SPN: The Sun's Coming Over The Hill
Fandom: Supernatural
Main characters: Jess, Dean, Sam
Referenced characters: John
Pairings: Sam/Jess, Dean/Jess
Contains: Angst, AU, death
Rating: PG
Summary: Jess should have known, somehow, that things were changing, the day Dean Winchester showed up.
Notes: If you know the song I took the title from, you'll have a fair idea of what this story is like. It's by Karine Polwart, and I love it, but it's not a happy song, though there is a kind of hope in it. This story is for feywood's birthday, though it came out even sadder than I thought it would. It is AU from before the beginning of the series, and contains no spoilers for any of it.
Sam is tense and awkward. Jess has an idea why: he was like this at first, sometimes, before she learned the topics to avoid. So the man sat in their kitchen with a beer, he must be someone from Sam's past, someone that before now he wouldn't discuss. That he wouldn't discuss at all without him having come and pushed himself into their lives. Jess slips her arm through Sam's, tips her head up so she's smiling at him, just at him, a quick private smile. "Hey," she says, easy, leans up to kiss him and feel the slow smile form.
"Hey," he says, not easy, but better. "Jess, this is -- this is my brother. Dean."
The man grins at her, salutes her with his beer. His face is open, bright, friendly, but some instinct screams danger and lies. "Hey, Jess," Dean says, and he winks at her. "What's a pretty girl like you doing with my little brother?"
"Things you'd probably rather not think about your little brother doing," she says, winking back. Dean blinks and then he laughs, and the sunlight runs its fingers through his hair, and he seems so alive, more alive than anyone Jess has ever known.
"I like her, Sammy," he says. Jess feels the warmth of Sam's smile without looking: the response in him, involuntary, hard-wired.
---
Somehow, Jess isn't surprised when she comes home, a month or so later, to find Dean sat in their kitchen, drinking one of Sam's beers. She puts her bag down on a chair and hangs up her jacket before she really turns to look at him. He grins at her, unashamed. "I thought you'd shriek, if you walked in and just found me here. Hey, Jess."
"Dean," she says, acknowledging, give him a little amused smile back. "Is your entire understanding of women taken from shitty horror movies?"
"There're porn movies, too," he says, and has a mouthful of beer. He's as flashy as before, sharp-edged, so sharp he could cut himself.
"Did Sam give you a key, last time you were here?"
"Sort of. He around?"
"He's out of town for a day or two. You didn't call ahead, obviously."
"Maybe I did. Maybe I wanted to catch you alone," Dean says, with another grin.
"I assume you were going with the porn movie plot, right?"
"Given my life, it could go either way," he says, and there's a hint of truth there, a sombreness, that she didn't expect from him. She goes to the fridge and gets something out, casts a glance back over her shoulder.
"Do you like pie as much as Sam does?" she asks, deliberately light, like she sometimes is with Sam when she knows his thoughts are going somewhere he doesn't want her to see. Dean's eyes light up again.
"Hot and smart," Dean says, finishing up his beer and coming over to stand next to her, checking out the fridge. And probably her cleavage too, while he's at it. "I like pie even more than Sam does. And wow, Sammy has better taste than I thought, you know? I mean, a girlfriend who buys him pie?"
"A girlfriend who makes him pie," she says, and can't help a warm feeling of pride at the way Dean looks at her then. It's the same as the way Sam looks at her sometimes, actually, like she's a gift, like he can't believe someone like her really exists. Like some part of him can't believe there's good things in the world, that good things might happen to him -- only it's worse with Dean, for all his sharpness, for all the life that seems to fill him, because the hunger in his eyes isn't about pie, it's about something gone that can't be put back. Sam doesn't have that look -- maybe because it's something he doesn't know he's missing. Jess turns away from him then, not wanting that understanding. "I'll heat it up for you," she says, light again. "But don't get any ideas about a woman's place being in the kitchen, 'kay?"
