Daylight Refracted (Het, R)
Title: Daylight Refracted
Rating: R
Category: AU oneshot
Word Count: 7585
Characters: Jess/Sam, Dean, handfuls of other SPN characters and OCs
Spoilers: S1: “Pilot” and “Shadows;” S2: “In My Time of Dying,” “All Hell Breaks Loose: Parts 1 and 2”
Summary: It takes revenge against a demon and love for a hunter for her to go back to where she began.
Warnings: None
Author’s Notes: Okay. So. This grew from an innocent comment that druffine made in response to a previous story I wrote. Since then, I haven’t been able to keep this idea quiet. (It did grow out of control as the first draft for this topped out at somewhere around 9K words, but it’s been cut quite a bit since then.) While I’m pretty sure this wasn’t anything like she had in mind when she suggested her original idea, it’s all I have to offer. As always, equinox_blue did brainstorming and beta honors. She wanted some things changed in this story, and I chose not to listen, which makes any remaining mistakes mine alone. She tried, she really did. I’m just stubborn. Crossposted around.
Disclaimer: The following characters and situations are used without permission of the creators, owners, and further affiliates of the television show, Supernatural, to whom they rightly belong. I claim only what is mine, and I make no money off what is theirs.
- - - - -
“Are you sure you’re going to be okay?” Dad asks as he follows her down the porch steps with Mom behind him. The sun is high in the early afternoon sky, and he raises a hand to shield his eyes. “We can drive you if you want. Hell,” he continues with a forced chuckle, “you don’t even have to go to college, y’know. I’ll sleep a lot better at night. Do you really want to give your old man a heart attack?”
Even though she knows he’s joking, she can still hear genuine worry resting beneath his sarcasm. As she closes the trunk of her loaded car, she sighs. “I’ve got to do this,” she replies. “I really want to do this.” She turns to face her parents. Mom is pretending not to cry by biting her lower lip and gently dabbing at her eyes with a tissue too damp for its own good. Dad has a tight smile on his weary face. “Really,” she continues, “I’m not that far away anyway. It’s not like I’m going halfway across the country. I’ll still come home for the holidays and an occasional weekend.”
Mom, laughing in spite of her tears, rests a hand on her face and says, “That’s a promise we’ll be keeping you to, young lady.”
Tenderly, she hugs her parents good-bye, breathes in Mom’s perfume one last time and kisses Dad’s dry, unshaven cheek.
As she pulls her keys from her pocket, Dad calls out to her and comes closer.
“Take these with you, please? I really will sleep better knowing you’ve at least got something on your side out there.” He hands her a small leather case worn on the edges and bearing his initials on its top flap.
“You didn’t have to get me anything.” She takes his gift hesitantly. “Don’t worry about me. I know how to take care of myself.”
He kisses her forehead one more time and whispers in that deep and gentle voice of his, “It’s not you I’m worried about. It’s everything else out there.”
Nearly an hour away from home while waiting for a stoplight to change, she opens the case that sits next to her on the passenger seat. When the blades of her father’s best hunting knives catch the sunlight, she can only laugh.
“Oh, Dad,” she says, smiles and turns up the music on her radio. Jessica sings loudly, windows rolled down, feeling free and new.
- - - - -
She sleeps with one of the knives beneath her pillow. The rest she leaves in their case, which she hides at the bottom of her underwear drawer. At night, she salts the window ledges and draws a devil’s trap on the bottom of her bunk in pencil. The gun loaded with silver bullets is rolled up in an old t-shirt that she stuffs among her other clothes.
Jessica’s roommate only knows about the salt when Jess forgets to sweep it off one morning, and that is enough right there.
“What the hell is this shit?” the girl asks, wrinkling her nose when she first notices the fine white lines. She is opening the windows for the morning after they closed them following an unusually cool night. Carefully, she runs her finger through the salt line, stares at it and glances up at Jess through a fringe of black bangs.
“Salt,” Jess answers, trying for nonchalant by not looking up from her English Literature homework.
“Salt?” the girl echoes.
“Yeah.”
There is a beat as the girl realizes that Jess isn’t going to offer anything further. So she shrugs and mumbles, “Oh” before turning away and grabbing her towel for a shower.
The next semester, Jess requests a private room. More money perhaps, but it still gives her the same education only with less questions. It’s just the way she prefers.
- - - - -
His name is Sam.
Samuel Winchester, actually, but no one-except the college office-calls him that. To everyone else, he is just “Sam.” Tall, smiling, intellectual Sam.
Whenever anyone asks Sam about the first time Jessica and he met, Sam tells the story how their morning jogs coincided one day. He recounts their first nervous dinner together and how they walked through the campus park afterward, hand in hand.
Jessica never corrects him on this story. It’s the one that she tells everyone as well. But it really isn’t the truth. Not that she would expect otherwise because she knows well enough that nothing about Sam and her is the truth.
The first time she actually sees Sam is late one night after a home football game. She has just unlocked her room when she hears a high-pitched feminine scream come from the direction of the stadium, which isn’t too far from her building. Quickly, she pulls a pair of her father’s knives from the case and slips her gun down the side of her pants before hurrying back outside.
By the time she arrives at the stadium, someone else is already whispering Latin phrases fluently and spreading rock salt on the battered football field. The girl and whatever attacked her are both gone. This boy, this Sam, is the only person in the stadium.
Keeping herself hidden, Jess watches him finish the job. Curiously, she follows him unnoticed back to his dorm room where she waits outside until the next morning. Instead of going to class, he appears from the building in a faded t-shirt and track pants. She watches his back round the building as he begins on what she will learn is his daily jog.
Three days later, she starts running the same route to emerge into his life as a force to be reckoned with.
She expects him to be like the other hunters she’s met. As bitter and drained as her father’s friends and as cold and antisocial as the friends’ children.
She doesn’t expect Sam to be so warm and friendly. So funny and relaxed. She doesn’t expect to actually fall for Sam Winchester.
- - - - -
“Winchester?” Dad repeats as they sit around the table for Thanksgiving dinner. “Sam?” It’s just Dad, Mom, and Jess. Jessica’s older sister is at the in-laws for the day and can’t make it to the family dinner. The table seems smaller with only three.
“You ever heard anything about his family?” Jess asks.
Dad pauses before answering, thinking. “I’ve heard of a John Winchester-any relation?”
Jessica nods and swallows a forkful of mashed potatoes. “That’s his dad. I don’t think they get along though. Sam doesn’t like to talk about him.”
“John’s good, but he’s also got a temper and is stubborn and impatient as hell. We met once…a long time ago. When I was still hunting full-time, you realize.”
Jess murmurs in agreement. Even though her dad spent the majority of his younger years teaching his daughters about hunting by taking them on the occasional case, he also left while he still had enough sanity to live peacefully with his girls and wife. Secretly, Jessica thinks he regrets his decision to leave that life of adrenaline and danger for one where he weeds the gardens on Saturday and attends church on Sunday.
“You should invite Sam over for Christmas,” Mom suggests. “Doesn’t sound like he’s got the best family life if he and his dad don’t get along. Does he have any siblings?”
“An older brother. I don’t think they parted on bad terms, but,” Jess sighs, “he just doesn’t like to talk about his family. It’s like this big closed book with him. I was going to invite him over here today, but I didn’t know if you would mind. It would’ve been too last minute anyway.”
“Mind?” Mom echoes in surprise as if Jessica’s said something offensive. “Of course not. Like I said, Christmastime-or whenever you come home next-bring him with you.”
“Just as long as Dad promises not to discuss hunting. Sam has no idea about that in my life. He doesn’t even know I know about him. I’d rather keep him innocent as long as possible.”
Dad grins. “I’ll be on my best behavior. Cross my heart, Jessie. Invite him over. I’d just like to meet the boy that’s got my daughter all love-struck.”
- - - - -
When they move in together, Jess decides to hide her knives and gun from Sam. She feels naked without the constant presence of a blade beneath her head at night, but she knows that Sam will not hesitate to ask questions. Added to that fact that they sleep in the same bed, hiding such a weapon will prove to be difficult. She stops trailing salt along the window ledges and dumps the bottle of holy water she keeps in the refrigerator. The knives and gun go with a pair of boots she never wears, and she shoves them in the bottom of her closet beneath stacks of old papers.
For the first few nights, she doesn’t sleep and paces their apartment. Hunting has been a part of her life for so long that she doesn’t know how to shut off that part of her brain. Every noise belongs to a monster and every breath is that of Death knocking on their door.
She considers telling Sam the truth. Considers sitting him down and pulling out all her weapons. While she shops, she plans what she would say to him. She would tell him that she was raised as a hunter. That her father and his father before him hunted the monsters of the night. She never went without, never wanted for anything while growing up, but she chose to go to college for a chance at something greater than hunting. To finally find a place where she fit in.
After she has planned her speech, she comes home to find Sam delighted with the simplest, most normal things or disgusted with a memory of his family. He never explains his delight, never elaborates on his disgust, but she knows that she can’t take this away from him. This life-no matter how falsely he’s constructed it-is not hers to steal.
So she keeps silent, and she lies for his happiness.
