scratched his head. He didn’t want to get into the reason why he wanted the mark redone. It had been easy enough to tell Claire, partly because he was still so upset, and partly because talking to Ben about how easily, how unthinkingly he had bended that man to his will scared Jesse: what if Ben started to wonder about them, about why Jesse was the first bloke he’d ever wanted to do? This was a fresh onslaught of doubt and fear that he wasn’t ready to face.
“Could you…” Jesse circled a finger around the approximate spot. “Do it again? It’s faded.”
Ben’s mouth twisted. “Are you sure you need it?”
It was the first time Ben had done anything but comply at this request. “You don’t have to… I mean, I know this isn’t much fun for you.”
“It’s not that, it’s… Alright, have a sit.” Jesse obeyed. “Take off your shirt.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“Mouthy fucker.”
Jesse grabbed his t-shirt by the collar to haul it over his head, messing with his hair. When he could see again Ben and he shared a look and a brief smile, both of their minds flashing back to other, more pleasant circumstances.
“Let me see,” Ben said, and he kneeled on the floor. He hunched closer, eyes narrowed in concentration, and ghosted over the scar with his fingertips. It tickled and Jesse held his breath.
“Don’t you need a knife?” he said, heartbeat speeding up.
“In a minute,” Ben murmured absently, now using his thumb to follow the circle around the symbol.
Jesse closed his eyes, letting the anticipation build up - strangely enough, what had been a painful chore before had become kind of a turn on. There was just something about having Ben so close, so focused, so intent on him-
“I think it’s fine as it is,” Ben said, startling Jesse out of the spaced-out state he’d been getting into.
“I think it needs refreshing. It feels a little-”
“You know you don’t have to inflict this upon yourself.”
“What do you mean?”
Ben looked away and Jesse immediately knew that he was hiding something. “Ben?”
Ben raked his fingers through his hair, rocking back on his heels, a sure sign that he was uncomfortable.
“Remember Ramiel?” he asked. “The angel that possessed my neighbor?”
What kind of dumb question was that? Ramiel had tricked Jesse into coming back to the US, was the sole reason he had even met Ben and Claire, so of course he remembered him. Ben was stalling from revealing something unpleasant, and Jesse felt himself grow cold, goosebumps surfacing on his naked arms.
“Is that a trick question?”
“He said something about your mark, said it was some sort of placebo, working only because you wanted it to. I didn’t know if I should tell you, because it was helping you, and-”
“It’s useless?” Jesse’s ears were ringing and the world around him was losing color, a bit like when he was about to teleport. “You mean I have nothing- I’m out of control-”
“Jesse, hey, no.” Ben’s hands on both sides of his head hooked him back to reality. “Look at me. Look into my eyes.”
Jesse blinked until his vision cleared and all he could see were Ben’s brown eyes looking back at him worriedly.
“You’re not out of control, okay? Listen to me, you have something - it’s you, alright? The mark, it’s just a crutch - you can control your power, you have a hold on it. You just need-” Ben’s fingers buried deeper into Jesse’s hair, and the line of his mouth got soft and fond as he grazed his thumbnail against Jesse’s eyebrow. “Believe in yourself, you idiot.”
“Okay,” Jesse said, feeling a little out of breath. “Thanks. I-”
The door opened, and Ben and Jesse both startled and jerked apart. It was Claire, her hair wet from the shower and dripping on her shoulder, drawing darker crisscross patterns on her sweater. “Oh. Am I interrupting something?” she asked, arching an eyebrow. Her cheeks were a little pink, belying her apparent composure.
“No, we were-” Jesse said.
“You’re not, I was just-” Ben said at the same time, and they both broke off and chuckled, a little flustered.
It was strange to feel embarrassed that Claire had come in - it wasn’t like she hadn’t seen them in much more intimate positions - but some of the tension in the air had gone now and Jesse couldn’t help being a little disappointed. He put his shirt back on as casually as possible under the circumstances while Ben rose to his feet.
“Did you leave me any hot water, princess?” Jesse told Claire, trying to dissipate the awkwardness straining the atmosphere.
“Aren’t you capable of heating your own water?” she shot back and he laughed.
“Point.”
“It’s going to take Sam and Dean about 20 hours total to drive up to Alliance,” Ben said. “They’ll probably stop for the night, so they’ll arrive tomorrow evening. We’re not in a hurry.”
“Why do we have to wait for them?” Jesse asked. “The trail’s going to get cold. Why aren’t they flying to Alliance, anyway?”
“Oh, that. It’s just- Dean isn’t very fond of planes.”
Jesse snorted a laugh.
“What?”
“Nothing. Just trying to picture it.”
“They went on a plane once that got almost crashed by a demon,” Ben said, defensive; Jesse saw Claire contain a smile. “Anyway, your parents died a couple of days ago - one more day won’t make a big difference. We can go back to Long Beach, pack, call in sick at work, warn Blake and Katie we’re going to be gone for a few days. Dean told me he’d text me the name of the place where they stop tonight, so we could meet them there and discuss what we’re going to do.”
“He’s right,” Claire said. “It won’t do us any good to get into this headlong.”
I’m not asking you to get into anything! But with both of them looking at him like that - damn, there was no room for argument here, was there? Jesse sighed and ran a hand through his hair, which felt greasy. Time to jump under the water jet and forget everything.
“I’m gonna take a shower,” he said as a way of admitting defeat, and turned his back on Ben and Claire.
---
When Dean finally texted, they were all waiting in the living room at Ben’s place, their bags gathered in a pile and silence weighing heavily on them all. They’d called their respective jobs, Blake - Ben’s other best friend and former roommate, who also shared their kidnapping experience - had promised to water the plants or whatever, and now Ben was lying on the couch, bouncing a baseball against the wall, Claire was huddled on a chair reading on her tablet, and Jesse was pacing up and down, more than ready to get a move on. His fingers were itching for a smoke, but he wanted to be ready to leave at once.
The ringtone from Ben’s phone, announcing a text message, gathered everyone’s attention in a second.
“Is it Dean?” Jesse demanded, swallowing the space separating them in a couple of strides. “What does he say?”
“Dude,” Ben groused. “Give me time to read.”
The Winchesters had stopped at a motel in Springville, Utah. Jesse didn’t waste time taking them there, and to his credit Ben didn’t complain about the jump, even though he looked green around the edges when they materialized behind a bush by the motel sign - they’d found a picture on the Internet. The war counsel in Sam and Dean’s room was short and frustrating. Follow our lead, they told them; don’t do anything foolish, and Dean paired the warning with a glance reserved to Jesse.
Jesse, Ben, and Claire took one room with a king-sized bed. They didn’t sleep all in the same bed very often, because both Claire and Jesse were kind of claustrophobic sleepers and neither Ben’s nor Claire’s bed was really big enough for three if you didn’t want to snuggle all night. It earned them some odd looks from the motel clerk, but thankfully no comment. Ben and Claire offered Jesse the middle spot, but in spite of the comfortable space and even though the night before they’d slept tangled in each other with no space to breathe, Jesse couldn’t get any sleep the whole night, feeling trapped and stifled.
The next day they all packed into Dean’s monster car, with Dean in the driving seat and his brother riding shotgun while Jesse, Ben, and Claire crammed in the backseat. Ben seemed in love with the car. He sat in the middle and spent a good part of the trip leaning between the front seats, talking obscure car-speak with Dean.
Jesse wasn’t used to long hours in a car and soon enough he had trouble sitting still - knees bouncing, fingers drumming - and tried to kill time looking through the window at the passing scenery. He knew that they were getting close to Alliance when they entered the Sandhills with its undulating expanses of burned grass. The yellow-green stretches of soft hills, rolling as far as the eye could see like waves in a stormy sea, the cloud-studded sky - all of it hit Jesse with its aching familiarity and his heart felt like it’d grown ten sizes too big for his ribcage. Claire must have sensed something, because when her eyes met his over Ben’s bent back, she pressed her fingertips against her lips in a kiss and directed it to Jesse, a spontaneous but uncharacteristic gesture. It stirred something deep inside him, shaking him harder than any kiss she’d given him before. He sent her a wobbly smile and turned back to the window, focusing on the sandy roadsides patched with clumps of grass until he could see clearly again.