---
Dean comes and goes -- there's no routine to it. Sometimes he'll stay for a week and then be gone for months; sometimes he'll be there four times in a month, visits of no more than a day. They settle into that, both of them. Jess will never remember afterwards exactly when it was, exactly how long she'd known -- or not-really-known -- Dean, but she'll remember this evening like it's cut into her. Not like a photograph or a video, not like a painting, but an engraving. Something more permanent. She knows that right away, when she walks in and Dean's there, with Sam. The room is darkened -- Sam remembered to draw the curtains -- and lit mostly by the glow of the tv, and Sam's asleep. His long body is all stretched out, and his head is on his brother's shoulder, falling back so his neck is bare, which seems to her somehow vulnerable, too open.
There's no danger in Dean's face, no lies. His voice is soft, barely enough to be heard over the noise of the television. "Hey, Jess," he says.
"Hey," she says, just as soft. Sam hasn't stirred. He sleeps so lightly, with her. The first times they shared a bed she knows even her movements kept him awake, that there was always a tension in him. As if he couldn't trust. He's completely relaxed against his brother though, like he can let go like that, with Dean so close. And the tenderness on Dean's face... She doesn't mean to say anything, but it falls out of her mouth anyway, the kind of question she normally knows not to ask either of them. "Why didn't you call, ever, before? Why'd you suddenly show up like that?"
"He's my brother," Dean says, as if that answers everything, every question she could ever ask him -- and somehow it does, it holds the world in it.
---
Sam's phone is suddenly like some alien artifact. She has to think about how to unlock the keypad, how to find the address book. She finds herself staring at the words -- the names -- blankly for far too long, as if the letters no longer hold meaning, like there's a hole in the world and the meanings of things are all dribbling out of it. When she finally finds Dean's number, the first time it rings it goes through to the answer phone, and Jess doesn't know what to say. She just sits there, stupid and dumb, until she recovers enough wit to press the button to hang up.
When Dean calls back, it takes impossibly long to realise that Enter Sandman must be a personalised ringtone, something set so Sam knows it's Dean calling and no one else. Or maybe Dean set it -- she can imagine that, she remembers the retching noises Dean made that one time they took her car and Sam wanted to play Green Day, she can imagine Dean setting it himself, insisting.
"Sam? Dude, I thought your therapist had taught you not to leave creepy voice mails with just breathing by now," Dean says, and the brightness jars, rings so false. For a moment, Jess still can't say anything -- it's not that there's nothing that should be said, but there are no words.
"Dean," she says, finally, because that at least has some meaning still.
"Jess? Was that you leaving me a voicemail? I thought it was Sam. Something wrong?"
"I need you," stupidly, god, that's all she has, the only words, the only thing that will come out of her emptiness. There's silence on the other end, and then Dean again, the bright and flashy Dean that lies, that is a lie. More so than ever now, only he doesn't know it yet.
"Are my porn movie daydreams finally coming true?"
"Sam's dead," she says, like she's tearing it out of herself and flinging it down, like a challenge, a gauntlet. Silence again.
"I'm two days out," Dean says, then. "I'll be there."
She puts the phone down without even saying goodbye. Dean doesn't need social graces like that, anyway, and by now he knows -- he knows that the words are stupid, grains of sand trying to hold back floods alone, rather than sandbags.
She microwaves her dinner. It takes her five minutes to remember how to work the microwave.
---
Dean has never touched her before. She realises that when he puts his arms around her and she buries his face in his shoulder. He smells of sweat, of leather, of being cooped up in a car for two days and driving flat out. He holds her like he doesn't really know how, all tense against her, and he's so like Sam in that -- so like Sam at first -- that it could kill her, if she let it, could send her spinning. He holds her a little too tightly, though, just like she wants it right now -- not like Sam did back then, because Sam started off so careful, like he might hurt her. Years of teenage clumsiness teaching him to finally overestimate his own strength.
