Heart's Desire - Chapter 3
Fandom: Supernatural
Title: Heart’s Desire
Chapter: 3/24
Rating: Teen and Up Audiences
Author's Notes: Thanks to VegasGranny and Ncsupnatfan for pre-reading.
Summary: Jack wants to help Sam after overhearing a nightmare which results in a rift being opened. Jessica is brought from a world in which Lilith was never killed and now she and the demons reign while they work to break Sam in Hell. Unable to leave her to that life and pain, Sam and his family go to her world to save it.
Chapter Three
Sam was in the kitchen, mixing the batter for the pancakes and grumbling to himself. Dean had more than enough time to finish in the bathroom and should have arrived to cook his bacon by now if Jack had passed on the message. Sam wasn’t going to do it for him, and he wasn’t going to put up with Dean’s moans if there wasn’t any for him to pile on his plate. He was tired and grumpy after the hellish night and unwilling to cater to his brother.
He set down the bowl and made his way to out of the kitchen to look for him. He was almost in the library when he heard Dean’s strained voice. He hurried in and saw the strange scene.
Dean and Jack were facing him, confusion on Jack’s face and strain on Dean’s that became horror when he saw Sam. Opposite them, her back to Sam, was a woman wielding the long sword Dean had once tested his skills with and cut himself. She was swinging it around, and the sight of it so close to his brother made Sam gasp and start edging towards the cabinet where they kept some of their weapons.
“Who’s that?”
Sam froze as he felt the blood drain from his face, and his hands shook as one pressed to the sudden aching in his chest, feeling his racing heart, and the other reached for her unconsciously. He knew that voice. He dreamed of that voice in the seemingly endless years since he’d last heard it.
“Jess?”
The sword clattered to the floor and she turned slowly to face him.
His racing heart seemed to stop. It was really her. She was different, older, but it was the woman he loved. It was Jessica.
His head swam and he thought his legs were going to give way.
Dean started towards him but Jessica was moving, too. Her eyes blazed with emotion he couldn’t define she passed Dean who shouted a warning, and then she was there.
In that moment, Sam didn’t care if she was coming to kill him, if she was some monster sent to torment and end him or maybe drive him mad with longing. He just knew that her face was going to be the last thing he saw and he wanted nothing more.
His name ripped from her and his arms flew out and caught he as she collided with him.
She clung to him with surprising strength, speaking words of shock and love that blurred into one another and he was doing the same. He clutched her like she was all that held him to the earth, and when she pulled back to look at him, he stopped both of their words with a searing kiss. She returned it with passion and they only broke apart to gasp air into their lungs and resume.
Dean cleared his throat but Sam ignored him. For him, all that mattered was Jessica. She overwhelmed him in every way, eclipsed everything else. She felt familiar and wrong at the same time. Where she had been soft to hold before, where he’d had to be gentle, she was now firm with muscle and holding him with as much strength as he was allowing himself to hold her.
They parted again and Sam started to cry, heaving sobs that shook him. She was crying, too, silent tears that slipped down her cheeks, and she wiped at his as he wiped at hers.
“I can’t believe it,” he breathed. “How did this happen? How are you here?” He kissed her again. “How can you be…”
“Jack,” Dean said, striding towards them, and Sam understood at last.
“I was trying to help,” Jack said a little defensively. “I did help. Sam is happy now.”
Sam stared at Jessica for another moment, seeing the other changes in her that he’d missed before: the hardness of a warrior in her eyes, the scar on her cheek.
He stared into her eyes and then kissed the scar. She was still his, no matter how she looked, no matter what world she had come from.
She smiled blissfully and said, “How did you get free?”
Sam’s exhilaration faded and he forced himself to say what he needed to. “I’m not your Sam, and you’re not my Jess. You’re from a different world.” He looked at Dean. “Right?”
“You want to tell him, Jack?” Dean asked.
“She came through a rift,” Jack stated, his satisfaction obvious. “I brought her to you.”
“Maybe we should sit,” Dean said. “And we’re going to need to do checks. No offense, Jess, but we’ve got to be sure.”
She nodded. “Yeah, me too.”
“I’ll get the kit,” Dean said, going to the cabinet and pulling out a leather bag that Sam knew contained a flask of holy water and a silver knife. He carried it back to them and set it down on the table. “Line up.”