They entered Alliance just when the light was starting to dim, which was a chance because it stopped Jesse from looking at everything too closely and comparing it with his memories. The motel the Winchesters chose was almost the opposite side of the town from where he used to live, and he wondered if it was on purpose.
“Tomorrow, Sam and me will go talk to the police, and then ask ‘round the neighborhood,” Dean said, bag hanging from his shoulder and his hand on the doorknob to his room. His face was drawn, tired from the long drive. “You kids sit tight.”
“What can we do to help?” Ben asked eagerly, and Dean grimaced.
“There isn’t much you can do,” he started, but trailed off at Ben’s sour expression.
“You could go in and have a look at the crime scene,” Sam intervened, subtly shifting positions, probably so he could bodily get between Ben and Dean in case of an argument. “There are tests you can do to-”
“It was a demon,” Jesse said abruptly. “I already went there. I smelled it.”
“Smell?” Dean’s face scrunched up, but Sam sounded curious when he said, “Sulfur? Interesting.”
“Yeah, it’s downright fascinating,” Dean grumbled, and swiped a hand over his face with a hearty sigh. “Look, Ben, I know you want to help-”
“Why not operate a compromise?” Claire said. The brothers looked at her with varying combinations of wariness and curiosity. “Why don’t we ask around the neighborhood while you talk to the police? We’re probably too young to pass for law enforcement, but we could find another story for the neighbors.”
“What if the neighbors recognize him?” Dean asked, pointing a thumb at Jesse, but he didn’t sound completely opposed to the idea. Ben seemed to notice it too because he shot Claire a beaming smile of gratitude. “I’ve seen him when he was eleven, and I can tell you that he hasn’t changed so much that he’s impossible to place. A conversation is long enough to stir up some memories.”
“I can deal with that,” Jesse said. “I can make it so they can’t focus on me long enough to identify me.”
This was one of the few skills he possessed that he could actually say he mastered. As a scared kid lost in a foreign country he had made quite a use of it to escape unwanted attention, and sometimes to shoplift a bit too - not that he was going to admit that to a bunch of hunters, of course.
Sam and Dean exchanged a look: Sam raised an eyebrow, Dean lifted a shoulder, there were other minute signs involving mouths and eyes that Jesse couldn’t quite catch, but eventually they seemed to reach some kind of agreement, because Dean said, “Alright. We talk to the police, you talk to the neighbors, and we meet at noon to cross information.”
Jesse resisted breaking into a military salute. Ben had no such qualms and said, “Yes, sir,” which made Dean snort. “Don’t get cute, kiddo.”
The rooms they had booked were side-to-side. This time the clerk hadn’t seemed to give one flying fuck that Jesse, Ben, and Claire were evidently going to share. They said goodnight to Sam and Dean and didn’t have far to go to get to their own room. Jesse flopped on the bed and had a look around, having a feeling that they were going to be there a while. It seemed to be going for rustic bad taste: the bed took most of the space in one corner of the room, topped by the painting of a mountain landscape and framed with two nightstands of a dark-colored wood; two deep armchairs built out of pieces of unpolished woods, cushions decorated with ugly green and burgundy patterns, faced a stone fireplace, and were separated by a small pedestal table with twisted wrought iron legs; the upper part of the walls was painted yellow while the lower part was green, the separation made by a wallpaper border showing an odd collection of ducks, oil lamps, and clumps of nuts, and autumn leaves.
“Hey, look at that,” Ben said.
He was lying flat on his back, looking up at the ceiling. Jesse dropped back by his side and saw that the ceiling was adorned with a mirror right above the bed.
“What the hell?” said Jesse, and Claire raised her eyes too and frowned.
“Is it a rent-by-the-hour kinda place?” Ben said. “I’ve never been to one of those.”
“Never? Ben, you shame me.”
“We’re not having sex in this room,” Claire said.
“Aw,” Ben and Jesse chorused. They shifted on the gold and red paisley bedspread so as to face each other and Ben burst out laughing. The sound warmed the core of ice inside Jesse’s chest, just a little, and he smiled in response.
---
“This is a terrible, terrible thing.” Dona Saunders shook her head as she spoke. The movement didn’t disturb even one blond hair from her perfect perm. “Poor Jo. Poor Kate. You said that your mother…”
“Is - was - Jo’s second cousin, yes,” Ben said. “They hadn’t seen each other in more than twenty years, but my mom’s grand-mother - Jo’s grand-aunt - just died at 99, and Mom found pictures that she thought Jo could be interested in.” Ben bowed his head, the picture of despondency. “This is a moot point now, but since I’ve come all the way from Michigan, I thought I could at least get some answers on what happened.”
Claire, sitting next to Ben on a wide beige couch with curvy arms, took Ben’s hand and squeezed it sympathetically. Jesse was standing in a corner of the room by a heavy-set bookshelf and watched the scene with an outsider point of view. Dona Saunders, who had moved to the neighborhood a couple of years before Jesse ran away, had been the only one of his parents’ few neighbors to open her door. The others had remained resolutely closed, either because the people were not there, or because, with the violent crime that had taken place in their vicinity, they were now wary of strangers. Jesse was pretty sure that at one point he’d seen lacy curtains flutter at their knocking.
But Dona, sweet Dona who used to make cookies for Jesse and her daughter Lizzie when they came back from school, paid him ridiculously high fees to mow her lawn, always showed up to check on him when he was alone at the house - she didn’t hesitate and welcomed them like long-lost relatives, ate up the bullshit Claire and Ben spun for her with such ease that Jesse couldn’t help be amazed. Dona was sitting on a Victorian-styled chair that didn’t match the rest of the room - not that anything matched with anything, really - with her legs demurely pressed together and her hands joined in her lap. She didn’t seem to be aware he was there, although she had closed the door behind him when he’d entered.
“Of course you do, you poor thing,” Dona said, her carefully made-up eyes open wide. “Of course. How awful for you to do the trip and have to learn about that.”
Jesse repressed a snicker. Ben had her hook and sinker, oh yeah, and it was astonishing to see Ben, who usually tumbled around lies like a drunk, be so good at this role-playing thing.
“Do you know anything?” Claire asked softly, a twitch of her fingers on Ben’s the only sign of her growing impatience. “The police won’t talk to us.”
“Not much, unfortunately. This is a really strange matter, though. I mean, horrible, of course, but extremely odd too.”
Jesse frowned, and Ben asked, “What do you mean? How strange?”
“Well,” and Dona leaned forward, followed almost absent-mindedly by Ben and Claire, “I was the one who called the police. See, I was getting worried: I hadn’t seen Jo or Kate for more than a week. Their car was parked in the driveway, but they never left the house. I was out of town for a few days to see my sister, and when I came back Larry, my husband, told me he hadn’t seen them at all while I was gone. He didn’t think much of it, but then he’s always lived in his own world.”
Dona shook her head again, this time in fondness. The name Larry didn’t ring any bell to Jesse - from what he remembered, Dona had been divorced when he’d known her.
“What did you do then?” Ben pressed. “You called the police?”
“Not immediately, goodness no. I knocked on the door, and I walked around the house to check if I could see them through the windows. I was really more worried about carbon monoxide poisoning or something similar. I never thought-” She drew a deep breath then exhaled slowly through her mouth, like in some breathing exercise. “It’s when I saw the blood that I called the police. I couldn’t see the bodies, but there was a big pool of blood spreading from the fireplace to the couch.”
Ben and Claire both paled at that detail, and Jesse didn’t feel much better, the memory of the blood-soaked carpet in his parents’ living room making him faint and dizzy. He reached out to steady himself and almost knocked over a faux-Chinese porcelain vase perched on a phone stand. He muffled a curse and saw Ben wince. Claire tried to cover for it immediately with another question to Dona.
“Do you think they’ve been dead all that time?”
Dona’s face took on the color of milk, but she answered anyway, “I’m not sure, but… I don’t think so. The, the blood looked really bright. Fresh.”