"What happened?" Dean asks, when she finally pulls back. His face looks bruised, tired. "What happened to him?"
"You should sit down," she says, stupidly -- she has always thought that stupid, because it doesn't matter if you're standing up or sitting down, it can still knock you flat from there. She was laying down when they told her, but even that doesn't matter. There's always a little further to fall. Dean shakes his head.
"Just tell me."
"He... went out of town. Like he sometimes did, you know? He went out of town for the weekend, said he had some business to take care of, that he'd be back in time for lectures on Monday. I asked him what, but I guess it's only now I realise he never told me. He was good at lying by omission."
"I bet," Dean says, grim.
"I found his journal, after they told me. That he was dead. It didn't matter then. Going through his things." Jess takes a deep breath, and feels Dean's hand at her elbow, steadying her again. She didn't expect him to be so steady. He nods at her, like he's saying it's okay, go on, without wasting time on the words. "If I didn't know him, I'd have thought he was mad. Going on about monsters. There was one entry, he said he'd called you to help with with something, some weird thing, and that was when -- "
"The first time I showed up in your kitchen. I didn't know he kept a journal. Like our dad."
"The journal... It said it was the family business."
"Yeah," Dean said. "Guess you could say that."
"I don't understand."
"I think I need a beer," Dean said. He looked at her. "I think you need a beer."
---
"A wendigo?" Jess asks. She says it without incredulity -- matter-of-factly, a real question, no edge of disbelief. She feels a strange calm now, like everything has been poured out of her in the last weeks, through that hole in her world, and nothing has come to fill it up yet.
Dean glances at her and then back at the road. He looks worse than her, somehow. He has a couple of days' worth of stubble, and his eyes are reddened even though she hasn't seen him crying. "Yeah, a wendigo. I think that's what Sammy went up against. On his own. It was a fucking stupid thing to do -- you have no idea how strong they are, how fast, even though they supposedly were human once. Even in the day, they've got the advantage. I don't know what he was thinking."
"He wanted to keep me safe," Jess says, thinking of the journal.
"Yeah, I guess," Dean says. His hands are tight on the steering wheel, and he doesn't look at Jess this time. "If I were being smart, I'd call my dad, or maybe a couple of other hunters. Have them help me waste it."
"Are you going to?"
"No. We're going to waste it. You and me."
"Alright," she says, even though it's insane. It makes sense to her.
---
Dean's face is dirty. There's a smear of blood across his cheek, from his mouth, and his nose is bloody too, and there's bruising darkening all his face already. Jess thinks she must be no better. She's shaking, in the aftermath, adrenaline souring her stomach, making her want to throw up, making her never want to move again. "I learnt something there," she says.
Dean looks at her in the light of the fire that's still burning. "Some big revelation? Life's worth living and all that crap?"
"No," she says, and she doesn't look at him but at the flame. She looks up for the briefest moment, though, when she finds a smile catching at her lips, tugging at them, for the first time since. "I missed my calling. I really like setting shit on fire."
"We should do it more often," Dean says, and something like a smile tugs at his mouth too. It could be a grimace.
"You should shave," she tells him. "You look like shit."
---
"It's been a year," Dean says, when she comes into their motel room and raises an eyebrow at him sprawled out over his bed with a beer. "A year since Sammy." There's a period there, not an ellipsis. 'Sammy', like that's all that needs to be said, a word spoken and ended, like a life. Jess sits down on her bed and takes a beer from the six-pack on the bedside table. She tried this at first -- both of them did -- pouring alcohol into the emptiness. Never worked for either of them: she stopped letting Dean buy it six months back, is glad that Dean picked up nothing stronger than beer.
A year.
"You're pretty good, you know."
Jess makes some kind of noise of acknowledgement, opens her beer, takes a long drink. It tastes like Sam's mouth did sometimes, but the tears don't come to sting her eyelids now and the twist of the knife in her chest -- well, she knows what a knife wound really feels like now, and this is nothing.