But when Sam sleeps and she cannot on the nights when the moon is full, she leans over him and kisses his forehead. Brushes his hair from his eyes and whispers, “Christo.” She always holds her breath, always waits for him to flinch and swear, but he never does. Only sleeps on peacefully. Only sleeps unaware of everything she knows.
- - - - -
“Did Sam ever tell you his mother died?” Dad asks on the phone. He has called her out of nowhere during her lunch. Sam is at class, and she has the entire apartment to herself.
“When he was a baby. I think he said in a house fire?” Jess replies with the phone cradled between her ear and shoulder. She’s cutting an orange, and the juice pools on the cutting board and runs across the countertop. She gave up trying not to make a mess about five minutes ago.
“Not just a house fire. I made some calls to a few old friends. They think it was a demon. At least, that’s what John seemed to think, and all signs point to it being a demon. Cattle deaths, abnormal electrical activity, the works. Sam’s mom-Mary-was found pinned to the ceiling with her abdomen sliced open. She burst into flames before John had a chance to save her.”
“God,” Jess whispers, horrified.
“Now, the demon hasn’t attacked the family in years, and nobody’s heard of anything like that happening since then, but I just want you to be extra careful.”
“How can it be stopped? Silver bullets? Exorcisms?”
“I don’t think so. Seems like it’s a higher-level demon. Holy water might hurt it, but I don’t think it’ll stop it. Just,” Dad sighs, and she can picture him wiping his hand across his face, “just please promise you’ll be careful. You still have your weapons?”
“Yeah, I do. If I get time this week, I’ll swing by the library. See if I can find out anything about demons.” She pulls a bowl from the cupboard and drops her pieces of orange into it. “I’ll give you a call later. I’ve got two exams though, so it might be a while.”
“All right, honey. Your mom’s calling me. Something about the damn sink. I swear it’s possessed. I’ll talk to you later, okay?”
“Okay, Dad. I love you.”
“Love you too, sweetie.”
- - - - -
The night Sam leaves with his brother, Jessica lines the windows with salt again. She draws a devil’s trap above her bed with a shaking hand and sharpens her blades until they gleam in the darkness.
If John Winchester truly is missing, she thinks, then whatever got him has to be completely evil. Evil enough that he couldn’t fight back to save himself. Perhaps the demon that killed his wife has returned for him after all these years.
When she sleeps, it’s only fitfully, and she doesn’t loosen her hold on her father’s knife for all the time that Sam is gone. She leaves a message on his phone but keeps it short and vague. More than anything, she wants to tell him that she knows, that she understands, and that she should be by his side rather than left behind.
But she never does. Perhaps she’s worrying about nothing. Maybe John Winchester really is drunk somewhere and just needs his boys to give him a lift home.
Still. She wears her hunting clothes constantly, never bothering to change into pajamas or a pair of dressy heels. She keeps a knife in one hand and a gun on the nightstand beside her bed just in case. Just because she doesn’t really know.
Looking back, she’ll think that no one really could have known.
- - - - -
When it comes for her, when the monster that murdered Mary Winchester comes for her, Jessica is ready. She knows it’s on her doorstep when her bedside lamp flickers and dies and when the clock on the opposite wall stops moving its long and skinny hands.
The demon steps over her salt lines, walks right up to her and sneers in her face. He looks like just a man, not much older than her father, but she knows better when she smells the acrid smoke on his breath.
“Jessica,” he whispers, lips curling as he runs his fingers through her hair. “Just the girl I was looking for.”
He mocks her as she spouts her Latin exorcisms and protective prayers. When she tries to splash holy water on him, he forces her to lift her hand that holds the knife. She watches in horror as her hand, no longer under her control, slashes long marks across her abdomen.
The blood gushes instantly through her shirt and runs down her jeans in hot rivulets. Choking on the pain, she staggers for a moment before collapsing to her knees in front of the demon.
The demon strolls up to her, grinning, and raises her hand to her throat. She can feel the wet blade pressing against her jugular. Her own blood falls from the metal onto the rug she bought with Sam less than a month ago.
“Good night, precious,” the demon whispers with a wink, “it’s been fun. I’ll make sure to send Sam your regards.”
Hoarsely, she spits, determined to go down like her father taught her, “Fuck off and die, bitch.”
Glaring down at her, the demon’s eyes flare brightly once, and he brings her hand back for the final cut across her throat.
She closes her eyes.
“Jess?”
Sam.
“Jess!” Sam’s voice, his presence coming down the hallway, causes the demon to stop and look over his shoulder.
“This ain’t over yet, sweetie,” the demon hisses before he swirls away into a thousand tiny pieces.
“Jess! Oh, God, no! Jess!” Sam scoops her up, bleeding and limp, into his arms. Through her blurred vision, she can see his wide eyes frantically taking in her cuts, the gun on the bed, and the large knife hanging loosely in her hand.
Dean bursts through the doorway and freezes when he sees her in Sam’s hold.
“I’ll call 911,” he says quickly, reaching for the cell phone in his coat pocket.
“No,” she whispers so soft but enough to make them both stop. She knows that by going to the hospital only questions will arise. The police will be called in to find her attacker and the doctors will want to know the type of weapon used against her. It will all only create more problems than they need.
“No,” she repeats. “The demon. Yellow eyes. You’ve got…got to do it.”
“Did she just say-” Dean begins incredulously.
“Demon?” Sam finishes, staring terrified at her.
Jess nods, barely a bob of her chin. “Ask later. Just,” she sighs as black begins to shadow the corner of her vision, “please…the bleeding…stop.”
And she goes under.
- - - - -
She awakes in a motel room with the sound of traffic a faraway murmur and the curtains on the windows drawn tightly to stop the invading sunlight. Sam is sleeping in the chair beside her bed, and Dean, at a table across the room, is focusing intently on the opened screen of Sam’s laptop. Sam has not changed his clothes since she last saw him; his shirt and pants are covered in her blood.
When she stirs, Dean glances up at her then away as if he is uncomfortable with looking at her for too long.
“Where am I?” she asks sleepily.
“‘Bout half an hour outside city limits. We needed to get you out of there in case the demon decided to return.”
She nods to indicate that she has heard him, and when she shifts, a hot pain flashes across her body, reminding her of why she is here. Tentatively, she reaches down to her stomach and feels the small bumps of stitches. Lifting the edge of her shirt, she sees neat black crisscrosses on her pale skin, and she looks back to Dean. “Sam’s handiwork? Or yours?”
“Mine,” Dean replies humbly. “Sam was too freaked out. Couldn’t handle seeing his girlfriend cut open and knowing that she was a hunter all along. Really laid one on him there, y’know.”
“I’m a lot to handle,” she admits.
In the chair, Sam begins to move, and she reaches over to wrap her fingers around his hand. Instinctively, he squeezes back until he opens his eyes and sees her watching him. His hold loosens when recognition sweeps across his face, and she sees him remember the events of last night.
“Jess,” he murmurs. He pauses as she rubs her thumb over the back of his hand. “Dean and I, we’re going to find that demon that did this to you.”
“All right.”
“You’re going to have to stay here. We’ll wait until you’re on your feet again, but after that, we’ve got to leave and find the demon and our dad.”
“I’m not staying behind.”
He stares at her, perhaps a bit disbelieving that she won’t willingly allow him to leave and that she would knowingly place herself in danger. “You can’t come,” he tells her.
“Look, Sam, this really shouldn’t be that big of a deal. Nothing’s changed between us except now you know. That’s it. Me? Us? That’s all still the same. You’ve always trusted me before. You’ve got to trust me now to hold my own with you guys.”
Sam rises to his feet, pulls his hand away from her and pushes out his chair. “You’re not coming. You’re going to stay here where it’s safe.”
“Sam-” she begins.
“I don’t want to talk about this now,” he tells her sharply, and he walks across the room. He doesn’t look at Dean as he passes by, and when Sam opens the door, a bright flood of light pours in. She squints as Sam disappears outside.
From the table, Dean remains staring at the door like he expects Sam to return immediately, but when a beat passes and Sam remains gone, Dean turns back to her. “He just doesn’t want to see you hurt. We lost our mom to the demon. Sam doesn’t want to lose anything more.”
“I know.”
“Then stay here. It’ll be easier on him.”
“No,” she says. “No, I can’t.”
Dean sighs raggedly and rubs his eyes with the heel of his hand. For the first time, she realizes how exhausted he looks, and she wonders if he’s slept at all since they brought her here. “Goddamit, you’re just as stubborn as he is.”
“Yeah,” she agrees softly.
“Then good luck convincing him otherwise.”
- - - - -
They’ve argued before but never like this. Never so hurtful and angry. They sling words with the intent to draw blood, and they yell like the louder one will walk away the winner.
“You’re not going,” Sam snaps. He returned a few hours after he left and didn’t talk to anyone until the next day.
This is the next day.
“End of story,” he continues. “You’re not going out there and putting your life at risk. It’s too goddamn dangerous.”
She seethes. “This is my fucking fight now too,” she spits. “In case you forgot what that bastard did to me.” She doesn’t need to lift her shirt for them to remember. She doesn’t need to show her puffy red skin separated by a row of knots for them to know what her words mean.
“Dean and I can handle it-”
“And I can’t? Why? Because I’m a girl?”