Ben said something else but Jesse’s attention was drawn elsewhere: there was some movement at the top of the staircase occupying the back of the room, feet dancing behind the banister. As the person went down the stairs Jesse saw that it was a young woman about his age, dressed in jeans and a cropped flowery blouse, her long ginger hair floating at her back. Her sudden appearance jolted back a flow of memories in Jesse’s mind: this was Lizzie, Dona’s only child and the apple of her eyes, Jesse’s schoolmate and first crush, from an eternity ago.
“I heard noises coming from the Turners’,” she said once she reached the bottom of the stairs.
Dona’s face brightened when she saw her daughter, and she held out a hand to her. Lizzie took Dona’s fingers loosely and let her mother pull her to her side.
“This is my daughter, Lizzie,” Dona said. Ben and Claire nodded and murmured greetings. “What were you saying, my sweetheart? What did you hear?”
“Noises - it was when I came back for the weekend, and it was late at night, and really, I wasn’t sure what it was or that I hadn’t imagined the whole thing. But when I learned that the Turners were found dead I thought again about it, and I think that what I heard were sounds of struggle. And maybe a muffled scream.”
“Did you tell the police?” Claire asked.
“I’ve just came back, but I plan to, obviously,” Lizzie said somewhat haughtily, like she was offended by Claire questioning her. “But really, I think all this has something to do with Jesse.”
Jesse felt his heart miss a beat, suddenly convinced that she could see him and was directly addressing him - but Lizzie wasn’t looking anywhere in his direction and he relaxed after a moment. Ben and Claire, for their parts, behaved like fucking pros, not even flinching and keeping their composure.
“Jesse?” Ben said, the quizzical look on his face so convincing that Jesse could have kissed him. “Oh - isn’t that the Turners’ son who went missing?”
“Yes,” Lizzie said, and Jesse didn’t know why he was surprised by the fleeting look of sadness on her face; in truth, he hadn’t ever really given a thought about how his going missing could have impacted people other than his parents. “They never found him. They never even found anyone who’d seen him. If he’d run away, someone would have seen him, so he must have been taken by someone… ill-intended.” The word sounded odd in her young mouth. “And now, this. How many times can the same people be involved in a criminal case?”
“So you think that… Jesse Turner was kidnapped, and that the kidnapper - what, came back and killed his parents?”
Lizzie tweaked her mouth, her distaste of Ben’s skeptical tone obvious. “This is as likely as anything. Who else would’ve wanted to kill the Turners?”
---
“Soooo- that was kind of exciting, right?” Ben said, almost bouncing as they walked away from Dona’s house. It was mild enough outside that Jesse was merely wearing a t-shirt, although Ben and Claire had still opted for jackets. “My heart was beating a mile a minute, and when that chick said your name, Jess - man, I thought I was going to have a stroke.”
“You were awesome,” Jesse said, smiling fondly. “Both of you - you looked like you’d done this all your lives.”
“I know, right?” Ben enthused, spinning round to face Claire. “Don’t you agree?”
“I found it a little uncomfortable,” Claire said, and Ben’s smile lost some its radiance.
“Well, yeah-” He lowered his voice, mindful of the young mother pushing a stroller a few yards up the road. “But we didn’t have any bad intentions. We actually want to know what happened to the Turners. And it was useful, too - now we know that they hadn’t left their house in days; something has to be up with that.”
“I’m a little more worried about what Lizzie Saunders said,” Claire said in the same tone. “If she tells the police her suspicions that the Turners’ deaths have something to do with Jesse going missing, it could be problematic for us.”
“Yeah, but are they going to believe her? It seems a little far-fetched.”
“It’s not,” Jesse said in a normal voice. Ben and Claire’s eyes immediately swung to him. “If a demon killed my parents,” he explained more quietly, walking a little ahead of them with his hands in his pockets, head hung low, “odds are that it has something to do with me. Lizzie’s right on that point: what are the chances that they attracted the attention of a random demon, with absolutely no relation to the fact that I’m their son?”
“Jesse,” Ben said in a subdued voice. “You know that it’s not your fault, right?”
“Mm. Yeah, I know.”
Jesse focused on the cracks scarring the road, where age, bad weather, and neglect had damaged the asphalt. It was his fault, no matter what Ben said. He wasn’t going to endlessly tear himself up over that because there wasn’t anything he could do about it now, but the fact remained that everything horrible about his parents’ lives had been because of him. At the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse of something black, and he stopped and watched the Impala creep up the road like a monstrous beetle.
“Here they are,” he heard Claire murmur.
The Impala ground to a halt and Jesse, Ben, and Claire climbed into the backseat. Dean and Sam both wore dark suits that gave them the looks of undertakers. The door squeaked as it closed, and Dean said, “Learn anything?”
“Only one of the neighbors accepted to talk to us, but she’s the one who called the cops,” Ben said, wedging himself between the front seats. “She said that the Turners hadn’t come out of their house for at least a week, and her daughter said that she heard the sounds of a struggle.”
“That’s consistent with what the police told us,” Sam said, and Jesse expected him to go into more details about what the police had said, but he went quiet.
“What is it?” Jesse asked after a moment.
He was sitting directly behind Sam so he had to twist to the side, almost ending in Ben’s lap, to have a look at his face. The line of Sam’s jaw was tightly set.
“All evidence points to your dad slitting your mom’s throat,” Dean said in a bored voice, eyes fixed on the road. “And then his own.”
“So my dad was the one possessed. What else did you find out?” This time Dean’s eyes flicked to his brother, silently checking in with him, and Jesse fought off annoyance. “You don’t have to spare my feelings, you know. Spit it out.”
“There were… marks on your mother’s body,” Sam said reluctantly. “Signs of torture.”
“Torture?” Jesse thought he felt Ben’s touch on his wrist but everything seemed very far away. “For a week?”
“Probably,” Dean said. “The demon wanted something from her - from them.”
“It wants me, obviously,” Jesse said absently. “It thought my parents knew where I am. Good thing they didn’t.”
His thoughts and feelings were in turmoil, flashes of pain, blood, sulfur, wet grass mixed with memories of his parents, and the urge to jump anywhere but here was so strong he had to bite the inside of his cheek to resist it. He looked through the window to distract himself - there was Dona Saunders’ house again, painted a prim yellow with just a purple band in the trim, with its double pane windows and its red brick walkway. “Wait - did you drive around the block?”
“Yeah,” Dean said nonchalantly. “I wanted to check on something. Here, look over there.”
Jesse followed his look and saw a woman across the road from his parents’ house, standing pressed against a utility pole in what looked like a completely pointless attempt to hide. Everything about her radiated nervousness: the way she huddled in on herself, the broad sunglasses she wore, the way her head jerked right and left like she was on the lookout for something. She saw the Impala approach and froze up.
“I saw her when we drove by the first time,” Dean said. “She was looking at your parents’ house.”
“She looks familiar,” Sam said, peering through the window. “Could it be- Oh, fuck.”
Instead of running away the woman trotted up to the car, and Dean pulled up while Sam rolled down the window.
“I thought it was you,” she said breathlessly.
The brothers shared a look and got out of the car as one. Jesse pushed the door open on his side, an ominous feeling nagging at him, and Ben and Claire shuffled after him.
“Hey,” Jesse heard Sam say. “What are you-”
“I heard about- I wanted to check-” the woman said hurriedly in a hushed voice. “I should have known you would come.”
“Julia,” Dean said in a warning voice. “We-”
Jesse saw the moment the woman - Julia - caught sight of them. Her mouth opened slightly, her hand went to close the collar of her trench coat in a protective gesture. “Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t-”
“Julia,” Sam said very softly, like talking to a small kid. “This is Jesse. Jesse, this is Julia Wright.”
The woman’s head whipped to look at him, and even if Jesse couldn’t see her eyes it was obvious that his name had the effect of a bomb on her. The hand closing her coat started to shake and the line of her shoulders was taut.
“Jesse? How?”
“The same reason you’re here,” Sam said. “Jesse wants to know what happened to his parents.”
Jesse looked at the woman, really looked at her, her blond hair mingled with gray, the hard lines at the corner of her mouth, the slightly prominent nose, and it struck him all of a sudden that the feeling he’d had since he’d seen her was familiarity. He’d met her before, he’d seen her in his house with the black eyes of a demon, talking to him about lies and power.