He took the silver knife from the bag and rolled up his sleeve then cut across his forearm. Jessica watched carefully and then took the knife from him and pulled up the sleeve of her hoodie and cut across her own arm.
Sam hadn’t expected a reaction, he knew Jessica was real as he felt it in his heart, but he didn’t see the same surety in her eyes and he cut his arm and handed the knife to Jack then received the flask of holy water Dean had just drunk from and took a swig on it. Jessica watched carefully, a smile breaking over her face as she watched him lower the flask.
“It’s really you,” she breathed.
Sam nodded. “And it’s you. But…”
“But not quite,” Dean said then raised his voice. “Castiel, we’ve got a bit of a situation going on that you might want to be here for.”
“Castiel is here?” Jessica asked.
“You have Cas in your world, too?” Dean asked.
“Yeah. He’s been with us since John got back from Hell.”
Dean’s eyes widened. “Hold up! Dad’s alive?”
“Of course,” she said. “He brought John back after he made the deal to save Sam. He’s been with us ever since.” She looked aghast. “He’s not alive here?”
“Not for a while,” Dean said. “At least not really. We had him for… It doesn’t matter. Our worlds are obviously very different. You’ve still got Lilith, right?”
Her face fell and her hand crept into Sam’s. “Yes.”
“Let’s sit and talk,” Dean suggested, he looked up as someone hammered on the front door. “Jack, can you let Cas in?”
Jack hurried out of the room and up the stairs to the door as Sam and Jessica took his seat. Sam gave her space, not wanting to crowd this version of this woman he loved now that the initial shock and lack of caution of their reunion had passed, but she shifted her chair close to his and looped her arm through his, linking their hands on his lap.
Sam relished the contact. He could feel the tightness in his chest that had been there since the nightmares had started days ago begin to fade and finally be replaced with something that made drawing a breath feel like a joy instead of just a necessity.
Dean gave them a wary look and then pulled out his own chair as Castiel and Jack came into the room. Jack moved to Dean’s side and sat down, his face satisfied as he looked at Sam and Jessica pressed close together.
Castiel stopped dead in front of them and whispered, “Jessica Moore…”
“Hey, Cas,” she said. “What’s with the coat. It’s different.”
Castiel looked startled and plucked at the front of his coat. “I was forced to choose between hydration and laundry when I was first human. I chose right.”
“Human!” Jessica looked at Sam and he nodded. “You’re human?”
“No, I retrieved my own grace eventually. I am an angel again. How are you here?” His eyes drifted to Jack and he said, “What did you do?”
“I helped,” Jack said defensively. “Didn’t I, Sam?”
Sam squeezed Jessica’s hand and answered Jack without looking at him. “Yes, Jack.”
“How did you do it?” Jessica asked. “I was just in my motel when this crazy gold light appeared. I tried to get away from it, but it dragged me through.”
“It was a rift between worlds,” Castiel said. “There are endless worlds that follow a different path. The birth of two men that didn’t happen allowed an apocalypse to reign in one that we visited.”
Jessica gasped. “The apocalypse happened there?”
Dean nodded. “We finally stopped it, but, yeah, it happened. Didn’t it happen in your world?”
Jessica shook her head jerkily. “No. We stopped it before it he could be freed, but…” She looked at Sam and a tear slipped down her cheek that Sam wiped away.
“I died, didn’t I?” He was sure it was the truth. The only thing that could have stopped an apocalypse was if he wasn’t there to kill Lilith, as any form of him that lived would have done it.
A haunted expression came to Jessica and she leaned towards him, as if there was a magnetic pull between them, as she answered. “No, what happened to you was worse than dying. Lilith took you. I haven’t seen you in over ten years. We believe you’re in Hell.”
Dean sucked in a sharp breath and Sam tried to remember how to draw his own. Hell. Ten years of Hell. The eighteen months of the Cage had destroyed him. He didn’t want to think of what ten years could do or equate how many years that amounted to in Hell time.
“Sammy,” Dean breathed, looking stricken.
“It wasn’t me,” Sam reminded him, forcing a smile. “I’m fine.”
Jessica was watching Dean with a strange look on her face. “Now you look like my Dean,” she said. “Even with both eyes.”