“Because I don’t want to see you die!” he nearly screams at her.
They stand, staring down one another with fire in their eyes. So determined, so headstrong, so similar.
She can hear Dean pacing over the wooden porch outside. His boots stomp hollowly on the sun-bleached boards. He wanted to leave two hours ago for the next hunt.
“Don’t you think,” she says, “that I’m a helluva lot safer with you than left behind? Alone?”
“You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into.”
“I’m going with you and short of drugging me and tying me to a damn chair, you can’t stop me,” she continues. “I’m just as good as you and Dean anyway.”
They say nothing for a long while, both waiting for the other to speak so the words can be rebutted, bashed away yet again.
Outside, Dean clears his throat. Noisily and awkwardly. Impatiently.
At last Sam sighs, shoulders slumping. He never says, “Okay,” or “Come along.” His silence is his agreement, but even if he didn’t give her permission, she’d join them anyway.
This-them and their demon-is part of her life now too.
- - - - -
She cuts her hair a few days following the first hunt together after her ponytail gets caught in a tree branch and she has to rip her hair just so she can keep running. Using the scissors from the first aid kit, she cuts off her curls in determined hacks. Too dangerous to have hair this long. Too much of a risk. Too much of a life she can’t have right now.
The bathroom door’s ajar, and Sam slowly opens it. “Jess?” he asks cautiously. He may not have agreed with her being here, but he’s slowly coming to terms with it nonetheless.
“In here,” she replies, not stopping. If she stops, she might not finish this. Her hair falls like golden feathers, soft and curved, into the wastebasket.
He stands in the doorway and watches her. Says nothing until she puts the scissors down and faces herself in the mirror.
A girl that is not her stares back.
“Oh,” she breathes, surprised and pained all at once, and she grabs the edge of the sink. No going back now. She’s too far in this hole to climb out now.
Sam comes up from behind her, loops his arms around her and lightly rests his linked fingers on her stomach above the scar. “It’ll be okay,” he murmurs. His kiss against the hollow of her throat is dry and warm.
She remains staring at herself in the mirror. “What did I do?” she asks. It’s meant as a question to her, but Sam answers anyway.
“You did what you thought you needed to do to live in this mess. Made a sacrifice just to get by.”
She lifts a hand, touches the jagged ends of her hair, and rests her palm against Sam’s cheek. Thinks of Sam abandoning his family for a future and of Sam leaving that future to save his family, and she whispers, “Yeah, I guess so.”
- - - - -
Whenever she can, she calls her parents from the road.
“Watch yourself with those boys,” her father warns one afternoon as she’s pressed herself against the glass of a telephone booth while Dean and Sam finish up lunch inside the diner. “If they do anything to you, just let them know they’ll have me to answer to.” Despite all his paternal protections, he never orders her to come home. He understands the allure of the road and the call of the hunt. Understands the need for revenge and blood.
Her father’s knives, which belong to her a little more every day, find a place in the trunk of the Impala beside Dean’s crossbow and Sam’s shotgun. She rides in the backseat of the car with her knees brought to her chest and eyes staring out the window.
From the front seat, Sam and Dean talk in a language all their own. She rests her head against the soft curve of the seat and listens to the rise and fall of their voices over the wind.
- - - - -
In line to pick up her birth control pills and her little shopping basket is filled with other things she doesn’t normally buy with the boys. A box of tampons, lip gloss, a new pack of razors. She splurges and buys a bottle of body spray that catches her eye on the end of an aisle.
She and Sam are always so careful when it comes to sex. She knows the reasons why, knows the rationality well, but she still wonders what a child would be like. What their child would be like.
She pictures a girl with her curls and Sam’s chocolate color, and a boy, tall like his daddy. Their daughter could have Sam’s brilliant mind with the stubbornness of both her parents. Their son might know what his mom and dad did before he’s born with Jess’ eyes and Sam’s laugh.
Jess dreams of what Sam would say if she came home and told him that she had stopped taking her pills. If he’d smile in happiness or frown in disapproval. If he’d take her to bed and say, “All right” or if he’d turn away and not touch her again.
Afterward when Jess walks up the sidewalk to the latest motel, Dean is outside, bent inside his opened car trunk. She can’t see his face, but she recognizes him by his jacket and shoes. He doesn’t look up as she approaches.
“Where’s Sam?” she asks.
“Getting packed,” he answers with his head still inside the trunk.
“New case then.” It’s not really a question.
“Five kids found within the last month with their eyes eaten while in their beds. ‘Bout ten hours from here if we make a straight shot for it.”
She nods, watches him load a round of rock salt into one of his shotguns. The shopping bag snaps noisily against her knees in the breeze.
“Dean?”
“Hmm?”
“Do you, well, do you think Sam would ever want children?” Somehow asking Dean seems easier than asking Sam himself. Safer. Dean will never tell the secrets that are not his to tell, and he knows Sam almost better than she does. Knows different parts that Sam’s kept hidden from her.
Dean’s back stiffens then he stands, careful to avoid hitting his head on the opened trunk lid, and looks at her directly.
“You’re not-I mean-You aren’t…Are you?”
She laughs, a scratchy single note. “No. No, oh God, no. I just-” She stops, crosses her arms around her in an instinctively defensive position. “I was just wondering.”
Before Dean can answer, Sam comes out of the motel room with their weapons bag slung over his shoulder. She looks away.
Dean watches her, gauging her reaction. His eyes are narrowed and focused as he puts away the gun he was loading.
Sam approaches, glances from Dean to her. “You guys in the middle of something?”
Her hands are sweating around the plastic handles of the bag that holds her birth control pills. Before she can answer, Dean slams the lid shut.
“Shit, yes.” He slaps Sam hard on the shoulder, hard enough to make Sam flinch. “Trying to figure out how the hell to prank your hairy ass on this drive. Way to interrupt, Sammy.”
“Oh,” Sam says with a shrug. “Sorry? I guess?”
“You should be,” Jess tells him with a forced grin.
Sam laughs, oblivious, and goes around to the passenger side of the car to climb in his seat. At the back of the car, Dean only rests his hand gently on her back and says, “C’mon, Jessie, we’re burning daylight.”
- - - - -
Her first kill with them is a beheading when the monster grabs Sam by the throat and begins to squeeze the life from him. Dean’s bleeding and unconscious at the bottom of a flight of stairs.
She lifts the machete, lifts it high and swings it fast. When the monster topples to the ground, she can’t help but feel nauseous.
She’s forgotten how warm still-living blood really is. She’s forgotten the way a body will twitch and spasm like it’s crawling across the floor when its head rolls away. She’s forgotten the feeling of ending a life.
It’s not as if she hasn’t killed before. But her father was beside her and her weapon never so heavy. It didn’t seem quite as bad as this.
Back in the motel shower, she turns the water as hot as she can stand it. Watching blood and dirt spiral down the drain, she brings an unsteady hand to her forehead.
God. She’s forgotten so much about this life.
- - - - -
In Chicago, she meets John Winchester. His hair is matted down with the slick shine of blood, and his boys wear flayed claw marks on their faces. She assumes that the throbbing gouges on her face match Sam and Dean’s.
When the four of them stand between their cars, she shakes his hand, looks him square in the eye, and says, “I’ve heard a lot about you, sir.”
And he, the hunter she has only known in stories, the man who is said to kill without mercy or forgiveness, only laughs. He holds her hand in his bloodied own on that Chicago street and looks to Sam and Dean. “You two better take care of her, d’you hear me?”
To her, he smiles, worn and tired like her own father, and says in a warm tone she hadn’t expected, “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you, darlin’.”
- - - - -
When Sam and she fuck, it’s always fast and hard. Never slow and soft like at college when they had all the time in the world to lie together on their bed and learn the planes of each other’s bodies. Now they live with adrenaline in their veins and blood on their hands. Barely enough time to breathe, let alone to love.
Sitting on the sink with her legs spread and jeans on the floor, she asks, “What if Dean comes back?”
Sam slides into her and presses his face against her neck just to catch his pinched breath. It always seems so new every damn time.
“Don’t worry,” he huffs hotly on her skin and damp fabric of her shirt that smells like lake water where they saved that little girl. So close, she can see the dried blood flaking along his hairline, and she watches her dirty fingernails curl over his shoulder as he thrusts into her. Their skin slaps together obscenely, sticky hot in the humidity. “Dean’ll be gone for…a while. We’ve got enough time.” His hand, where it curves over her bare hip, squeezes tightly.
Time. There’s never enough time for anything. Life seems to pass in a flurry of colors and sounds instead of captured moments now. Yet she gasps, “If you say so.” She meets his mouth in a messy kiss and holds on.
- - - - -
They shop from gas stations and thrift stores, and it’s in the middle of a small town Quickie Mart as she picks up another bottle of aspirin that she realizes she’s becoming exactly what her father tried to avoid. As a child, she was taken to the mall for her clothes and department stores for her purchases because her dad didn’t want his daughter growing up with a desire for anything. Even though she dressed the part of a normal teenager at school, she always knew she was different from her peers. Hoped for a sense of belonging at college.
When she comes out of the store holding the small brown bag, Dean is waiting at the car.