“Your birth mother?” Ben said, obviously following the same trail of thought.
Jesse and his birth mother stood there gaping at each other while a wind of awkwardness blew over the group. Dean shifted from one foot to another, cleared his throat noisily and said, “Maybe we should let you two catch up.”
Julia turned to him in alarm and Sam added soothingly, “We’ll be right there in the car.”
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Jesse said, and he’d meant to sound reassuring but it came out wounded.
“No, of course not. I know that.” It would’ve been more convincing if her voice wasn’t quaking.
The Winchesters went back to the car, but Ben and Claire trailed behind, looking uncertainly at Jesse.
“Are you sure?” Ben said.
“I’ll be fine.”
Claire took his hand and gave it a hard squeeze, and they both joined the Winchesters in the Impala, leaving Jesse and Julia in apparent privacy. Julia pressed her lips together in a pale thin line and took off her sunglasses. Jesse leaned against the picket fence that delimitated the field behind him and examined his biological mother. She had a lined, weary face, and eyes so clear they looked washed out. Jesse couldn’t see anything of himself in her - not his hair, not his skin tone, not his eyes, not his nose - and he had that chilling thought: where did he get all his features from?
“Your friends seem nice,” Julia said after a silence, her voice hoarse.
“Yeah. They are.”
“Good, that’s good.” She looked him over with too bright eyes and lifted a hand to briefly touch his face. Her fingers were cold and clammy. “You’re a handsome boy. You were a lovely child too.”
It took Jesse a few seconds to get the implications of her words. “You remember that?”
“Yes, oh yes.” Her mouth trembled. “The demon, it liked to let me be aware of what was happening. It especially wanted me to see you - our accomplishment. This is what it called you. Our, like it was something we’d decided together. It was so proud of you.”
It was so absurd that Jesse wanted to laugh. How nice to know that his father - progenitor, whatever - was proud of him. Although it probably wasn’t so happy with Jesse’s refusal to take over the family business of maiming, killing, and bringing on the Apocalypse.
“Thanks for the confidence builder, I guess,” he mumbled, then said in a louder voice, “Why did you come here? How did you know about what happened?”
She flinched a little, even though Jesse didn’t think he’d sounded accusing or threatening. “I’ve known where you lived since Sam and Dean told me.”
“They did?”
“Yes, they came to my house, years ago, and asked me questions about you. That’s when they told me your name and where you lived, so I… kept myself updated. I knew you’d gone missing so I kept an eye on Alliance to see if you ever came back. That’s how I knew that your parents had died.”
Jesse wondered if she’d thought, was still thinking maybe, that he was the one who’d done it. He didn’t dare to ask.
“I wanted to know more about what happened. I’ve had…” Her blue eyes clouded over. “I’ve had some horrible dreams lately, and I was scared… I’m tired of always being scared.”
“I’m sorry,” Jesse said impulsively, and for the first time she smiled at him, the ghost of a smile.
“For what? You didn’t do anything beside be born. I gave you up. I wish I could say I would do it differently if I had the choice all over again, but I, I couldn’t have been a good mother to you.”
“No, it’s fine, my parents were fine. They loved me like their own.”
“I’m glad.”
A gust of wind ruffled their hair and Julia closed her eyes, just when Jesse thought he could see tears in them. “I’m sorry for your loss,” she said, a little off-beat, like the thought of condolences had just occurred to her.
A sharp bit of fresh pain stabbed him in the chest. “Thanks.”
“But tell me about you,” she said, brushing hair off her face. “You ran away from Alliance, right? Where did you go? Where do you live now?”
“I was, um,” he coughed, “in Australia for a while. I came back to the US a few months ago, and now I live in California and I, uh, work in a restaurant.”
It was a little pitiful to hear his life be summed up like that but he didn’t know what to say, torn up between the need to show her that he was normal, that he wasn’t a fuck-up, that he wasn’t a destructive force of evil, and an obscure reluctance to share more of his life with her. She was, after all, no more than a stranger. She’d signed herself out of his life.
“And do you- do you have a girlfriend? Oh.” Her eyes flicked to the car. “That young woman. Is she?”
“Claire?” Jesse instinctively turned to the Impala, where Sam and Dean looked engrossed in their conversation, and Claire and Ben were almost pressed to the window, watching in Jesse and Julia’s direction. “Yeah, we’re together.”
Julia seemed sincerely pleased at this and Jesse felt an absurd amount of validation over her reaction. It was only once he was back in the car, and Julia was chatting with Sam and Dean up at the driver’s window, giving them the address of the motel she was staying in, that Jesse realized that he’d let her have the wrong impression.
“How did it go?” Ben said to his ear when the Impala started up and drove away from the Turners’ house.
Jesse fought a swell of guilt. “Good, I guess. Awkward as fuck. She asked me about my life. She understood that Claire and me were an item, but I didn’t,” he lowered his voice to a shamed murmur, “I didn’t explain things further.”
“What do you mean you didn’t- oh, right.” Ben rested a hand on Jesse’s knee. “It’s fine, man. She doesn’t need to know every single detail of your sex life.”
“And we won’t probably see much of her, so it’s not like it’s going to come up a lot.”
“Exactly. Don’t worry about it.”
Ben’s hand remained on his knee for the whole trip back to the motel.
Part three
It was being cold that woke him up. He unstuck his eyes open with effort. They felt puffy and sensitive, and his head pounded steadily. He was alone in the bed, but someone had folded the bedspread over him, wrapping him inside like a burrito. He pushed himself up in a sitting position, blinking slowly. Light was filtering through the blinds and his eyes hurt like he’d slept with sand behind his eyelids. He’d rarely ever felt so shitty, and hoped that his inhuman recovery reflex was going to kick in sooner rather than later.
As he was debating over getting out of bed or staying there a little while longer, the door gaped in slow motion to reveal Ben pushing it open with his elbow, his hands full with a serving tray. It was a wooden thing, yellow with garlands of olive tree leaves painted on the side. Jesse marveled that such an object could be found in the Winchesters’ kitchen.
“What, no pancakes?” he said, and winced: he sounded clogged and raspy.
Ben shot him a carefully neutral look. “Don’t push it.”
“Is it morning?” He felt like he’d slept for days, years even.
“Yeah. You slept through the night for once. You must have been exhausted.”
Ben dropped the tray on Jesse’s lap, then climbed on the bed and sat cross-legged next to him. Jesse gave him a tentative smile and looked at the fried eggs, buttered toasts, and orange juice offered to him. His stomach did a nauseous little flip, but Ben was looking at him so hopefully that Jesse grabbed a fork and planted it into one of the eggs’ yolk, which deflated and spread in little rivulets around the plate.
“How are you feeling?” asked Ben as he stole a bit of egg white dripping with yolk.
Jesse shrugged and stuffed his mouth with food so he had an excuse for not voicing a more detailed answer. Ben seemed to see the strategy for what it was though, because he sighed almost inaudibly and his eyes dropped to the foot he had crossed over his ankle, fingers playing with a hole in his sock. Jesse’s eyes lingered over the line of his neck, where his dark hair curled slightly.
“I’m sorry about yesterday,” Ben said, drawing a harsh breath. “I shouldn’t have freaked out. You had enough on your plate already.”
Jesse chewed his food - a bit of eggshell crunched under his teeth - and rolled a shoulder to signify Ben that they were cool before he swallowed his mouthful.
“You apologized already, mate. It’s fine.”
He didn’t like fighting with Ben, but with everything else it didn’t rank very high on the scale. Ben still looked troubled, so Jesse made a valiant effort to smile at him.
“Where’s everyone? Where’s Dean?” he asked, realizing that he’d chased Dean from his own bed by passing out on it. Couldn’t be good on the old man’s back.
“Claire’s in the shower. The Winchesters left a few hours ago. I say we swing by Long Beach to get some stuff, and…”
Jesse dropped his fork and it clattered loudly against the plate. “Wait, what?”