"I always figured you'd give up. Go back and have a normal life."
"You wouldn't."
"I wouldn't know what a normal life was if it came and bit me in the backside," Dean says, without self-pity, but it's a lie because he does, she knows he does, she knows about the four years he can't ever speak about, knows the name, Mary Winchester, if she knows nothing else.
She doesn't call him on it.
It takes them both another beer before Dean sits up and looks at her. "Are you going to leave?" he asks. He looks at her like he thinks it's a stupid question, like he already knows the answer and the answer is yes, but she doesn't think it's so stupid. She didn't have an answer until he opened his mouth and actually asked it.
She could go back. Reconnect with her family, her friends. God knows what they think now. They probably think she's unhinged, that she went off the rails after Sam's death. Maybe they think she was kidnapped or something. Murdered. She could claim it all back, cauterise her wounds and have Stanford. A degree. A home, a normal life. No Sam, though. And no Dean -- he wouldn't come to visit now, she knows. Not where Sam so pointedly isn't.
"No," she says.
"Pass me another beer," he says, like it didn't really matter. Her first impression of him was right, though. She knows him, she knows he's a liar.
---
The sun's warmth is like a caress on her skin, like long careful fingers and big hands. Jess leans against the side of the car and feels the heat given back by the metal. The air thrums with the heat, with life, and Dean is bright and sharp at her side. His laugh comes easy now, relearned sometime in the last twelve months -- two years, since Sammy. Jess looks at Dean and she knows they've been filled up again, both of them, when they thought nothing could do that. It isn't a perfect fit, but life isn't perfect. You don't get your degree, you don't marry your boyfriend, you don't get the white picket fence and two point five children, and monsters aren't a fairytale.
You don't, and they aren't, and it hurts like hell, but you can come out of the other side.
"You scream like a girl, sometimes," Jess tells Dean. He huffs out another laugh, takes a swig of his coke -- coke, now, from a cooler they keep in the back seat now. Not beer. Not now, not so often anyway.
"Shitty horror movies neglect the fact that the big tough guys get startled sometimes too."
"Oh, but I thought they were known for their wonderful and insightful characterisations of people, and for the way they totally spurn the use of stereotypes."
The laugh again -- real, this time, coming out whole. Dean tips his head back so the sun falls on his face, runs its fingers through his hair. Alive. So alive. Jess laughs too, feeling the air in her lungs and the movement of blood in her body and the flutter in her stomach, and she knows that there is nobody in the world quite so alive as herself and Dean. She reaches up and she runs her fingers through his hair, looks for all the colours in it and for the startlement in his eyes, and the smile. He meets her halfway for the kiss, real and alive and sharp-edged, his face the tiniest bit rough with stubble.
"So I finally get to show you my impressive knowledge of porn movies?" he asks, when the kiss breaks, and she kisses him again and bites his lip.
"I've seen a couple myself," she says, and grins up at him.
---
She has access to a kitchen. Jess is surprised that this didn't tip Dean off -- her insistence on it -- but it's been a long time and maybe he doesn't remember these things. Those details are not important, not like knowing their knives and their ammo, their resources, and the lists of things they might face, the precautions. Even the parts of the Impala. Those are ingrained now and instinctual, even for her, the things that keep them alive. The things that have filled her up -- some of it, anyway.
These are the memories that can cut them, if they're allowed to.
It was apple pie, that afternoon so long ago. Jess is almost sure. So it's apple pie that she makes, slow and careful, relearning how to do it.
"I have the most amazing girlfriend," Dean says, when he sees, when he comes in. He puts his arms around her from behind, presses a kiss to the nape of her neck, where her hair falls away to bare her skin. "Hot, and smart, and she makes me pies."
It's the first time he's ever said it. Girlfriend.