She tosses him one of his favorite nudie magazines. “Got ‘cha something,” she says as he catches it. Flipping it over to see the cover with the scantily dressed woman, he laughs in appreciation.
“You know me better than I thought.”
“There’s a box of condoms in the bag too.”
Dean smirks, rolling up the magazine and sliding it in his back pocket for safekeeping. “You really are too good to me.”
“I try,” she replies sarcastically and sits down on the hood. “Where’s Sam anyway?”
“Bathroom.”
Jess nods silently and pulls out one of her own indulgent purchases from the bag. It’s a fancy women’s magazine where a million dollar actress smiles on the front cover, surrounded by headlines that blare how to lose weight and have hot sex tonight with your man. Idly, Jess flips through the glossy pages. She reads them now for entertainment rather than practical purposes.
“You miss it?” Dean says.
“Huh?” Jess murmurs, not catching what he said and looking up at him to see him reading over her shoulder.
“That,” he clarifies with a head nod toward the magazine. “How long did you have it?”
“Most of my life. My dad was the hunter. I mean, he taught my sister and me everything he knew, and he took us hunting a little bit, but he didn’t isolate us from the real world. He wasn’t, well, y’know…”
“He wasn’t our dad,” Dean finishes for her.
“Yeah,” she replies softly. “I had normal for longer than Sam ever did.”
“Do you miss it now? Being out here with us all the time? Not exactly your comfy American dream world.”
“Sometimes, yeah, I guess.”
“Then why not go back?”
She looks up from the magazine, looks past Dean, to see Sam walking across the parking lot with his hands shoved deep in his pockets. He scans the area as he moves, always watching, always observing.
She glances back to Dean. “I have my reasons for staying.”
- - - - -
She goes out on her own when she can. Just to get a cup of hot chocolate and read the newspaper. To wander along a river and sit on mossy rocks, listening to the water’s chatter. To window shop for a pair of red flashy sandals in the latest town she’s been dumped in. Simple things really, but things that she misses while she’s on the road.
She remembers going out on Friday nights with her friends. They laughed and played pool, danced and drank cocktails. Now if she goes to a bar, Sam and Dean are never far behind. She doesn’t wear her cute skirt she got for Christmas or the top she bought on sale at the mall. All she has now are blue jeans and a t-shirt with a hole in the sleeve. Asking the bartender for a martini would be out of the question. Here, they only serve drinks that go well with gunpowder.
- - - - -
After John’s death, she becomes their rock. In a bed at Bobby’s where they have all sought refuge until the brothers can live without grief again, Sam curls up beside her and presses his face to her chest to sob hot tears of pain. “Baby, it’s okay,” she croons, running her fingers through his hair. His skin is flushed from crying.
He wraps his arms around her and whispers, “I don’t know what I’d do if I lost you.”
When Sam falls asleep at last, she sneaks downstairs past Bobby, who’s making scribbled notes in his journal. He only glances up briefly when she goes outside.
Dean is in the shop, trying to concentrate on what appears to be a mangled piece of metal from the remains of the Impala. As she comes around from behind him, there is a stripe of perspiration down the back of his shirt, and his face is shadowed in the setting sun.
“You okay?” she asks once she stands in front of him, shoving her hands in her back pockets.
“Yup.” A lie.
“You wanna talk about it?”
“Nothing to talk ‘bout.”
She sighs. Foolish to think Dean would be willing to open up to her when he won’t even talk to his own brother. At last she whispers, “For what it’s worth, I really am sorry.”
For the first time since John’s passing, Dean looks up and makes eye contact with her. His eyes, wet and bloodshot, give away everything. “Me too.”
- - - - -
They stop at her parents’ house for a weekend. Her dad hugs her and welcomes the boys with a firm handshake. Mom kisses Sam on the cheek and tells Dean it’s good to finally meet him.
Dinner is chicken on the grill with melting vanilla ice cream on top of warm peach cobber that they eat on the picnic table outside. Dean and Sam both have extra helpings of everything, even the steamed vegetables, and Mom laughs and asks if they’re trying to out-eat each other.
Later after dinner once Dean’s gone down to the basement to sleep on the spare cot and watch TV until the early hours of the night, she takes Sam by the hand and leads him up to her old room. They make love, sweet and slow like they haven’t in months, in her old bed where they come silently on pink plaid bedsheets.
When she wakes the next morning, she at first doesn’t recognize this as her room, as her once house and home. She smells bacon and pancakes in the air, and she can hear her mom’s and Dean’s muffled voices coming from the kitchen downstairs.
Sam, with his front pressed to her back, shifts when he feels her stir. He has an arm around her waist; his large hand cups one of her breasts tenderly with his thumb resting on the warm swell of flesh.
“Good morning,” he whispers, head bent to press his lips against her bare shoulder. They’re both still naked from last night, seeing no reason to dress.
She turns her head to meet his lips. She smiles into their kiss. “Morning, Sam.”
- - - - -
Down south where the ocean is cool and sand hot, Jess reclines on a beach towel and watches the waves lap against the sand. Sam and Dean are interviewing a few of the locals for information about the latest hunt, and she smirks whenever Dean not so discreetly ogles any passing cleavage.
She remembers coming here when she was younger. Dad had heard about a black dog tearing up the town and promptly decided that his family needed a vacation. Despite the hunt, the trip remains one of her fonder memories. After the dog was dead, Dad took his daughters to get ice cream. They ate on the shoreline, and Jessica’s sister swore when a seagull stole her ice cream. While Jess and her sister played in the water, Mom helped Dad clean the weapons before putting them away in the car.
Now, Jess lies down on the towel below the white warming sun and naps with the memory fresh in her mind.
- - - - -
It’s after they kill the demon as Sam sits on the grass that she tends to the wound in his arm. She had sewn the tear shut following Jake’s attempt to kill Sam in South Dakota. Sam, hearing Dean’s and her warning screams, had turned around. Instead of a knife in the back, he had received the stab to his upper arm. Painful but survivable.
She shot Jake as he tried to flee into the woods. She fired bullet after bullet into his body even when she knew he was dead until Dean pulled her away, whispering, “Sam’s all right. C’mon now, he’s all right, Jess.”
Now following the demon’s murder as she blots away the blood on Sam’s bicep where he ripped his stitches open during the final battle, he reaches up and takes her by the wrist.
“Hey-” she begins in protest as the bloody rag dangles from her hand.
“You know, a long time ago, I was going to propose,” he tells her groggily. The lack of blood and pain is making him disoriented, and she hopes he didn’t suffer any head injuries when the demon flung him against a tree in the cemetery.
“Oh?” she says, threading a needle to stitch up the flayed part of his arm.
“I was going to marry you, Jessica. I really was.”
“And you can’t now?” she asks playfully, ignoring the hot flutter in her stomach.
“People like us don’t get married. Too short of a life. Too damn dangerous.” He swallows and winces when she pierces his skin with the needle.
She looks to his eyes which stare up at her from beneath his dark hair. “But we can fall in love,” she tells him, “so why can’t we have a future too?”
“Then marry me, Jess,” Sam whispers. “Will you,” he corrects himself, “will you marry me, Jessica?”
She cuts off the end of the thread after she ties the last knot and smiles. When she kisses him, she tastes blood and smoke, but only thinks, This is us. We couldn’t run from it no matter how hard we tried.
- - - - -
She calls her mom afterwards. Dean is napping inside the room and Sam has taken the car to get dinner. Alone, she sits outside the motel and watches the wind roll across the pale, tall grass while the day falls in a soft purple sunset.
Jess tells her mom that the demon’s dead now and that there’s nothing more to fear. No more revenge to be found.
“So you’ll be going back to school?” her mom asks. “Or coming home then?”
Jess smiles around her announcement. How she’s finally found a place where she no longer has to hide any part of herself whether it be her love for dog-eared novels or the thrill of a gun in her hands. She’s finally found that perfect place where she’s safe and free all at once.
Immediately, Mom begins to cry in happiness, and she shouts for Jessica’s father. Jess can hear her mom running to find her dad as she screams, “Quick! Come to the phone! Our daughter’s engaged! Jessie’s getting married!”
- - - - -
One morning when the air is cool and the sun is bright, she goes for a jog on her own. Her hair bounces against her back; it’s almost as long as it was when she was in college. She’s been letting it grow again if for no other reason than she misses it.
When she arrives back at the motel, Sam is waiting for her on the porch steps. His sweatshirt sleeves are pushed up to his elbows, and the ends of his hair are damp like he’s just showered.
He hands her a warm cup of coffee, paper and good, which she recognizes from the restaurant just down the street. Gratefully, she accepts the drink and sips carefully, letting the steam blush her cheeks. The hot liquid feels good against the morning chill.
Sam wraps his arm around her waist. Not protectively, not controlling, just a presence. She leans into him, hard heat and lean muscle, and smells his crisp shampoo and the musty scent of his old sweatshirt.
“You remember this is how we met,” he says, referring to her worn tennis shoes that ran past him so long ago when the sidewalks were safer and the nights quieter.
“That’s what you were supposed to believe,” she replies.
“Oh?” he asks, stopping and looking down at her. He’s framed by the early sun rising, and she has to squint to make eye contact with him.