“Well, we don’t know how long we’ll stay in Alliance, so…”
“Alliance? You mean that - you mean that the Winchesters left for Alliance to-”
“Hunt for whatever killed your parents, yeah. It’s what they do, man. They’re hunters.”
“Are they still even on the payroll? I thought they’d left the playing field and were now acting as graybeard mentors. You know, passing the torch.”
“Well, with Sam recovering and all they have been taking it easy, but-” Ben grimaced. “Look, I know that Dean isn’t always full of warm and fuzzy with you, but he didn’t forget what you did to help Sam.”
“Okay. I’ll grant you the Winchesters. And you and Claire, what are you going to do?”
Now Ben looked slightly annoyed. “We’re going to help, of course.”
“Did you tell them? Because I’m not sure they’d be too keen on that.”
“I’m not asking for their permission.” Ben’s foot shot off to hit Jesse in the knee, making the breakfast tray tremble and the plate, glass, and cutlery rattle. “And I know where you’re going with this, so don’t waste your breath. We’re helping. You’re not going after this thing by yourself.”
“Demon.”
“What?”
“It’s a demon that killed my parents. I could smell it when I was in their house. Ben, it’s going to be…”
“Dangerous?” Ben uncrossed his legs and scooted closer, getting up on his knees. The rise in height allowed him to loom over Jesse, his eyes flashing. “You know, this thing where we share a bed and we occasionally fuck? It also means that I care. I’m not going to leave you to deal with this alone.” Then his mouth lost its grim set and he grinned. “You can try to convince Claire to stay out of it, though.”
“Ha. Your sense of humor floors me.”
“I’ve seen demons before,” Ben said, serious again. He lost his balance, flailed a little and caught himself on Jesse’s collar, leaning close, his breath tickling the side of Jesse’s face. “I’ve been kidnapped by demons. I’ve run into a battlefield full of demons and angels fighting. You can’t scare me off.”
Jesse thought that Ben would do better to be a little more scared, but he knew him well enough by now to be aware that you couldn’t change his mind when it was made up. Honestly, Jesse hadn’t really thought about going alone after the demon who had killed his parents. He hadn’t thought about anything at all, had merely borne the blow and reacted. It filled him with shame to realize that other people had been making plans while he mopped around and slept like a log. He pushed the tray off his knees. Ben looked like he wanted to protest about the fact that Jesse hadn’t eaten much, but one glance at Jesse’s face and he shut his mouth, sliding off the bed to accommodate him. Jesse stretched, making his spine pop and his joints crack. He didn’t feel tired anymore and his headache had vanished, but his body felt sort of weightless, like at any sudden movement he would float off the floor.
“Jesse?”
“A little dizzy, that’s all.”
Ben’s hand dropped to his shoulder, a familiar weight, his thumb brushing close to the spot where the scarred mark was, and Jesse thought about asking Ben to redo it. The thought made him flush, absurdly.
“What’s the matter?”
Jesse scratched his head. He didn’t want to get into the reason why he wanted the mark redone. It had been easy enough to tell Claire, partly because he was still so upset, and partly because talking to Ben about how easily, how unthinkingly he had bended that man to his will scared Jesse: what if Ben started to wonder about them, about why Jesse was the first bloke he’d ever wanted to do? This was a fresh onslaught of doubt and fear that he wasn’t ready to face.
“Could you…” Jesse circled a finger around the approximate spot. “Do it again? It’s faded.”
Ben’s mouth twisted. “Are you sure you need it?”
It was the first time Ben had done anything but comply at this request. “You don’t have to… I mean, I know this isn’t much fun for you.”
“It’s not that, it’s… Alright, have a sit.” Jesse obeyed. “Take off your shirt.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“Mouthy fucker.”
Jesse grabbed his t-shirt by the collar to haul it over his head, messing with his hair. When he could see again Ben and he shared a look and a brief smile, both of their minds flashing back to other, more pleasant circumstances.
“Let me see,” Ben said, and he kneeled on the floor. He hunched closer, eyes narrowed in concentration, and ghosted over the scar with his fingertips. It tickled and Jesse held his breath.
“Don’t you need a knife?” he said, heartbeat speeding up.
“In a minute,” Ben murmured absently, now using his thumb to follow the circle around the symbol.
Jesse closed his eyes, letting the anticipation build up - strangely enough, what had been a painful chore before had become kind of a turn on. There was just something about having Ben so close, so focused, so intent on him-
“I think it’s fine as it is,” Ben said, startling Jesse out of the spaced-out state he’d been getting into.
“I think it needs refreshing. It feels a little-”
“You know you don’t have to inflict this upon yourself.”
“What do you mean?”
Ben looked away and Jesse immediately knew that he was hiding something. “Ben?”
Ben raked his fingers through his hair, rocking back on his heels, a sure sign that he was uncomfortable.
“Remember Ramiel?” he asked. “The angel that possessed my neighbor?”
What kind of dumb question was that? Ramiel had tricked Jesse into coming back to the US, was the sole reason he had even met Ben and Claire, so of course he remembered him. Ben was stalling from revealing something unpleasant, and Jesse felt himself grow cold, goosebumps surfacing on his naked arms.
“Is that a trick question?”
“He said something about your mark, said it was some sort of placebo, working only because you wanted it to. I didn’t know if I should tell you, because it was helping you, and-”
“It’s useless?” Jesse’s ears were ringing and the world around him was losing color, a bit like when he was about to teleport. “You mean I have nothing- I’m out of control-”
“Jesse, hey, no.” Ben’s hands on both sides of his head hooked him back to reality. “Look at me. Look into my eyes.”
Jesse blinked until his vision cleared and all he could see were Ben’s brown eyes looking back at him worriedly.
“You’re not out of control, okay? Listen to me, you have something - it’s you, alright? The mark, it’s just a crutch - you can control your power, you have a hold on it. You just need-” Ben’s fingers buried deeper into Jesse’s hair, and the line of his mouth got soft and fond as he grazed his thumbnail against Jesse’s eyebrow. “Believe in yourself, you idiot.”
“Okay,” Jesse said, feeling a little out of breath. “Thanks. I-”
The door opened, and Ben and Jesse both startled and jerked apart. It was Claire, her hair wet from the shower and dripping on her shoulder, drawing darker crisscross patterns on her sweater. “Oh. Am I interrupting something?” she asked, arching an eyebrow. Her cheeks were a little pink, belying her apparent composure.
“No, we were-” Jesse said.
“You’re not, I was just-” Ben said at the same time, and they both broke off and chuckled, a little flustered.
It was strange to feel embarrassed that Claire had come in - it wasn’t like she hadn’t seen them in much more intimate positions - but some of the tension in the air had gone now and Jesse couldn’t help being a little disappointed. He put his shirt back on as casually as possible under the circumstances while Ben rose to his feet.
“Did you leave me any hot water, princess?” Jesse told Claire, trying to dissipate the awkwardness straining the atmosphere.
“Aren’t you capable of heating your own water?” she shot back and he laughed.
“Point.”
“It’s going to take Sam and Dean about 20 hours total to drive up to Alliance,” Ben said. “They’ll probably stop for the night, so they’ll arrive tomorrow evening. We’re not in a hurry.”
“Why do we have to wait for them?” Jesse asked. “The trail’s going to get cold. Why aren’t they flying to Alliance, anyway?”
“Oh, that. It’s just- Dean isn’t very fond of planes.”
Jesse snorted a laugh.
“What?”
“Nothing. Just trying to picture it.”
“They went on a plane once that got almost crashed by a demon,” Ben said, defensive; Jesse saw Claire contain a smile. “Anyway, your parents died a couple of days ago - one more day won’t make a big difference. We can go back to Long Beach, pack, call in sick at work, warn Blake and Katie we’re going to be gone for a few days. Dean told me he’d text me the name of the place where they stop tonight, so we could meet them there and discuss what we’re going to do.”
“He’s right,” Claire said. “It won’t do us any good to get into this headlong.”
I’m not asking you to get into anything! But with both of them looking at him like that - damn, there was no room for argument here, was there? Jesse sighed and ran a hand through his hair, which felt greasy. Time to jump under the water jet and forget everything.
“I’m gonna take a shower,” he said as a way of admitting defeat, and turned his back on Ben and Claire.