“He lost an eye!” Sam said, his voice catching.
“Perhaps we should start at the beginning,” Castiel suggested. “Jessica, how did you survive Brady’s attack.”
“Brady?” she asked.
“Perhaps he wasn’t sent to kill you,” Castiel said. “In our world, you were killed on Azazel’s orders by a demon that was possessing Brady.”
Jessica looked stunned. “Brady’s a demon? He’s with us, on our side. He has been for years; ever since the siege of California eight years ago.”
“Yeah, he’s probably possessed,” Dean said. “But how did you survive? Did a demon come for you?”
“Yes. Sam saw him coming though, in his vision dreams, and you and John came for us. We went on the road and protected ourselves.”
Sam flinched. In her world, he had been a better man. In his world, he had as good as killed her himself.
“Makes sense,” Dean said thoughtfully, staring across the room. “Brady said they killed her because you were turning into a civilian. If you and Jess started hunting together, they would have gotten what they wanted. But you still have Lilith in your world, Jess? She was never killed?”
She looked aghast and her voice was so low Sam thought she was talking to herself. “She died here, of course, yes. The apocalypse…”
“It raged for a year before Dean and Sam stopped it,” Castiel said.
“Since we all stopped it,” Sam said pointedly. “None of it could have happened without you and Bobby on our side.”
Jessica was looking around the library, her eyes wide and confused. “So this is some kind of bunker that protects you from the word?”
“Technically, it protects us from everything. Well mostly,” Dean amended. “But our world is okay. Yeah, we’ve got crazy monsters and we’ve had much worse, but it’s still keeping on. Things are mostly normal.”
“That’s crazy,” Jessica breathed. “We always thought it would be worse. Maybe if we had let him…” She shook her head. “Cliff notes: Sam and I joined Dean and John on the road and we hunted Azazel together. After Sam was killed in Cold Oak, John made a deal for his life and had a year. Azazel was killed by Dean and we spent the year trying to break the deal, but we couldn’t do it; not even with Sam training his powers.”
“Sam was training!” Dean said, his voice close to a shout. “You let him do that?”
“Dean!” Sam snapped. “Calm down.”
Jessica looked puzzled by Dean’s reaction. “It was the only chance we had of saving John.”
Sam understood, even if Dean didn’t. Dean had never wanted Ruby to help him with his powers in the year running down to the deal, but that had been about saving him. If it was to save their father, there was nothing Dean wouldn’t do. How John had been persuaded when he had feared Sam’s fate enough to instruct Dean to kill him, he didn’t know, but he could see how it would happen.
Dean waved a hand and said, “Sure, okay, keep going.”
Jessica nodded. “John was in hell four months before Castiel and his garrison got him out, and before we knew it, Lilith was breaking the seals. Sam was still training to stop her, though it was different then as we were trying to stop him in the end instead of encouraging because of the…” She shot Sam an apologetic look.
“The blood,” Sam said. “Yeah. Me too.”
“We didn’t know until it was too late,” Jessica said. “And we tried to stop him, but he got free and went after Lilith. Cas found out Heaven’s plan and got us to Sam before he could kill her. When we heard what would happen, we stopped him, but Lilith wasn’t happy. Dean lost his eye that day and Sam was taken.” She stared into Sam’s eyes as she finished, her face haunted with pain. “None of us have seen him since.”
Sam pressed his lips to her forehead and whispered. “I’m sorry.”
She leaned into his kiss, her hand settling on his chest right over his heart, and they stayed like that for what felt like a long time, just feeling the presence of each other.
When they broke apart, she asked, “But you killed her here?”
“Yeah, and she’s not the only one,” Sam said, staring into her eyes and trying to prepare himself to share his shame. “I killed you, too.”
“Sam,” Dean growled. “It wasn’t like that, dammit.”
“No. I did,” Sam said, and then addressed Jessica who was leaning away from him, her eyes fixed on his face and her lips a thin line. “I had the dreams of your death, but I didn’t do anything. I thought they were just dreams. I was trying so hard to…” He shook his head brutally. “I let you die because I wanted to pretend I was normal. I told myself they were just dreams. The anniversary of Mom’s death was coming up and I’d been thinking about her a lot. I heard everything about Mom’s death from Dad when he was loaded. I thought that was it, but I should have known better. I let my Jessica die.”