“Sam,” she says, “there’s something I’ve got to tell you about that.” She pulls him back to her.
He sighs, easy and quiet.
As she walks to the motel room with Sam pressed against her, she thinks of how she never knows what tomorrow will bring for her. Where she will rest her head at night. What they will kill and who they will save. Her future holds so much uncertainty except for this. Except for Sam.
Sam is certain. He is home and he is hers. With him, she has found everything she wants. She doesn’t need to search any longer.
End
Rating: R
Category: AU oneshot
Word Count: 7585
Characters: Jess/Sam, Dean, handfuls of other SPN characters and OCs
Spoilers: S1: “Pilot” and “Shadows;” S2: “In My Time of Dying,” “All Hell Breaks Loose: Parts 1 and 2”
Summary: It takes revenge against a demon and love for a hunter for her to go back to where she began.
Warnings: None
Author’s Notes: Okay. So. This grew from an innocent comment that druffine made in response to a previous story I wrote. Since then, I haven’t been able to keep this idea quiet. (It did grow out of control as the first draft for this topped out at somewhere around 9K words, but it’s been cut quite a bit since then.) While I’m pretty sure this wasn’t anything like she had in mind when she suggested her original idea, it’s all I have to offer. As always, equinox_blue did brainstorming and beta honors. She wanted some things changed in this story, and I chose not to listen, which makes any remaining mistakes mine alone. She tried, she really did. I’m just stubborn. Crossposted around.
Disclaimer: The following characters and situations are used without permission of the creators, owners, and further affiliates of the television show, Supernatural, to whom they rightly belong. I claim only what is mine, and I make no money off what is theirs.
- - - - -
“Are you sure you’re going to be okay?” Dad asks as he follows her down the porch steps with Mom behind him. The sun is high in the early afternoon sky, and he raises a hand to shield his eyes. “We can drive you if you want. Hell,” he continues with a forced chuckle, “you don’t even have to go to college, y’know. I’ll sleep a lot better at night. Do you really want to give your old man a heart attack?”
Even though she knows he’s joking, she can still hear genuine worry resting beneath his sarcasm. As she closes the trunk of her loaded car, she sighs. “I’ve got to do this,” she replies. “I really want to do this.” She turns to face her parents. Mom is pretending not to cry by biting her lower lip and gently dabbing at her eyes with a tissue too damp for its own good. Dad has a tight smile on his weary face. “Really,” she continues, “I’m not that far away anyway. It’s not like I’m going halfway across the country. I’ll still come home for the holidays and an occasional weekend.”
Mom, laughing in spite of her tears, rests a hand on her face and says, “That’s a promise we’ll be keeping you to, young lady.”
Tenderly, she hugs her parents good-bye, breathes in Mom’s perfume one last time and kisses Dad’s dry, unshaven cheek.
As she pulls her keys from her pocket, Dad calls out to her and comes closer.
“Take these with you, please? I really will sleep better knowing you’ve at least got something on your side out there.” He hands her a small leather case worn on the edges and bearing his initials on its top flap.
“You didn’t have to get me anything.” She takes his gift hesitantly. “Don’t worry about me. I know how to take care of myself.”
He kisses her forehead one more time and whispers in that deep and gentle voice of his, “It’s not you I’m worried about. It’s everything else out there.”
Nearly an hour away from home while waiting for a stoplight to change, she opens the case that sits next to her on the passenger seat. When the blades of her father’s best hunting knives catch the sunlight, she can only laugh.
“Oh, Dad,” she says, smiles and turns up the music on her radio. Jessica sings loudly, windows rolled down, feeling free and new.
- - - - -
She sleeps with one of the knives beneath her pillow. The rest she leaves in their case, which she hides at the bottom of her underwear drawer. At night, she salts the window ledges and draws a devil’s trap on the bottom of her bunk in pencil. The gun loaded with silver bullets is rolled up in an old t-shirt that she stuffs among her other clothes.
Jessica’s roommate only knows about the salt when Jess forgets to sweep it off one morning, and that is enough right there.
“What the hell is this shit?” the girl asks, wrinkling her nose when she first notices the fine white lines. She is opening the windows for the morning after they closed them following an unusually cool night. Carefully, she runs her finger through the salt line, stares at it and glances up at Jess through a fringe of black bangs.
“Salt,” Jess answers, trying for nonchalant by not looking up from her English Literature homework.
“Salt?” the girl echoes.
“Yeah.”
There is a beat as the girl realizes that Jess isn’t going to offer anything further. So she shrugs and mumbles, “Oh” before turning away and grabbing her towel for a shower.
The next semester, Jess requests a private room. More money perhaps, but it still gives her the same education only with less questions. It’s just the way she prefers.
- - - - -
His name is Sam.
Samuel Winchester, actually, but no one-except the college office-calls him that. To everyone else, he is just “Sam.” Tall, smiling, intellectual Sam.
Whenever anyone asks Sam about the first time Jessica and he met, Sam tells the story how their morning jogs coincided one day. He recounts their first nervous dinner together and how they walked through the campus park afterward, hand in hand.
Jessica never corrects him on this story. It’s the one that she tells everyone as well. But it really isn’t the truth. Not that she would expect otherwise because she knows well enough that nothing about Sam and her is the truth.
The first time she actually sees Sam is late one night after a home football game. She has just unlocked her room when she hears a high-pitched feminine scream come from the direction of the stadium, which isn’t too far from her building. Quickly, she pulls a pair of her father’s knives from the case and slips her gun down the side of her pants before hurrying back outside.
By the time she arrives at the stadium, someone else is already whispering Latin phrases fluently and spreading rock salt on the battered football field. The girl and whatever attacked her are both gone. This boy, this Sam, is the only person in the stadium.
Keeping herself hidden, Jess watches him finish the job. Curiously, she follows him unnoticed back to his dorm room where she waits outside until the next morning. Instead of going to class, he appears from the building in a faded t-shirt and track pants. She watches his back round the building as he begins on what she will learn is his daily jog.
Three days later, she starts running the same route to emerge into his life as a force to be reckoned with.
She expects him to be like the other hunters she’s met. As bitter and drained as her father’s friends and as cold and antisocial as the friends’ children.
She doesn’t expect Sam to be so warm and friendly. So funny and relaxed. She doesn’t expect to actually fall for Sam Winchester.
- - - - -
“Winchester?” Dad repeats as they sit around the table for Thanksgiving dinner. “Sam?” It’s just Dad, Mom, and Jess. Jessica’s older sister is at the in-laws for the day and can’t make it to the family dinner. The table seems smaller with only three.
“You ever heard anything about his family?” Jess asks.
Dad pauses before answering, thinking. “I’ve heard of a John Winchester-any relation?”
Jessica nods and swallows a forkful of mashed potatoes. “That’s his dad. I don’t think they get along though. Sam doesn’t like to talk about him.”
“John’s good, but he’s also got a temper and is stubborn and impatient as hell. We met once…a long time ago. When I was still hunting full-time, you realize.”
Jess murmurs in agreement. Even though her dad spent the majority of his younger years teaching his daughters about hunting by taking them on the occasional case, he also left while he still had enough sanity to live peacefully with his girls and wife. Secretly, Jessica thinks he regrets his decision to leave that life of adrenaline and danger for one where he weeds the gardens on Saturday and attends church on Sunday.
“You should invite Sam over for Christmas,” Mom suggests. “Doesn’t sound like he’s got the best family life if he and his dad don’t get along. Does he have any siblings?”
“An older brother. I don’t think they parted on bad terms, but,” Jess sighs, “he just doesn’t like to talk about his family. It’s like this big closed book with him. I was going to invite him over here today, but I didn’t know if you would mind. It would’ve been too last minute anyway.”
“Mind?” Mom echoes in surprise as if Jessica’s said something offensive. “Of course not. Like I said, Christmastime-or whenever you come home next-bring him with you.”
“Just as long as Dad promises not to discuss hunting. Sam has no idea about that in my life. He doesn’t even know I know about him. I’d rather keep him innocent as long as possible.”
Dad grins. “I’ll be on my best behavior. Cross my heart, Jessie. Invite him over. I’d just like to meet the boy that’s got my daughter all love-struck.”
- - - - -
When they move in together, Jess decides to hide her knives and gun from Sam. She feels naked without the constant presence of a blade beneath her head at night, but she knows that Sam will not hesitate to ask questions. Added to that fact that they sleep in the same bed, hiding such a weapon will prove to be difficult. She stops trailing salt along the window ledges and dumps the bottle of holy water she keeps in the refrigerator. The knives and gun go with a pair of boots she never wears, and she shoves them in the bottom of her closet beneath stacks of old papers.
For the first few nights, she doesn’t sleep and paces their apartment. Hunting has been a part of her life for so long that she doesn’t know how to shut off that part of her brain. Every noise belongs to a monster and every breath is that of Death knocking on their door.
She considers telling Sam the truth. Considers sitting him down and pulling out all her weapons. While she shops, she plans what she would say to him. She would tell him that she was raised as a hunter. That her father and his father before him hunted the monsters of the night. She never went without, never wanted for anything while growing up, but she chose to go to college for a chance at something greater than hunting. To finally find a place where she fit in.