"Don't get any ideas about a woman's place being in the kitchen," she says.
Main characters: Jess, Dean, Sam
Referenced characters: John
Pairings: Sam/Jess, Dean/Jess
Contains: Angst, AU, death
Rating: PG
Summary: Jess should have known, somehow, that things were changing, the day Dean Winchester showed up.
Notes: If you know the song I took the title from, you'll have a fair idea of what this story is like. It's by Karine Polwart, and I love it, but it's not a happy song, though there is a kind of hope in it. This story is for feywood's birthday, though it came out even sadder than I thought it would. It is AU from before the beginning of the series, and contains no spoilers for any of it.
Sam is tense and awkward. Jess has an idea why: he was like this at first, sometimes, before she learned the topics to avoid. So the man sat in their kitchen with a beer, he must be someone from Sam's past, someone that before now he wouldn't discuss. That he wouldn't discuss at all without him having come and pushed himself into their lives. Jess slips her arm through Sam's, tips her head up so she's smiling at him, just at him, a quick private smile. "Hey," she says, easy, leans up to kiss him and feel the slow smile form.
"Hey," he says, not easy, but better. "Jess, this is -- this is my brother. Dean."
The man grins at her, salutes her with his beer. His face is open, bright, friendly, but some instinct screams danger and lies. "Hey, Jess," Dean says, and he winks at her. "What's a pretty girl like you doing with my little brother?"
"Things you'd probably rather not think about your little brother doing," she says, winking back. Dean blinks and then he laughs, and the sunlight runs its fingers through his hair, and he seems so alive, more alive than anyone Jess has ever known.
"I like her, Sammy," he says. Jess feels the warmth of Sam's smile without looking: the response in him, involuntary, hard-wired.
---
Somehow, Jess isn't surprised when she comes home, a month or so later, to find Dean sat in their kitchen, drinking one of Sam's beers. She puts her bag down on a chair and hangs up her jacket before she really turns to look at him. He grins at her, unashamed. "I thought you'd shriek, if you walked in and just found me here. Hey, Jess."
"Dean," she says, acknowledging, give him a little amused smile back. "Is your entire understanding of women taken from shitty horror movies?"
"There're porn movies, too," he says, and has a mouthful of beer. He's as flashy as before, sharp-edged, so sharp he could cut himself.
"Did Sam give you a key, last time you were here?"
"Sort of. He around?"
"He's out of town for a day or two. You didn't call ahead, obviously."
"Maybe I did. Maybe I wanted to catch you alone," Dean says, with another grin.
"I assume you were going with the porn movie plot, right?"
"Given my life, it could go either way," he says, and there's a hint of truth there, a sombreness, that she didn't expect from him. She goes to the fridge and gets something out, casts a glance back over her shoulder.
"Do you like pie as much as Sam does?" she asks, deliberately light, like she sometimes is with Sam when she knows his thoughts are going somewhere he doesn't want her to see. Dean's eyes light up again.
"Hot and smart," Dean says, finishing up his beer and coming over to stand next to her, checking out the fridge. And probably her cleavage too, while he's at it. "I like pie even more than Sam does. And wow, Sammy has better taste than I thought, you know? I mean, a girlfriend who buys him pie?"
"A girlfriend who makes him pie," she says, and can't help a warm feeling of pride at the way Dean looks at her then. It's the same as the way Sam looks at her sometimes, actually, like she's a gift, like he can't believe someone like her really exists. Like some part of him can't believe there's good things in the world, that good things might happen to him -- only it's worse with Dean, for all his sharpness, for all the life that seems to fill him, because the hunger in his eyes isn't about pie, it's about something gone that can't be put back. Sam doesn't have that look -- maybe because it's something he doesn't know he's missing. Jess turns away from him then, not wanting that understanding. "I'll heat it up for you," she says, light again. "But don't get any ideas about a woman's place being in the kitchen, 'kay?"