She considered him for a long time, staring into his eyes and making him want to squirm, and then she said, “It makes sense. You didn’t want to believe it in my world either. I think it was because I was worried and spoke to John and Dean that you told us in the end. They got the story out of you and saw the real danger.”
“Me and Dad knew you?” Dean asked.
Jessica frowned. “Well, yeah. I met them not long after me and Sam got together. Didn’t you meet me in this world?”
“Not properly,” Dean said. “I hadn’t seen Sam properly for years until a few days before you died when Dad disappeared. Things went bad when Sam said he was going to college. He and Dad had a fight and I didn’t’ exactly step up. It was a nightmare.”
Jessica looked almost angry for a moment before she shook it off and said, “This world is so different.”
“Your world sounds crazy,” Jack said. “Like the apocalypse world Mary and I were in.”
Jessica’s eyes snapped to him. “Mary’s alive? How?”
Dean leaned back in his chair and raked a hand over his face. “That’s another long story.” He sighed. “And we’ll get to it, but I need a break from the crazy. Sammy, you still up for breakfast?”
Sam shook his head, his eyes fixed on Jessica. “No, not anymore. I want to just…”
Jessica nodded. “Me, too. Is there somewhere safe we can go?”
“Pretty much everywhere is safe,” Dean said. “But yeah, you can have the room. We’ll go fix our own breakfast. Come on, Jack, you can fry the bacon. Cas, you can make the coffee.”
As they got to their feet and wandered from the room, Jessica said, “Is there somewhere we can really be alone?”
“My room,” Sam said, getting to his feet and holding her hand as she rose. “We can talk there.”
She beamed at him. “Perfect.”
Sam put his arm around her, allowing himself to luxuriate in the exhilaration of touching her, and led her to his room. Perhaps they would talk. Perhaps they wouldn’t. Sam thought he would be happy to just sit and stare at her forever, but a part of him, the smallest, selfless part of him, whispered that he couldn’t have forever, his time was limited.
Their world was safe now but hers wasn’t, and they were going to have to fix that. Sam had a responsibility to the version that had spent over a decade in hell.
He was going to have to let Jessica go again to save his other self.
Title: Heart’s Desire
Chapter: 3/24
Rating: Teen and Up Audiences
Author's Notes: Thanks to VegasGranny and Ncsupnatfan for pre-reading.
Summary: Jack wants to help Sam after overhearing a nightmare which results in a rift being opened. Jessica is brought from a world in which Lilith was never killed and now she and the demons reign while they work to break Sam in Hell. Unable to leave her to that life and pain, Sam and his family go to her world to save it.
Chapter Three
Sam was in the kitchen, mixing the batter for the pancakes and grumbling to himself. Dean had more than enough time to finish in the bathroom and should have arrived to cook his bacon by now if Jack had passed on the message. Sam wasn’t going to do it for him, and he wasn’t going to put up with Dean’s moans if there wasn’t any for him to pile on his plate. He was tired and grumpy after the hellish night and unwilling to cater to his brother.
He set down the bowl and made his way to out of the kitchen to look for him. He was almost in the library when he heard Dean’s strained voice. He hurried in and saw the strange scene.
Dean and Jack were facing him, confusion on Jack’s face and strain on Dean’s that became horror when he saw Sam. Opposite them, her back to Sam, was a woman wielding the long sword Dean had once tested his skills with and cut himself. She was swinging it around, and the sight of it so close to his brother made Sam gasp and start edging towards the cabinet where they kept some of their weapons.
“Who’s that?”
Sam froze as he felt the blood drain from his face, and his hands shook as one pressed to the sudden aching in his chest, feeling his racing heart, and the other reached for her unconsciously. He knew that voice. He dreamed of that voice in the seemingly endless years since he’d last heard it.
“Jess?”
The sword clattered to the floor and she turned slowly to face him.
His racing heart seemed to stop. It was really her. She was different, older, but it was the woman he loved. It was Jessica.
His head swam and he thought his legs were going to give way.
Dean started towards him but Jessica was moving, too. Her eyes blazed with emotion he couldn’t define she passed Dean who shouted a warning, and then she was there.
In that moment, Sam didn’t care if she was coming to kill him, if she was some monster sent to torment and end him or maybe drive him mad with longing. He just knew that her face was going to be the last thing he saw and he wanted nothing more.