---
When Dean finally texted, they were all waiting in the living room at Ben’s place, their bags gathered in a pile and silence weighing heavily on them all. They’d called their respective jobs, Blake - Ben’s other best friend and former roommate, who also shared their kidnapping experience - had promised to water the plants or whatever, and now Ben was lying on the couch, bouncing a baseball against the wall, Claire was huddled on a chair reading on her tablet, and Jesse was pacing up and down, more than ready to get a move on. His fingers were itching for a smoke, but he wanted to be ready to leave at once.
The ringtone from Ben’s phone, announcing a text message, gathered everyone’s attention in a second.
“Is it Dean?” Jesse demanded, swallowing the space separating them in a couple of strides. “What does he say?”
“Dude,” Ben groused. “Give me time to read.”
The Winchesters had stopped at a motel in Springville, Utah. Jesse didn’t waste time taking them there, and to his credit Ben didn’t complain about the jump, even though he looked green around the edges when they materialized behind a bush by the motel sign - they’d found a picture on the Internet. The war counsel in Sam and Dean’s room was short and frustrating. Follow our lead, they told them; don’t do anything foolish, and Dean paired the warning with a glance reserved to Jesse.
Jesse, Ben, and Claire took one room with a king-sized bed. They didn’t sleep all in the same bed very often, because both Claire and Jesse were kind of claustrophobic sleepers and neither Ben’s nor Claire’s bed was really big enough for three if you didn’t want to snuggle all night. It earned them some odd looks from the motel clerk, but thankfully no comment. Ben and Claire offered Jesse the middle spot, but in spite of the comfortable space and even though the night before they’d slept tangled in each other with no space to breathe, Jesse couldn’t get any sleep the whole night, feeling trapped and stifled.
The next day they all packed into Dean’s monster car, with Dean in the driving seat and his brother riding shotgun while Jesse, Ben, and Claire crammed in the backseat. Ben seemed in love with the car. He sat in the middle and spent a good part of the trip leaning between the front seats, talking obscure car-speak with Dean.
Jesse wasn’t used to long hours in a car and soon enough he had trouble sitting still - knees bouncing, fingers drumming - and tried to kill time looking through the window at the passing scenery. He knew that they were getting close to Alliance when they entered the Sandhills with its undulating expanses of burned grass. The yellow-green stretches of soft hills, rolling as far as the eye could see like waves in a stormy sea, the cloud-studded sky - all of it hit Jesse with its aching familiarity and his heart felt like it’d grown ten sizes too big for his ribcage. Claire must have sensed something, because when her eyes met his over Ben’s bent back, she pressed her fingertips against her lips in a kiss and directed it to Jesse, a spontaneous but uncharacteristic gesture. It stirred something deep inside him, shaking him harder than any kiss she’d given him before. He sent her a wobbly smile and turned back to the window, focusing on the sandy roadsides patched with clumps of grass until he could see clearly again.
They entered Alliance just when the light was starting to dim, which was a chance because it stopped Jesse from looking at everything too closely and comparing it with his memories. The motel the Winchesters chose was almost the opposite side of the town from where he used to live, and he wondered if it was on purpose.
“Tomorrow, Sam and me will go talk to the police, and then ask ‘round the neighborhood,” Dean said, bag hanging from his shoulder and his hand on the doorknob to his room. His face was drawn, tired from the long drive. “You kids sit tight.”
“What can we do to help?” Ben asked eagerly, and Dean grimaced.
“There isn’t much you can do,” he started, but trailed off at Ben’s sour expression.
“You could go in and have a look at the crime scene,” Sam intervened, subtly shifting positions, probably so he could bodily get between Ben and Dean in case of an argument. “There are tests you can do to-”
“It was a demon,” Jesse said abruptly. “I already went there. I smelled it.”
“Smell?” Dean’s face scrunched up, but Sam sounded curious when he said, “Sulfur? Interesting.”
“Yeah, it’s downright fascinating,” Dean grumbled, and swiped a hand over his face with a hearty sigh. “Look, Ben, I know you want to help-”
“Why not operate a compromise?” Claire said. The brothers looked at her with varying combinations of wariness and curiosity. “Why don’t we ask around the neighborhood while you talk to the police? We’re probably too young to pass for law enforcement, but we could find another story for the neighbors.”
“What if the neighbors recognize him?” Dean asked, pointing a thumb at Jesse, but he didn’t sound completely opposed to the idea. Ben seemed to notice it too because he shot Claire a beaming smile of gratitude. “I’ve seen him when he was eleven, and I can tell you that he hasn’t changed so much that he’s impossible to place. A conversation is long enough to stir up some memories.”
“I can deal with that,” Jesse said. “I can make it so they can’t focus on me long enough to identify me.”
This was one of the few skills he possessed that he could actually say he mastered. As a scared kid lost in a foreign country he had made quite a use of it to escape unwanted attention, and sometimes to shoplift a bit too - not that he was going to admit that to a bunch of hunters, of course.
Sam and Dean exchanged a look: Sam raised an eyebrow, Dean lifted a shoulder, there were other minute signs involving mouths and eyes that Jesse couldn’t quite catch, but eventually they seemed to reach some kind of agreement, because Dean said, “Alright. We talk to the police, you talk to the neighbors, and we meet at noon to cross information.”
Jesse resisted breaking into a military salute. Ben had no such qualms and said, “Yes, sir,” which made Dean snort. “Don’t get cute, kiddo.”
The rooms they had booked were side-to-side. This time the clerk hadn’t seemed to give one flying fuck that Jesse, Ben, and Claire were evidently going to share. They said goodnight to Sam and Dean and didn’t have far to go to get to their own room. Jesse flopped on the bed and had a look around, having a feeling that they were going to be there a while. It seemed to be going for rustic bad taste: the bed took most of the space in one corner of the room, topped by the painting of a mountain landscape and framed with two nightstands of a dark-colored wood; two deep armchairs built out of pieces of unpolished woods, cushions decorated with ugly green and burgundy patterns, faced a stone fireplace, and were separated by a small pedestal table with twisted wrought iron legs; the upper part of the walls was painted yellow while the lower part was green, the separation made by a wallpaper border showing an odd collection of ducks, oil lamps, and clumps of nuts, and autumn leaves.
“Hey, look at that,” Ben said.
He was lying flat on his back, looking up at the ceiling. Jesse dropped back by his side and saw that the ceiling was adorned with a mirror right above the bed.
“What the hell?” said Jesse, and Claire raised her eyes too and frowned.
“Is it a rent-by-the-hour kinda place?” Ben said. “I’ve never been to one of those.”
“Never? Ben, you shame me.”
“We’re not having sex in this room,” Claire said.
“Aw,” Ben and Jesse chorused. They shifted on the gold and red paisley bedspread so as to face each other and Ben burst out laughing. The sound warmed the core of ice inside Jesse’s chest, just a little, and he smiled in response.
---
“This is a terrible, terrible thing.” Dona Saunders shook her head as she spoke. The movement didn’t disturb even one blond hair from her perfect perm. “Poor Jo. Poor Kate. You said that your mother…”
“Is - was - Jo’s second cousin, yes,” Ben said. “They hadn’t seen each other in more than twenty years, but my mom’s grand-mother - Jo’s grand-aunt - just died at 99, and Mom found pictures that she thought Jo could be interested in.” Ben bowed his head, the picture of despondency. “This is a moot point now, but since I’ve come all the way from Michigan, I thought I could at least get some answers on what happened.”
Claire, sitting next to Ben on a wide beige couch with curvy arms, took Ben’s hand and squeezed it sympathetically. Jesse was standing in a corner of the room by a heavy-set bookshelf and watched the scene with an outsider point of view. Dona Saunders, who had moved to the neighborhood a couple of years before Jesse ran away, had been the only one of his parents’ few neighbors to open her door. The others had remained resolutely closed, either because the people were not there, or because, with the violent crime that had taken place in their vicinity, they were now wary of strangers. Jesse was pretty sure that at one point he’d seen lacy curtains flutter at their knocking.