After she has planned her speech, she comes home to find Sam delighted with the simplest, most normal things or disgusted with a memory of his family. He never explains his delight, never elaborates on his disgust, but she knows that she can’t take this away from him. This life-no matter how falsely he’s constructed it-is not hers to steal.
So she keeps silent, and she lies for his happiness.
But when Sam sleeps and she cannot on the nights when the moon is full, she leans over him and kisses his forehead. Brushes his hair from his eyes and whispers, “Christo.” She always holds her breath, always waits for him to flinch and swear, but he never does. Only sleeps on peacefully. Only sleeps unaware of everything she knows.
- - - - -
“Did Sam ever tell you his mother died?” Dad asks on the phone. He has called her out of nowhere during her lunch. Sam is at class, and she has the entire apartment to herself.
“When he was a baby. I think he said in a house fire?” Jess replies with the phone cradled between her ear and shoulder. She’s cutting an orange, and the juice pools on the cutting board and runs across the countertop. She gave up trying not to make a mess about five minutes ago.
“Not just a house fire. I made some calls to a few old friends. They think it was a demon. At least, that’s what John seemed to think, and all signs point to it being a demon. Cattle deaths, abnormal electrical activity, the works. Sam’s mom-Mary-was found pinned to the ceiling with her abdomen sliced open. She burst into flames before John had a chance to save her.”
“God,” Jess whispers, horrified.
“Now, the demon hasn’t attacked the family in years, and nobody’s heard of anything like that happening since then, but I just want you to be extra careful.”
“How can it be stopped? Silver bullets? Exorcisms?”
“I don’t think so. Seems like it’s a higher-level demon. Holy water might hurt it, but I don’t think it’ll stop it. Just,” Dad sighs, and she can picture him wiping his hand across his face, “just please promise you’ll be careful. You still have your weapons?”
“Yeah, I do. If I get time this week, I’ll swing by the library. See if I can find out anything about demons.” She pulls a bowl from the cupboard and drops her pieces of orange into it. “I’ll give you a call later. I’ve got two exams though, so it might be a while.”
“All right, honey. Your mom’s calling me. Something about the damn sink. I swear it’s possessed. I’ll talk to you later, okay?”
“Okay, Dad. I love you.”
“Love you too, sweetie.”
- - - - -
The night Sam leaves with his brother, Jessica lines the windows with salt again. She draws a devil’s trap above her bed with a shaking hand and sharpens her blades until they gleam in the darkness.
If John Winchester truly is missing, she thinks, then whatever got him has to be completely evil. Evil enough that he couldn’t fight back to save himself. Perhaps the demon that killed his wife has returned for him after all these years.
When she sleeps, it’s only fitfully, and she doesn’t loosen her hold on her father’s knife for all the time that Sam is gone. She leaves a message on his phone but keeps it short and vague. More than anything, she wants to tell him that she knows, that she understands, and that she should be by his side rather than left behind.
But she never does. Perhaps she’s worrying about nothing. Maybe John Winchester really is drunk somewhere and just needs his boys to give him a lift home.
Still. She wears her hunting clothes constantly, never bothering to change into pajamas or a pair of dressy heels. She keeps a knife in one hand and a gun on the nightstand beside her bed just in case. Just because she doesn’t really know.
Looking back, she’ll think that no one really could have known.
- - - - -
When it comes for her, when the monster that murdered Mary Winchester comes for her, Jessica is ready. She knows it’s on her doorstep when her bedside lamp flickers and dies and when the clock on the opposite wall stops moving its long and skinny hands.
The demon steps over her salt lines, walks right up to her and sneers in her face. He looks like just a man, not much older than her father, but she knows better when she smells the acrid smoke on his breath.
“Jessica,” he whispers, lips curling as he runs his fingers through her hair. “Just the girl I was looking for.”
He mocks her as she spouts her Latin exorcisms and protective prayers. When she tries to splash holy water on him, he forces her to lift her hand that holds the knife. She watches in horror as her hand, no longer under her control, slashes long marks across her abdomen.
The blood gushes instantly through her shirt and runs down her jeans in hot rivulets. Choking on the pain, she staggers for a moment before collapsing to her knees in front of the demon.
The demon strolls up to her, grinning, and raises her hand to her throat. She can feel the wet blade pressing against her jugular. Her own blood falls from the metal onto the rug she bought with Sam less than a month ago.
“Good night, precious,” the demon whispers with a wink, “it’s been fun. I’ll make sure to send Sam your regards.”
Hoarsely, she spits, determined to go down like her father taught her, “Fuck off and die, bitch.”
Glaring down at her, the demon’s eyes flare brightly once, and he brings her hand back for the final cut across her throat.
She closes her eyes.
“Jess?”
Sam.
“Jess!” Sam’s voice, his presence coming down the hallway, causes the demon to stop and look over his shoulder.
“This ain’t over yet, sweetie,” the demon hisses before he swirls away into a thousand tiny pieces.
“Jess! Oh, God, no! Jess!” Sam scoops her up, bleeding and limp, into his arms. Through her blurred vision, she can see his wide eyes frantically taking in her cuts, the gun on the bed, and the large knife hanging loosely in her hand.
Dean bursts through the doorway and freezes when he sees her in Sam’s hold.
“I’ll call 911,” he says quickly, reaching for the cell phone in his coat pocket.
“No,” she whispers so soft but enough to make them both stop. She knows that by going to the hospital only questions will arise. The police will be called in to find her attacker and the doctors will want to know the type of weapon used against her. It will all only create more problems than they need.
“No,” she repeats. “The demon. Yellow eyes. You’ve got…got to do it.”
“Did she just say-” Dean begins incredulously.
“Demon?” Sam finishes, staring terrified at her.
Jess nods, barely a bob of her chin. “Ask later. Just,” she sighs as black begins to shadow the corner of her vision, “please…the bleeding…stop.”
And she goes under.
- - - - -
She awakes in a motel room with the sound of traffic a faraway murmur and the curtains on the windows drawn tightly to stop the invading sunlight. Sam is sleeping in the chair beside her bed, and Dean, at a table across the room, is focusing intently on the opened screen of Sam’s laptop. Sam has not changed his clothes since she last saw him; his shirt and pants are covered in her blood.
When she stirs, Dean glances up at her then away as if he is uncomfortable with looking at her for too long.
“Where am I?” she asks sleepily.
“‘Bout half an hour outside city limits. We needed to get you out of there in case the demon decided to return.”
She nods to indicate that she has heard him, and when she shifts, a hot pain flashes across her body, reminding her of why she is here. Tentatively, she reaches down to her stomach and feels the small bumps of stitches. Lifting the edge of her shirt, she sees neat black crisscrosses on her pale skin, and she looks back to Dean. “Sam’s handiwork? Or yours?”
“Mine,” Dean replies humbly. “Sam was too freaked out. Couldn’t handle seeing his girlfriend cut open and knowing that she was a hunter all along. Really laid one on him there, y’know.”
“I’m a lot to handle,” she admits.
In the chair, Sam begins to move, and she reaches over to wrap her fingers around his hand. Instinctively, he squeezes back until he opens his eyes and sees her watching him. His hold loosens when recognition sweeps across his face, and she sees him remember the events of last night.
“Jess,” he murmurs. He pauses as she rubs her thumb over the back of his hand. “Dean and I, we’re going to find that demon that did this to you.”
“All right.”
“You’re going to have to stay here. We’ll wait until you’re on your feet again, but after that, we’ve got to leave and find the demon and our dad.”
“I’m not staying behind.”
He stares at her, perhaps a bit disbelieving that she won’t willingly allow him to leave and that she would knowingly place herself in danger. “You can’t come,” he tells her.
“Look, Sam, this really shouldn’t be that big of a deal. Nothing’s changed between us except now you know. That’s it. Me? Us? That’s all still the same. You’ve always trusted me before. You’ve got to trust me now to hold my own with you guys.”
Sam rises to his feet, pulls his hand away from her and pushes out his chair. “You’re not coming. You’re going to stay here where it’s safe.”
“Sam-” she begins.
“I don’t want to talk about this now,” he tells her sharply, and he walks across the room. He doesn’t look at Dean as he passes by, and when Sam opens the door, a bright flood of light pours in. She squints as Sam disappears outside.
From the table, Dean remains staring at the door like he expects Sam to return immediately, but when a beat passes and Sam remains gone, Dean turns back to her. “He just doesn’t want to see you hurt. We lost our mom to the demon. Sam doesn’t want to lose anything more.”
“I know.”
“Then stay here. It’ll be easier on him.”
“No,” she says. “No, I can’t.”
Dean sighs raggedly and rubs his eyes with the heel of his hand. For the first time, she realizes how exhausted he looks, and she wonders if he’s slept at all since they brought her here. “Goddamit, you’re just as stubborn as he is.”
“Yeah,” she agrees softly.
“Then good luck convincing him otherwise.”
- - - - -
They’ve argued before but never like this. Never so hurtful and angry. They sling words with the intent to draw blood, and they yell like the louder one will walk away the winner.
“You’re not going,” Sam snaps. He returned a few hours after he left and didn’t talk to anyone until the next day.
This is the next day.
“End of story,” he continues. “You’re not going out there and putting your life at risk. It’s too goddamn dangerous.”