---
Dean comes and goes -- there's no routine to it. Sometimes he'll stay for a week and then be gone for months; sometimes he'll be there four times in a month, visits of no more than a day. They settle into that, both of them. Jess will never remember afterwards exactly when it was, exactly how long she'd known -- or not-really-known -- Dean, but she'll remember this evening like it's cut into her. Not like a photograph or a video, not like a painting, but an engraving. Something more permanent. She knows that right away, when she walks in and Dean's there, with Sam. The room is darkened -- Sam remembered to draw the curtains -- and lit mostly by the glow of the tv, and Sam's asleep. His long body is all stretched out, and his head is on his brother's shoulder, falling back so his neck is bare, which seems to her somehow vulnerable, too open.
There's no danger in Dean's face, no lies. His voice is soft, barely enough to be heard over the noise of the television. "Hey, Jess," he says.
"Hey," she says, just as soft. Sam hasn't stirred. He sleeps so lightly, with her. The first times they shared a bed she knows even her movements kept him awake, that there was always a tension in him. As if he couldn't trust. He's completely relaxed against his brother though, like he can let go like that, with Dean so close. And the tenderness on Dean's face... She doesn't mean to say anything, but it falls out of her mouth anyway, the kind of question she normally knows not to ask either of them. "Why didn't you call, ever, before? Why'd you suddenly show up like that?"
"He's my brother," Dean says, as if that answers everything, every question she could ever ask him -- and somehow it does, it holds the world in it.
---
Sam's phone is suddenly like some alien artifact. She has to think about how to unlock the keypad, how to find the address book. She finds herself staring at the words -- the names -- blankly for far too long, as if the letters no longer hold meaning, like there's a hole in the world and the meanings of things are all dribbling out of it. When she finally finds Dean's number, the first time it rings it goes through to the answer phone, and Jess doesn't know what to say. She just sits there, stupid and dumb, until she recovers enough wit to press the button to hang up.
When Dean calls back, it takes impossibly long to realise that Enter Sandman must be a personalised ringtone, something set so Sam knows it's Dean calling and no one else. Or maybe Dean set it -- she can imagine that, she remembers the retching noises Dean made that one time they took her car and Sam wanted to play Green Day, she can imagine Dean setting it himself, insisting.
"Sam? Dude, I thought your therapist had taught you not to leave creepy voice mails with just breathing by now," Dean says, and the brightness jars, rings so false. For a moment, Jess still can't say anything -- it's not that there's nothing that should be said, but there are no words.
"Dean," she says, finally, because that at least has some meaning still.
"Jess? Was that you leaving me a voicemail? I thought it was Sam. Something wrong?"
"I need you," stupidly, god, that's all she has, the only words, the only thing that will come out of her emptiness. There's silence on the other end, and then Dean again, the bright and flashy Dean that lies, that is a lie. More so than ever now, only he doesn't know it yet.
"Are my porn movie daydreams finally coming true?"
"Sam's dead," she says, like she's tearing it out of herself and flinging it down, like a challenge, a gauntlet. Silence again.
"I'm two days out," Dean says, then. "I'll be there."
She puts the phone down without even saying goodbye. Dean doesn't need social graces like that, anyway, and by now he knows -- he knows that the words are stupid, grains of sand trying to hold back floods alone, rather than sandbags.
She microwaves her dinner. It takes her five minutes to remember how to work the microwave.
---
Dean has never touched her before. She realises that when he puts his arms around her and she buries his face in his shoulder. He smells of sweat, of leather, of being cooped up in a car for two days and driving flat out. He holds her like he doesn't really know how, all tense against her, and he's so like Sam in that -- so like Sam at first -- that it could kill her, if she let it, could send her spinning. He holds her a little too tightly, though, just like she wants it right now -- not like Sam did back then, because Sam started off so careful, like he might hurt her. Years of teenage clumsiness teaching him to finally overestimate his own strength.