His name ripped from her and his arms flew out and caught he as she collided with him.
She clung to him with surprising strength, speaking words of shock and love that blurred into one another and he was doing the same. He clutched her like she was all that held him to the earth, and when she pulled back to look at him, he stopped both of their words with a searing kiss. She returned it with passion and they only broke apart to gasp air into their lungs and resume.
Dean cleared his throat but Sam ignored him. For him, all that mattered was Jessica. She overwhelmed him in every way, eclipsed everything else. She felt familiar and wrong at the same time. Where she had been soft to hold before, where he’d had to be gentle, she was now firm with muscle and holding him with as much strength as he was allowing himself to hold her.
They parted again and Sam started to cry, heaving sobs that shook him. She was crying, too, silent tears that slipped down her cheeks, and she wiped at his as he wiped at hers.
“I can’t believe it,” he breathed. “How did this happen? How are you here?” He kissed her again. “How can you be…”
“Jack,” Dean said, striding towards them, and Sam understood at last.
“I was trying to help,” Jack said a little defensively. “I did help. Sam is happy now.”
Sam stared at Jessica for another moment, seeing the other changes in her that he’d missed before: the hardness of a warrior in her eyes, the scar on her cheek.
He stared into her eyes and then kissed the scar. She was still his, no matter how she looked, no matter what world she had come from.
She smiled blissfully and said, “How did you get free?”
Sam’s exhilaration faded and he forced himself to say what he needed to. “I’m not your Sam, and you’re not my Jess. You’re from a different world.” He looked at Dean. “Right?”
“You want to tell him, Jack?” Dean asked.
“She came through a rift,” Jack stated, his satisfaction obvious. “I brought her to you.”
“Maybe we should sit,” Dean said. “And we’re going to need to do checks. No offense, Jess, but we’ve got to be sure.”
She nodded. “Yeah, me too.”
“I’ll get the kit,” Dean said, going to the cabinet and pulling out a leather bag that Sam knew contained a flask of holy water and a silver knife. He carried it back to them and set it down on the table. “Line up.”
He took the silver knife from the bag and rolled up his sleeve then cut across his forearm. Jessica watched carefully and then took the knife from him and pulled up the sleeve of her hoodie and cut across her own arm.
Sam hadn’t expected a reaction, he knew Jessica was real as he felt it in his heart, but he didn’t see the same surety in her eyes and he cut his arm and handed the knife to Jack then received the flask of holy water Dean had just drunk from and took a swig on it. Jessica watched carefully, a smile breaking over her face as she watched him lower the flask.
“It’s really you,” she breathed.
Sam nodded. “And it’s you. But…”
“But not quite,” Dean said then raised his voice. “Castiel, we’ve got a bit of a situation going on that you might want to be here for.”
“Castiel is here?” Jessica asked.
“You have Cas in your world, too?” Dean asked.
“Yeah. He’s been with us since John got back from Hell.”
Dean’s eyes widened. “Hold up! Dad’s alive?”
“Of course,” she said. “He brought John back after he made the deal to save Sam. He’s been with us ever since.” She looked aghast. “He’s not alive here?”
“Not for a while,” Dean said. “At least not really. We had him for… It doesn’t matter. Our worlds are obviously very different. You’ve still got Lilith, right?”
Her face fell and her hand crept into Sam’s. “Yes.”
“Let’s sit and talk,” Dean suggested, he looked up as someone hammered on the front door. “Jack, can you let Cas in?”
Jack hurried out of the room and up the stairs to the door as Sam and Jessica took his seat. Sam gave her space, not wanting to crowd this version of this woman he loved now that the initial shock and lack of caution of their reunion had passed, but she shifted her chair close to his and looped her arm through his, linking their hands on his lap.
Sam relished the contact. He could feel the tightness in his chest that had been there since the nightmares had started days ago begin to fade and finally be replaced with something that made drawing a breath feel like a joy instead of just a necessity.
Dean gave them a wary look and then pulled out his own chair as Castiel and Jack came into the room. Jack moved to Dean’s side and sat down, his face satisfied as he looked at Sam and Jessica pressed close together.