She seethes. “This is my fucking fight now too,” she spits. “In case you forgot what that bastard did to me.” She doesn’t need to lift her shirt for them to remember. She doesn’t need to show her puffy red skin separated by a row of knots for them to know what her words mean.
“Dean and I can handle it-”
“And I can’t? Why? Because I’m a girl?”
“Because I don’t want to see you die!” he nearly screams at her.
They stand, staring down one another with fire in their eyes. So determined, so headstrong, so similar.
She can hear Dean pacing over the wooden porch outside. His boots stomp hollowly on the sun-bleached boards. He wanted to leave two hours ago for the next hunt.
“Don’t you think,” she says, “that I’m a helluva lot safer with you than left behind? Alone?”
“You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into.”
“I’m going with you and short of drugging me and tying me to a damn chair, you can’t stop me,” she continues. “I’m just as good as you and Dean anyway.”
They say nothing for a long while, both waiting for the other to speak so the words can be rebutted, bashed away yet again.
Outside, Dean clears his throat. Noisily and awkwardly. Impatiently.
At last Sam sighs, shoulders slumping. He never says, “Okay,” or “Come along.” His silence is his agreement, but even if he didn’t give her permission, she’d join them anyway.
This-them and their demon-is part of her life now too.
- - - - -
She cuts her hair a few days following the first hunt together after her ponytail gets caught in a tree branch and she has to rip her hair just so she can keep running. Using the scissors from the first aid kit, she cuts off her curls in determined hacks. Too dangerous to have hair this long. Too much of a risk. Too much of a life she can’t have right now.
The bathroom door’s ajar, and Sam slowly opens it. “Jess?” he asks cautiously. He may not have agreed with her being here, but he’s slowly coming to terms with it nonetheless.
“In here,” she replies, not stopping. If she stops, she might not finish this. Her hair falls like golden feathers, soft and curved, into the wastebasket.
He stands in the doorway and watches her. Says nothing until she puts the scissors down and faces herself in the mirror.
A girl that is not her stares back.
“Oh,” she breathes, surprised and pained all at once, and she grabs the edge of the sink. No going back now. She’s too far in this hole to climb out now.
Sam comes up from behind her, loops his arms around her and lightly rests his linked fingers on her stomach above the scar. “It’ll be okay,” he murmurs. His kiss against the hollow of her throat is dry and warm.
She remains staring at herself in the mirror. “What did I do?” she asks. It’s meant as a question to her, but Sam answers anyway.
“You did what you thought you needed to do to live in this mess. Made a sacrifice just to get by.”
She lifts a hand, touches the jagged ends of her hair, and rests her palm against Sam’s cheek. Thinks of Sam abandoning his family for a future and of Sam leaving that future to save his family, and she whispers, “Yeah, I guess so.”
- - - - -
Whenever she can, she calls her parents from the road.
“Watch yourself with those boys,” her father warns one afternoon as she’s pressed herself against the glass of a telephone booth while Dean and Sam finish up lunch inside the diner. “If they do anything to you, just let them know they’ll have me to answer to.” Despite all his paternal protections, he never orders her to come home. He understands the allure of the road and the call of the hunt. Understands the need for revenge and blood.
Her father’s knives, which belong to her a little more every day, find a place in the trunk of the Impala beside Dean’s crossbow and Sam’s shotgun. She rides in the backseat of the car with her knees brought to her chest and eyes staring out the window.
From the front seat, Sam and Dean talk in a language all their own. She rests her head against the soft curve of the seat and listens to the rise and fall of their voices over the wind.
- - - - -
In line to pick up her birth control pills and her little shopping basket is filled with other things she doesn’t normally buy with the boys. A box of tampons, lip gloss, a new pack of razors. She splurges and buys a bottle of body spray that catches her eye on the end of an aisle.
She and Sam are always so careful when it comes to sex. She knows the reasons why, knows the rationality well, but she still wonders what a child would be like. What their child would be like.
She pictures a girl with her curls and Sam’s chocolate color, and a boy, tall like his daddy. Their daughter could have Sam’s brilliant mind with the stubbornness of both her parents. Their son might know what his mom and dad did before he’s born with Jess’ eyes and Sam’s laugh.
Jess dreams of what Sam would say if she came home and told him that she had stopped taking her pills. If he’d smile in happiness or frown in disapproval. If he’d take her to bed and say, “All right” or if he’d turn away and not touch her again.
Afterward when Jess walks up the sidewalk to the latest motel, Dean is outside, bent inside his opened car trunk. She can’t see his face, but she recognizes him by his jacket and shoes. He doesn’t look up as she approaches.
“Where’s Sam?” she asks.
“Getting packed,” he answers with his head still inside the trunk.
“New case then.” It’s not really a question.
“Five kids found within the last month with their eyes eaten while in their beds. ‘Bout ten hours from here if we make a straight shot for it.”
She nods, watches him load a round of rock salt into one of his shotguns. The shopping bag snaps noisily against her knees in the breeze.
“Dean?”
“Hmm?”
“Do you, well, do you think Sam would ever want children?” Somehow asking Dean seems easier than asking Sam himself. Safer. Dean will never tell the secrets that are not his to tell, and he knows Sam almost better than she does. Knows different parts that Sam’s kept hidden from her.
Dean’s back stiffens then he stands, careful to avoid hitting his head on the opened trunk lid, and looks at her directly.
“You’re not-I mean-You aren’t…Are you?”
She laughs, a scratchy single note. “No. No, oh God, no. I just-” She stops, crosses her arms around her in an instinctively defensive position. “I was just wondering.”
Before Dean can answer, Sam comes out of the motel room with their weapons bag slung over his shoulder. She looks away.
Dean watches her, gauging her reaction. His eyes are narrowed and focused as he puts away the gun he was loading.
Sam approaches, glances from Dean to her. “You guys in the middle of something?”
Her hands are sweating around the plastic handles of the bag that holds her birth control pills. Before she can answer, Dean slams the lid shut.
“Shit, yes.” He slaps Sam hard on the shoulder, hard enough to make Sam flinch. “Trying to figure out how the hell to prank your hairy ass on this drive. Way to interrupt, Sammy.”
“Oh,” Sam says with a shrug. “Sorry? I guess?”
“You should be,” Jess tells him with a forced grin.
Sam laughs, oblivious, and goes around to the passenger side of the car to climb in his seat. At the back of the car, Dean only rests his hand gently on her back and says, “C’mon, Jessie, we’re burning daylight.”
- - - - -
Her first kill with them is a beheading when the monster grabs Sam by the throat and begins to squeeze the life from him. Dean’s bleeding and unconscious at the bottom of a flight of stairs.
She lifts the machete, lifts it high and swings it fast. When the monster topples to the ground, she can’t help but feel nauseous.
She’s forgotten how warm still-living blood really is. She’s forgotten the way a body will twitch and spasm like it’s crawling across the floor when its head rolls away. She’s forgotten the feeling of ending a life.
It’s not as if she hasn’t killed before. But her father was beside her and her weapon never so heavy. It didn’t seem quite as bad as this.
Back in the motel shower, she turns the water as hot as she can stand it. Watching blood and dirt spiral down the drain, she brings an unsteady hand to her forehead.
God. She’s forgotten so much about this life.
- - - - -
In Chicago, she meets John Winchester. His hair is matted down with the slick shine of blood, and his boys wear flayed claw marks on their faces. She assumes that the throbbing gouges on her face match Sam and Dean’s.
When the four of them stand between their cars, she shakes his hand, looks him square in the eye, and says, “I’ve heard a lot about you, sir.”
And he, the hunter she has only known in stories, the man who is said to kill without mercy or forgiveness, only laughs. He holds her hand in his bloodied own on that Chicago street and looks to Sam and Dean. “You two better take care of her, d’you hear me?”
To her, he smiles, worn and tired like her own father, and says in a warm tone she hadn’t expected, “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you, darlin’.”
- - - - -
When Sam and she fuck, it’s always fast and hard. Never slow and soft like at college when they had all the time in the world to lie together on their bed and learn the planes of each other’s bodies. Now they live with adrenaline in their veins and blood on their hands. Barely enough time to breathe, let alone to love.
Sitting on the sink with her legs spread and jeans on the floor, she asks, “What if Dean comes back?”
Sam slides into her and presses his face against her neck just to catch his pinched breath. It always seems so new every damn time.
“Don’t worry,” he huffs hotly on her skin and damp fabric of her shirt that smells like lake water where they saved that little girl. So close, she can see the dried blood flaking along his hairline, and she watches her dirty fingernails curl over his shoulder as he thrusts into her. Their skin slaps together obscenely, sticky hot in the humidity. “Dean’ll be gone for…a while. We’ve got enough time.” His hand, where it curves over her bare hip, squeezes tightly.
Time. There’s never enough time for anything. Life seems to pass in a flurry of colors and sounds instead of captured moments now. Yet she gasps, “If you say so.” She meets his mouth in a messy kiss and holds on.
- - - - -
They shop from gas stations and thrift stores, and it’s in the middle of a small town Quickie Mart as she picks up another bottle of aspirin that she realizes she’s becoming exactly what her father tried to avoid. As a child, she was taken to the mall for her clothes and department stores for her purchases because her dad didn’t want his daughter growing up with a desire for anything. Even though she dressed the part of a normal teenager at school, she always knew she was different from her peers. Hoped for a sense of belonging at college.