"What happened?" Dean asks, when she finally pulls back. His face looks bruised, tired. "What happened to him?"
"You should sit down," she says, stupidly -- she has always thought that stupid, because it doesn't matter if you're standing up or sitting down, it can still knock you flat from there. She was laying down when they told her, but even that doesn't matter. There's always a little further to fall. Dean shakes his head.
"Just tell me."
"He... went out of town. Like he sometimes did, you know? He went out of town for the weekend, said he had some business to take care of, that he'd be back in time for lectures on Monday. I asked him what, but I guess it's only now I realise he never told me. He was good at lying by omission."
"I bet," Dean says, grim.
"I found his journal, after they told me. That he was dead. It didn't matter then. Going through his things." Jess takes a deep breath, and feels Dean's hand at her elbow, steadying her again. She didn't expect him to be so steady. He nods at her, like he's saying it's okay, go on, without wasting time on the words. "If I didn't know him, I'd have thought he was mad. Going on about monsters. There was one entry, he said he'd called you to help with with something, some weird thing, and that was when -- "
"The first time I showed up in your kitchen. I didn't know he kept a journal. Like our dad."
"The journal... It said it was the family business."
"Yeah," Dean said. "Guess you could say that."
"I don't understand."
"I think I need a beer," Dean said. He looked at her. "I think you need a beer."
---
"A wendigo?" Jess asks. She says it without incredulity -- matter-of-factly, a real question, no edge of disbelief. She feels a strange calm now, like everything has been poured out of her in the last weeks, through that hole in her world, and nothing has come to fill it up yet.
Dean glances at her and then back at the road. He looks worse than her, somehow. He has a couple of days' worth of stubble, and his eyes are reddened even though she hasn't seen him crying. "Yeah, a wendigo. I think that's what Sammy went up against. On his own. It was a fucking stupid thing to do -- you have no idea how strong they are, how fast, even though they supposedly were human once. Even in the day, they've got the advantage. I don't know what he was thinking."
"He wanted to keep me safe," Jess says, thinking of the journal.
"Yeah, I guess," Dean says. His hands are tight on the steering wheel, and he doesn't look at Jess this time. "If I were being smart, I'd call my dad, or maybe a couple of other hunters. Have them help me waste it."
"Are you going to?"
"No. We're going to waste it. You and me."
"Alright," she says, even though it's insane. It makes sense to her.
---
Dean's face is dirty. There's a smear of blood across his cheek, from his mouth, and his nose is bloody too, and there's bruising darkening all his face already. Jess thinks she must be no better. She's shaking, in the aftermath, adrenaline souring her stomach, making her want to throw up, making her never want to move again. "I learnt something there," she says.
Dean looks at her in the light of the fire that's still burning. "Some big revelation? Life's worth living and all that crap?"
"No," she says, and she doesn't look at him but at the flame. She looks up for the briefest moment, though, when she finds a smile catching at her lips, tugging at them, for the first time since. "I missed my calling. I really like setting shit on fire."
"We should do it more often," Dean says, and something like a smile tugs at his mouth too. It could be a grimace.
"You should shave," she tells him. "You look like shit."
---
"It's been a year," Dean says, when she comes into their motel room and raises an eyebrow at him sprawled out over his bed with a beer. "A year since Sammy." There's a period there, not an ellipsis. 'Sammy', like that's all that needs to be said, a word spoken and ended, like a life. Jess sits down on her bed and takes a beer from the six-pack on the bedside table. She tried this at first -- both of them did -- pouring alcohol into the emptiness. Never worked for either of them: she stopped letting Dean buy it six months back, is glad that Dean picked up nothing stronger than beer.
A year.
"You're pretty good, you know."
Jess makes some kind of noise of acknowledgement, opens her beer, takes a long drink. It tastes like Sam's mouth did sometimes, but the tears don't come to sting her eyelids now and the twist of the knife in her chest -- well, she knows what a knife wound really feels like now, and this is nothing.