Castiel stopped dead in front of them and whispered, “Jessica Moore…”
“Hey, Cas,” she said. “What’s with the coat. It’s different.”
Castiel looked startled and plucked at the front of his coat. “I was forced to choose between hydration and laundry when I was first human. I chose right.”
“Human!” Jessica looked at Sam and he nodded. “You’re human?”
“No, I retrieved my own grace eventually. I am an angel again. How are you here?” His eyes drifted to Jack and he said, “What did you do?”
“I helped,” Jack said defensively. “Didn’t I, Sam?”
Sam squeezed Jessica’s hand and answered Jack without looking at him. “Yes, Jack.”
“How did you do it?” Jessica asked. “I was just in my motel when this crazy gold light appeared. I tried to get away from it, but it dragged me through.”
“It was a rift between worlds,” Castiel said. “There are endless worlds that follow a different path. The birth of two men that didn’t happen allowed an apocalypse to reign in one that we visited.”
Jessica gasped. “The apocalypse happened there?”
Dean nodded. “We finally stopped it, but, yeah, it happened. Didn’t it happen in your world?”
Jessica shook her head jerkily. “No. We stopped it before it he could be freed, but…” She looked at Sam and a tear slipped down her cheek that Sam wiped away.
“I died, didn’t I?” He was sure it was the truth. The only thing that could have stopped an apocalypse was if he wasn’t there to kill Lilith, as any form of him that lived would have done it.
A haunted expression came to Jessica and she leaned towards him, as if there was a magnetic pull between them, as she answered. “No, what happened to you was worse than dying. Lilith took you. I haven’t seen you in over ten years. We believe you’re in Hell.”
Dean sucked in a sharp breath and Sam tried to remember how to draw his own. Hell. Ten years of Hell. The eighteen months of the Cage had destroyed him. He didn’t want to think of what ten years could do or equate how many years that amounted to in Hell time.
“Sammy,” Dean breathed, looking stricken.
“It wasn’t me,” Sam reminded him, forcing a smile. “I’m fine.”
Jessica was watching Dean with a strange look on her face. “Now you look like my Dean,” she said. “Even with both eyes.”
“He lost an eye!” Sam said, his voice catching.
“Perhaps we should start at the beginning,” Castiel suggested. “Jessica, how did you survive Brady’s attack.”
“Brady?” she asked.
“Perhaps he wasn’t sent to kill you,” Castiel said. “In our world, you were killed on Azazel’s orders by a demon that was possessing Brady.”
Jessica looked stunned. “Brady’s a demon? He’s with us, on our side. He has been for years; ever since the siege of California eight years ago.”
“Yeah, he’s probably possessed,” Dean said. “But how did you survive? Did a demon come for you?”
“Yes. Sam saw him coming though, in his vision dreams, and you and John came for us. We went on the road and protected ourselves.”
Sam flinched. In her world, he had been a better man. In his world, he had as good as killed her himself.
“Makes sense,” Dean said thoughtfully, staring across the room. “Brady said they killed her because you were turning into a civilian. If you and Jess started hunting together, they would have gotten what they wanted. But you still have Lilith in your world, Jess? She was never killed?”
She looked aghast and her voice was so low Sam thought she was talking to herself. “She died here, of course, yes. The apocalypse…”
“It raged for a year before Dean and Sam stopped it,” Castiel said.
“Since we all stopped it,” Sam said pointedly. “None of it could have happened without you and Bobby on our side.”
Jessica was looking around the library, her eyes wide and confused. “So this is some kind of bunker that protects you from the word?”
“Technically, it protects us from everything. Well mostly,” Dean amended. “But our world is okay. Yeah, we’ve got crazy monsters and we’ve had much worse, but it’s still keeping on. Things are mostly normal.”
“That’s crazy,” Jessica breathed. “We always thought it would be worse. Maybe if we had let him…” She shook her head. “Cliff notes: Sam and I joined Dean and John on the road and we hunted Azazel together. After Sam was killed in Cold Oak, John made a deal for his life and had a year. Azazel was killed by Dean and we spent the year trying to break the deal, but we couldn’t do it; not even with Sam training his powers.”
“Sam was training!” Dean said, his voice close to a shout. “You let him do that?”
“Dean!” Sam snapped. “Calm down.”
Jessica looked puzzled by Dean’s reaction. “It was the only chance we had of saving John.”