But Dona, sweet Dona who used to make cookies for Jesse and her daughter Lizzie when they came back from school, paid him ridiculously high fees to mow her lawn, always showed up to check on him when he was alone at the house - she didn’t hesitate and welcomed them like long-lost relatives, ate up the bullshit Claire and Ben spun for her with such ease that Jesse couldn’t help be amazed. Dona was sitting on a Victorian-styled chair that didn’t match the rest of the room - not that anything matched with anything, really - with her legs demurely pressed together and her hands joined in her lap. She didn’t seem to be aware he was there, although she had closed the door behind him when he’d entered.
“Of course you do, you poor thing,” Dona said, her carefully made-up eyes open wide. “Of course. How awful for you to do the trip and have to learn about that.”
Jesse repressed a snicker. Ben had her hook and sinker, oh yeah, and it was astonishing to see Ben, who usually tumbled around lies like a drunk, be so good at this role-playing thing.
“Do you know anything?” Claire asked softly, a twitch of her fingers on Ben’s the only sign of her growing impatience. “The police won’t talk to us.”
“Not much, unfortunately. This is a really strange matter, though. I mean, horrible, of course, but extremely odd too.”
Jesse frowned, and Ben asked, “What do you mean? How strange?”
“Well,” and Dona leaned forward, followed almost absent-mindedly by Ben and Claire, “I was the one who called the police. See, I was getting worried: I hadn’t seen Jo or Kate for more than a week. Their car was parked in the driveway, but they never left the house. I was out of town for a few days to see my sister, and when I came back Larry, my husband, told me he hadn’t seen them at all while I was gone. He didn’t think much of it, but then he’s always lived in his own world.”
Dona shook her head again, this time in fondness. The name Larry didn’t ring any bell to Jesse - from what he remembered, Dona had been divorced when he’d known her.
“What did you do then?” Ben pressed. “You called the police?”
“Not immediately, goodness no. I knocked on the door, and I walked around the house to check if I could see them through the windows. I was really more worried about carbon monoxide poisoning or something similar. I never thought-” She drew a deep breath then exhaled slowly through her mouth, like in some breathing exercise. “It’s when I saw the blood that I called the police. I couldn’t see the bodies, but there was a big pool of blood spreading from the fireplace to the couch.”
Ben and Claire both paled at that detail, and Jesse didn’t feel much better, the memory of the blood-soaked carpet in his parents’ living room making him faint and dizzy. He reached out to steady himself and almost knocked over a faux-Chinese porcelain vase perched on a phone stand. He muffled a curse and saw Ben wince. Claire tried to cover for it immediately with another question to Dona.
“Do you think they’ve been dead all that time?”
Dona’s face took on the color of milk, but she answered anyway, “I’m not sure, but… I don’t think so. The, the blood looked really bright. Fresh.”
Ben said something else but Jesse’s attention was drawn elsewhere: there was some movement at the top of the staircase occupying the back of the room, feet dancing behind the banister. As the person went down the stairs Jesse saw that it was a young woman about his age, dressed in jeans and a cropped flowery blouse, her long ginger hair floating at her back. Her sudden appearance jolted back a flow of memories in Jesse’s mind: this was Lizzie, Dona’s only child and the apple of her eyes, Jesse’s schoolmate and first crush, from an eternity ago.
“I heard noises coming from the Turners’,” she said once she reached the bottom of the stairs.
Dona’s face brightened when she saw her daughter, and she held out a hand to her. Lizzie took Dona’s fingers loosely and let her mother pull her to her side.
“This is my daughter, Lizzie,” Dona said. Ben and Claire nodded and murmured greetings. “What were you saying, my sweetheart? What did you hear?”
“Noises - it was when I came back for the weekend, and it was late at night, and really, I wasn’t sure what it was or that I hadn’t imagined the whole thing. But when I learned that the Turners were found dead I thought again about it, and I think that what I heard were sounds of struggle. And maybe a muffled scream.”
“Did you tell the police?” Claire asked.
“I’ve just came back, but I plan to, obviously,” Lizzie said somewhat haughtily, like she was offended by Claire questioning her. “But really, I think all this has something to do with Jesse.”
Jesse felt his heart miss a beat, suddenly convinced that she could see him and was directly addressing him - but Lizzie wasn’t looking anywhere in his direction and he relaxed after a moment. Ben and Claire, for their parts, behaved like fucking pros, not even flinching and keeping their composure.
“Jesse?” Ben said, the quizzical look on his face so convincing that Jesse could have kissed him. “Oh - isn’t that the Turners’ son who went missing?”
“Yes,” Lizzie said, and Jesse didn’t know why he was surprised by the fleeting look of sadness on her face; in truth, he hadn’t ever really given a thought about how his going missing could have impacted people other than his parents. “They never found him. They never even found anyone who’d seen him. If he’d run away, someone would have seen him, so he must have been taken by someone… ill-intended.” The word sounded odd in her young mouth. “And now, this. How many times can the same people be involved in a criminal case?”
“So you think that… Jesse Turner was kidnapped, and that the kidnapper - what, came back and killed his parents?”
Lizzie tweaked her mouth, her distaste of Ben’s skeptical tone obvious. “This is as likely as anything. Who else would’ve wanted to kill the Turners?”
---
“Soooo- that was kind of exciting, right?” Ben said, almost bouncing as they walked away from Dona’s house. It was mild enough outside that Jesse was merely wearing a t-shirt, although Ben and Claire had still opted for jackets. “My heart was beating a mile a minute, and when that chick said your name, Jess - man, I thought I was going to have a stroke.”
“You were awesome,” Jesse said, smiling fondly. “Both of you - you looked like you’d done this all your lives.”
“I know, right?” Ben enthused, spinning round to face Claire. “Don’t you agree?”
“I found it a little uncomfortable,” Claire said, and Ben’s smile lost some its radiance.
“Well, yeah-” He lowered his voice, mindful of the young mother pushing a stroller a few yards up the road. “But we didn’t have any bad intentions. We actually want to know what happened to the Turners. And it was useful, too - now we know that they hadn’t left their house in days; something has to be up with that.”
“I’m a little more worried about what Lizzie Saunders said,” Claire said in the same tone. “If she tells the police her suspicions that the Turners’ deaths have something to do with Jesse going missing, it could be problematic for us.”
“Yeah, but are they going to believe her? It seems a little far-fetched.”
“It’s not,” Jesse said in a normal voice. Ben and Claire’s eyes immediately swung to him. “If a demon killed my parents,” he explained more quietly, walking a little ahead of them with his hands in his pockets, head hung low, “odds are that it has something to do with me. Lizzie’s right on that point: what are the chances that they attracted the attention of a random demon, with absolutely no relation to the fact that I’m their son?”
“Jesse,” Ben said in a subdued voice. “You know that it’s not your fault, right?”
“Mm. Yeah, I know.”
Jesse focused on the cracks scarring the road, where age, bad weather, and neglect had damaged the asphalt. It was his fault, no matter what Ben said. He wasn’t going to endlessly tear himself up over that because there wasn’t anything he could do about it now, but the fact remained that everything horrible about his parents’ lives had been because of him. At the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse of something black, and he stopped and watched the Impala creep up the road like a monstrous beetle.
“Here they are,” he heard Claire murmur.
The Impala ground to a halt and Jesse, Ben, and Claire climbed into the backseat. Dean and Sam both wore dark suits that gave them the looks of undertakers. The door squeaked as it closed, and Dean said, “Learn anything?”
“Only one of the neighbors accepted to talk to us, but she’s the one who called the cops,” Ben said, wedging himself between the front seats. “She said that the Turners hadn’t come out of their house for at least a week, and her daughter said that she heard the sounds of a struggle.”
“That’s consistent with what the police told us,” Sam said, and Jesse expected him to go into more details about what the police had said, but he went quiet.
“What is it?” Jesse asked after a moment.
He was sitting directly behind Sam so he had to twist to the side, almost ending in Ben’s lap, to have a look at his face. The line of Sam’s jaw was tightly set.
“All evidence points to your dad slitting your mom’s throat,” Dean said in a bored voice, eyes fixed on the road. “And then his own.”