"I always figured you'd give up. Go back and have a normal life."
"You wouldn't."
"I wouldn't know what a normal life was if it came and bit me in the backside," Dean says, without self-pity, but it's a lie because he does, she knows he does, she knows about the four years he can't ever speak about, knows the name, Mary Winchester, if she knows nothing else.
She doesn't call him on it.
It takes them both another beer before Dean sits up and looks at her. "Are you going to leave?" he asks. He looks at her like he thinks it's a stupid question, like he already knows the answer and the answer is yes, but she doesn't think it's so stupid. She didn't have an answer until he opened his mouth and actually asked it.
She could go back. Reconnect with her family, her friends. God knows what they think now. They probably think she's unhinged, that she went off the rails after Sam's death. Maybe they think she was kidnapped or something. Murdered. She could claim it all back, cauterise her wounds and have Stanford. A degree. A home, a normal life. No Sam, though. And no Dean -- he wouldn't come to visit now, she knows. Not where Sam so pointedly isn't.
"No," she says.
"Pass me another beer," he says, like it didn't really matter. Her first impression of him was right, though. She knows him, she knows he's a liar.
---
The sun's warmth is like a caress on her skin, like long careful fingers and big hands. Jess leans against the side of the car and feels the heat given back by the metal. The air thrums with the heat, with life, and Dean is bright and sharp at her side. His laugh comes easy now, relearned sometime in the last twelve months -- two years, since Sammy. Jess looks at Dean and she knows they've been filled up again, both of them, when they thought nothing could do that. It isn't a perfect fit, but life isn't perfect. You don't get your degree, you don't marry your boyfriend, you don't get the white picket fence and two point five children, and monsters aren't a fairytale.
You don't, and they aren't, and it hurts like hell, but you can come out of the other side.
"You scream like a girl, sometimes," Jess tells Dean. He huffs out another laugh, takes a swig of his coke -- coke, now, from a cooler they keep in the back seat now. Not beer. Not now, not so often anyway.
"Shitty horror movies neglect the fact that the big tough guys get startled sometimes too."
"Oh, but I thought they were known for their wonderful and insightful characterisations of people, and for the way they totally spurn the use of stereotypes."
The laugh again -- real, this time, coming out whole. Dean tips his head back so the sun falls on his face, runs its fingers through his hair. Alive. So alive. Jess laughs too, feeling the air in her lungs and the movement of blood in her body and the flutter in her stomach, and she knows that there is nobody in the world quite so alive as herself and Dean. She reaches up and she runs her fingers through his hair, looks for all the colours in it and for the startlement in his eyes, and the smile. He meets her halfway for the kiss, real and alive and sharp-edged, his face the tiniest bit rough with stubble.
"So I finally get to show you my impressive knowledge of porn movies?" he asks, when the kiss breaks, and she kisses him again and bites his lip.
"I've seen a couple myself," she says, and grins up at him.
---
She has access to a kitchen. Jess is surprised that this didn't tip Dean off -- her insistence on it -- but it's been a long time and maybe he doesn't remember these things. Those details are not important, not like knowing their knives and their ammo, their resources, and the lists of things they might face, the precautions. Even the parts of the Impala. Those are ingrained now and instinctual, even for her, the things that keep them alive. The things that have filled her up -- some of it, anyway.
These are the memories that can cut them, if they're allowed to.
It was apple pie, that afternoon so long ago. Jess is almost sure. So it's apple pie that she makes, slow and careful, relearning how to do it.
"I have the most amazing girlfriend," Dean says, when he sees, when he comes in. He puts his arms around her from behind, presses a kiss to the nape of her neck, where her hair falls away to bare her skin. "Hot, and smart, and she makes me pies."
It's the first time he's ever said it. Girlfriend.
"Don't get any ideas about a woman's place being in the kitchen," she says.