Sam understood, even if Dean didn’t. Dean had never wanted Ruby to help him with his powers in the year running down to the deal, but that had been about saving him. If it was to save their father, there was nothing Dean wouldn’t do. How John had been persuaded when he had feared Sam’s fate enough to instruct Dean to kill him, he didn’t know, but he could see how it would happen.
Dean waved a hand and said, “Sure, okay, keep going.”
Jessica nodded. “John was in hell four months before Castiel and his garrison got him out, and before we knew it, Lilith was breaking the seals. Sam was still training to stop her, though it was different then as we were trying to stop him in the end instead of encouraging because of the…” She shot Sam an apologetic look.
“The blood,” Sam said. “Yeah. Me too.”
“We didn’t know until it was too late,” Jessica said. “And we tried to stop him, but he got free and went after Lilith. Cas found out Heaven’s plan and got us to Sam before he could kill her. When we heard what would happen, we stopped him, but Lilith wasn’t happy. Dean lost his eye that day and Sam was taken.” She stared into Sam’s eyes as she finished, her face haunted with pain. “None of us have seen him since.”
Sam pressed his lips to her forehead and whispered. “I’m sorry.”
She leaned into his kiss, her hand settling on his chest right over his heart, and they stayed like that for what felt like a long time, just feeling the presence of each other.
When they broke apart, she asked, “But you killed her here?”
“Yeah, and she’s not the only one,” Sam said, staring into her eyes and trying to prepare himself to share his shame. “I killed you, too.”
“Sam,” Dean growled. “It wasn’t like that, dammit.”
“No. I did,” Sam said, and then addressed Jessica who was leaning away from him, her eyes fixed on his face and her lips a thin line. “I had the dreams of your death, but I didn’t do anything. I thought they were just dreams. I was trying so hard to…” He shook his head brutally. “I let you die because I wanted to pretend I was normal. I told myself they were just dreams. The anniversary of Mom’s death was coming up and I’d been thinking about her a lot. I heard everything about Mom’s death from Dad when he was loaded. I thought that was it, but I should have known better. I let my Jessica die.”
She considered him for a long time, staring into his eyes and making him want to squirm, and then she said, “It makes sense. You didn’t want to believe it in my world either. I think it was because I was worried and spoke to John and Dean that you told us in the end. They got the story out of you and saw the real danger.”
“Me and Dad knew you?” Dean asked.
Jessica frowned. “Well, yeah. I met them not long after me and Sam got together. Didn’t you meet me in this world?”
“Not properly,” Dean said. “I hadn’t seen Sam properly for years until a few days before you died when Dad disappeared. Things went bad when Sam said he was going to college. He and Dad had a fight and I didn’t’ exactly step up. It was a nightmare.”
Jessica looked almost angry for a moment before she shook it off and said, “This world is so different.”
“Your world sounds crazy,” Jack said. “Like the apocalypse world Mary and I were in.”
Jessica’s eyes snapped to him. “Mary’s alive? How?”
Dean leaned back in his chair and raked a hand over his face. “That’s another long story.” He sighed. “And we’ll get to it, but I need a break from the crazy. Sammy, you still up for breakfast?”
Sam shook his head, his eyes fixed on Jessica. “No, not anymore. I want to just…”
Jessica nodded. “Me, too. Is there somewhere safe we can go?”
“Pretty much everywhere is safe,” Dean said. “But yeah, you can have the room. We’ll go fix our own breakfast. Come on, Jack, you can fry the bacon. Cas, you can make the coffee.”
As they got to their feet and wandered from the room, Jessica said, “Is there somewhere we can really be alone?”
“My room,” Sam said, getting to his feet and holding her hand as she rose. “We can talk there.”
She beamed at him. “Perfect.”
Sam put his arm around her, allowing himself to luxuriate in the exhilaration of touching her, and led her to his room. Perhaps they would talk. Perhaps they wouldn’t. Sam thought he would be happy to just sit and stare at her forever, but a part of him, the smallest, selfless part of him, whispered that he couldn’t have forever, his time was limited.
Their world was safe now but hers wasn’t, and they were going to have to fix that. Sam had a responsibility to the version that had spent over a decade in hell.
He was going to have to let Jessica go again to save his other self.