“So my dad was the one possessed. What else did you find out?” This time Dean’s eyes flicked to his brother, silently checking in with him, and Jesse fought off annoyance. “You don’t have to spare my feelings, you know. Spit it out.”
“There were… marks on your mother’s body,” Sam said reluctantly. “Signs of torture.”
“Torture?” Jesse thought he felt Ben’s touch on his wrist but everything seemed very far away. “For a week?”
“Probably,” Dean said. “The demon wanted something from her - from them.”
“It wants me, obviously,” Jesse said absently. “It thought my parents knew where I am. Good thing they didn’t.”
His thoughts and feelings were in turmoil, flashes of pain, blood, sulfur, wet grass mixed with memories of his parents, and the urge to jump anywhere but here was so strong he had to bite the inside of his cheek to resist it. He looked through the window to distract himself - there was Dona Saunders’ house again, painted a prim yellow with just a purple band in the trim, with its double pane windows and its red brick walkway. “Wait - did you drive around the block?”
“Yeah,” Dean said nonchalantly. “I wanted to check on something. Here, look over there.”
Jesse followed his look and saw a woman across the road from his parents’ house, standing pressed against a utility pole in what looked like a completely pointless attempt to hide. Everything about her radiated nervousness: the way she huddled in on herself, the broad sunglasses she wore, the way her head jerked right and left like she was on the lookout for something. She saw the Impala approach and froze up.
“I saw her when we drove by the first time,” Dean said. “She was looking at your parents’ house.”
“She looks familiar,” Sam said, peering through the window. “Could it be- Oh, fuck.”
Instead of running away the woman trotted up to the car, and Dean pulled up while Sam rolled down the window.
“I thought it was you,” she said breathlessly.
The brothers shared a look and got out of the car as one. Jesse pushed the door open on his side, an ominous feeling nagging at him, and Ben and Claire shuffled after him.
“Hey,” Jesse heard Sam say. “What are you-”
“I heard about- I wanted to check-” the woman said hurriedly in a hushed voice. “I should have known you would come.”
“Julia,” Dean said in a warning voice. “We-”
Jesse saw the moment the woman - Julia - caught sight of them. Her mouth opened slightly, her hand went to close the collar of her trench coat in a protective gesture. “Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t-”
“Julia,” Sam said very softly, like talking to a small kid. “This is Jesse. Jesse, this is Julia Wright.”
The woman’s head whipped to look at him, and even if Jesse couldn’t see her eyes it was obvious that his name had the effect of a bomb on her. The hand closing her coat started to shake and the line of her shoulders was taut.
“Jesse? How?”
“The same reason you’re here,” Sam said. “Jesse wants to know what happened to his parents.”
Jesse looked at the woman, really looked at her, her blond hair mingled with gray, the hard lines at the corner of her mouth, the slightly prominent nose, and it struck him all of a sudden that the feeling he’d had since he’d seen her was familiarity. He’d met her before, he’d seen her in his house with the black eyes of a demon, talking to him about lies and power.
“Your birth mother?” Ben said, obviously following the same trail of thought.
Jesse and his birth mother stood there gaping at each other while a wind of awkwardness blew over the group. Dean shifted from one foot to another, cleared his throat noisily and said, “Maybe we should let you two catch up.”
Julia turned to him in alarm and Sam added soothingly, “We’ll be right there in the car.”
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Jesse said, and he’d meant to sound reassuring but it came out wounded.
“No, of course not. I know that.” It would’ve been more convincing if her voice wasn’t quaking.
The Winchesters went back to the car, but Ben and Claire trailed behind, looking uncertainly at Jesse.
“Are you sure?” Ben said.
“I’ll be fine.”
Claire took his hand and gave it a hard squeeze, and they both joined the Winchesters in the Impala, leaving Jesse and Julia in apparent privacy. Julia pressed her lips together in a pale thin line and took off her sunglasses. Jesse leaned against the picket fence that delimitated the field behind him and examined his biological mother. She had a lined, weary face, and eyes so clear they looked washed out. Jesse couldn’t see anything of himself in her - not his hair, not his skin tone, not his eyes, not his nose - and he had that chilling thought: where did he get all his features from?
“Your friends seem nice,” Julia said after a silence, her voice hoarse.
“Yeah. They are.”
“Good, that’s good.” She looked him over with too bright eyes and lifted a hand to briefly touch his face. Her fingers were cold and clammy. “You’re a handsome boy. You were a lovely child too.”
It took Jesse a few seconds to get the implications of her words. “You remember that?”
“Yes, oh yes.” Her mouth trembled. “The demon, it liked to let me be aware of what was happening. It especially wanted me to see you - our accomplishment. This is what it called you. Our, like it was something we’d decided together. It was so proud of you.”
It was so absurd that Jesse wanted to laugh. How nice to know that his father - progenitor, whatever - was proud of him. Although it probably wasn’t so happy with Jesse’s refusal to take over the family business of maiming, killing, and bringing on the Apocalypse.
“Thanks for the confidence builder, I guess,” he mumbled, then said in a louder voice, “Why did you come here? How did you know about what happened?”
She flinched a little, even though Jesse didn’t think he’d sounded accusing or threatening. “I’ve known where you lived since Sam and Dean told me.”
“They did?”
“Yes, they came to my house, years ago, and asked me questions about you. That’s when they told me your name and where you lived, so I… kept myself updated. I knew you’d gone missing so I kept an eye on Alliance to see if you ever came back. That’s how I knew that your parents had died.”
Jesse wondered if she’d thought, was still thinking maybe, that he was the one who’d done it. He didn’t dare to ask.
“I wanted to know more about what happened. I’ve had…” Her blue eyes clouded over. “I’ve had some horrible dreams lately, and I was scared… I’m tired of always being scared.”
“I’m sorry,” Jesse said impulsively, and for the first time she smiled at him, the ghost of a smile.
“For what? You didn’t do anything beside be born. I gave you up. I wish I could say I would do it differently if I had the choice all over again, but I, I couldn’t have been a good mother to you.”
“No, it’s fine, my parents were fine. They loved me like their own.”
“I’m glad.”
A gust of wind ruffled their hair and Julia closed her eyes, just when Jesse thought he could see tears in them. “I’m sorry for your loss,” she said, a little off-beat, like the thought of condolences had just occurred to her.
A sharp bit of fresh pain stabbed him in the chest. “Thanks.”
“But tell me about you,” she said, brushing hair off her face. “You ran away from Alliance, right? Where did you go? Where do you live now?”
“I was, um,” he coughed, “in Australia for a while. I came back to the US a few months ago, and now I live in California and I, uh, work in a restaurant.”
It was a little pitiful to hear his life be summed up like that but he didn’t know what to say, torn up between the need to show her that he was normal, that he wasn’t a fuck-up, that he wasn’t a destructive force of evil, and an obscure reluctance to share more of his life with her. She was, after all, no more than a stranger. She’d signed herself out of his life.
“And do you- do you have a girlfriend? Oh.” Her eyes flicked to the car. “That young woman. Is she?”
“Claire?” Jesse instinctively turned to the Impala, where Sam and Dean looked engrossed in their conversation, and Claire and Ben were almost pressed to the window, watching in Jesse and Julia’s direction. “Yeah, we’re together.”
Julia seemed sincerely pleased at this and Jesse felt an absurd amount of validation over her reaction. It was only once he was back in the car, and Julia was chatting with Sam and Dean up at the driver’s window, giving them the address of the motel she was staying in, that Jesse realized that he’d let her have the wrong impression.
“How did it go?” Ben said to his ear when the Impala started up and drove away from the Turners’ house.
Jesse fought a swell of guilt. “Good, I guess. Awkward as fuck. She asked me about my life. She understood that Claire and me were an item, but I didn’t,” he lowered his voice to a shamed murmur, “I didn’t explain things further.”
“What do you mean you didn’t- oh, right.” Ben rested a hand on Jesse’s knee. “It’s fine, man. She doesn’t need to know every single detail of your sex life.”
“And we won’t probably see much of her, so it’s not like it’s going to come up a lot.”
“Exactly. Don’t worry about it.”
Ben’s hand remained on his knee for the whole trip back to the motel.
Part three