When she comes out of the store holding the small brown bag, Dean is waiting at the car.
She tosses him one of his favorite nudie magazines. “Got ‘cha something,” she says as he catches it. Flipping it over to see the cover with the scantily dressed woman, he laughs in appreciation.
“You know me better than I thought.”
“There’s a box of condoms in the bag too.”
Dean smirks, rolling up the magazine and sliding it in his back pocket for safekeeping. “You really are too good to me.”
“I try,” she replies sarcastically and sits down on the hood. “Where’s Sam anyway?”
“Bathroom.”
Jess nods silently and pulls out one of her own indulgent purchases from the bag. It’s a fancy women’s magazine where a million dollar actress smiles on the front cover, surrounded by headlines that blare how to lose weight and have hot sex tonight with your man. Idly, Jess flips through the glossy pages. She reads them now for entertainment rather than practical purposes.
“You miss it?” Dean says.
“Huh?” Jess murmurs, not catching what he said and looking up at him to see him reading over her shoulder.
“That,” he clarifies with a head nod toward the magazine. “How long did you have it?”
“Most of my life. My dad was the hunter. I mean, he taught my sister and me everything he knew, and he took us hunting a little bit, but he didn’t isolate us from the real world. He wasn’t, well, y’know…”
“He wasn’t our dad,” Dean finishes for her.
“Yeah,” she replies softly. “I had normal for longer than Sam ever did.”
“Do you miss it now? Being out here with us all the time? Not exactly your comfy American dream world.”
“Sometimes, yeah, I guess.”
“Then why not go back?”
She looks up from the magazine, looks past Dean, to see Sam walking across the parking lot with his hands shoved deep in his pockets. He scans the area as he moves, always watching, always observing.
She glances back to Dean. “I have my reasons for staying.”
- - - - -
She goes out on her own when she can. Just to get a cup of hot chocolate and read the newspaper. To wander along a river and sit on mossy rocks, listening to the water’s chatter. To window shop for a pair of red flashy sandals in the latest town she’s been dumped in. Simple things really, but things that she misses while she’s on the road.
She remembers going out on Friday nights with her friends. They laughed and played pool, danced and drank cocktails. Now if she goes to a bar, Sam and Dean are never far behind. She doesn’t wear her cute skirt she got for Christmas or the top she bought on sale at the mall. All she has now are blue jeans and a t-shirt with a hole in the sleeve. Asking the bartender for a martini would be out of the question. Here, they only serve drinks that go well with gunpowder.
- - - - -
After John’s death, she becomes their rock. In a bed at Bobby’s where they have all sought refuge until the brothers can live without grief again, Sam curls up beside her and presses his face to her chest to sob hot tears of pain. “Baby, it’s okay,” she croons, running her fingers through his hair. His skin is flushed from crying.
He wraps his arms around her and whispers, “I don’t know what I’d do if I lost you.”
When Sam falls asleep at last, she sneaks downstairs past Bobby, who’s making scribbled notes in his journal. He only glances up briefly when she goes outside.
Dean is in the shop, trying to concentrate on what appears to be a mangled piece of metal from the remains of the Impala. As she comes around from behind him, there is a stripe of perspiration down the back of his shirt, and his face is shadowed in the setting sun.
“You okay?” she asks once she stands in front of him, shoving her hands in her back pockets.
“Yup.” A lie.
“You wanna talk about it?”
“Nothing to talk ‘bout.”
She sighs. Foolish to think Dean would be willing to open up to her when he won’t even talk to his own brother. At last she whispers, “For what it’s worth, I really am sorry.”
For the first time since John’s passing, Dean looks up and makes eye contact with her. His eyes, wet and bloodshot, give away everything. “Me too.”
- - - - -
They stop at her parents’ house for a weekend. Her dad hugs her and welcomes the boys with a firm handshake. Mom kisses Sam on the cheek and tells Dean it’s good to finally meet him.
Dinner is chicken on the grill with melting vanilla ice cream on top of warm peach cobber that they eat on the picnic table outside. Dean and Sam both have extra helpings of everything, even the steamed vegetables, and Mom laughs and asks if they’re trying to out-eat each other.
Later after dinner once Dean’s gone down to the basement to sleep on the spare cot and watch TV until the early hours of the night, she takes Sam by the hand and leads him up to her old room. They make love, sweet and slow like they haven’t in months, in her old bed where they come silently on pink plaid bedsheets.
When she wakes the next morning, she at first doesn’t recognize this as her room, as her once house and home. She smells bacon and pancakes in the air, and she can hear her mom’s and Dean’s muffled voices coming from the kitchen downstairs.
Sam, with his front pressed to her back, shifts when he feels her stir. He has an arm around her waist; his large hand cups one of her breasts tenderly with his thumb resting on the warm swell of flesh.
“Good morning,” he whispers, head bent to press his lips against her bare shoulder. They’re both still naked from last night, seeing no reason to dress.
She turns her head to meet his lips. She smiles into their kiss. “Morning, Sam.”
- - - - -
Down south where the ocean is cool and sand hot, Jess reclines on a beach towel and watches the waves lap against the sand. Sam and Dean are interviewing a few of the locals for information about the latest hunt, and she smirks whenever Dean not so discreetly ogles any passing cleavage.
She remembers coming here when she was younger. Dad had heard about a black dog tearing up the town and promptly decided that his family needed a vacation. Despite the hunt, the trip remains one of her fonder memories. After the dog was dead, Dad took his daughters to get ice cream. They ate on the shoreline, and Jessica’s sister swore when a seagull stole her ice cream. While Jess and her sister played in the water, Mom helped Dad clean the weapons before putting them away in the car.
Now, Jess lies down on the towel below the white warming sun and naps with the memory fresh in her mind.
- - - - -
It’s after they kill the demon as Sam sits on the grass that she tends to the wound in his arm. She had sewn the tear shut following Jake’s attempt to kill Sam in South Dakota. Sam, hearing Dean’s and her warning screams, had turned around. Instead of a knife in the back, he had received the stab to his upper arm. Painful but survivable.
She shot Jake as he tried to flee into the woods. She fired bullet after bullet into his body even when she knew he was dead until Dean pulled her away, whispering, “Sam’s all right. C’mon now, he’s all right, Jess.”
Now following the demon’s murder as she blots away the blood on Sam’s bicep where he ripped his stitches open during the final battle, he reaches up and takes her by the wrist.
“Hey-” she begins in protest as the bloody rag dangles from her hand.
“You know, a long time ago, I was going to propose,” he tells her groggily. The lack of blood and pain is making him disoriented, and she hopes he didn’t suffer any head injuries when the demon flung him against a tree in the cemetery.
“Oh?” she says, threading a needle to stitch up the flayed part of his arm.
“I was going to marry you, Jessica. I really was.”
“And you can’t now?” she asks playfully, ignoring the hot flutter in her stomach.
“People like us don’t get married. Too short of a life. Too damn dangerous.” He swallows and winces when she pierces his skin with the needle.
She looks to his eyes which stare up at her from beneath his dark hair. “But we can fall in love,” she tells him, “so why can’t we have a future too?”
“Then marry me, Jess,” Sam whispers. “Will you,” he corrects himself, “will you marry me, Jessica?”
She cuts off the end of the thread after she ties the last knot and smiles. When she kisses him, she tastes blood and smoke, but only thinks, This is us. We couldn’t run from it no matter how hard we tried.
- - - - -
She calls her mom afterwards. Dean is napping inside the room and Sam has taken the car to get dinner. Alone, she sits outside the motel and watches the wind roll across the pale, tall grass while the day falls in a soft purple sunset.
Jess tells her mom that the demon’s dead now and that there’s nothing more to fear. No more revenge to be found.
“So you’ll be going back to school?” her mom asks. “Or coming home then?”
Jess smiles around her announcement. How she’s finally found a place where she no longer has to hide any part of herself whether it be her love for dog-eared novels or the thrill of a gun in her hands. She’s finally found that perfect place where she’s safe and free all at once.
Immediately, Mom begins to cry in happiness, and she shouts for Jessica’s father. Jess can hear her mom running to find her dad as she screams, “Quick! Come to the phone! Our daughter’s engaged! Jessie’s getting married!”
- - - - -
One morning when the air is cool and the sun is bright, she goes for a jog on her own. Her hair bounces against her back; it’s almost as long as it was when she was in college. She’s been letting it grow again if for no other reason than she misses it.
When she arrives back at the motel, Sam is waiting for her on the porch steps. His sweatshirt sleeves are pushed up to his elbows, and the ends of his hair are damp like he’s just showered.
He hands her a warm cup of coffee, paper and good, which she recognizes from the restaurant just down the street. Gratefully, she accepts the drink and sips carefully, letting the steam blush her cheeks. The hot liquid feels good against the morning chill.
Sam wraps his arm around her waist. Not protectively, not controlling, just a presence. She leans into him, hard heat and lean muscle, and smells his crisp shampoo and the musty scent of his old sweatshirt.
“You remember this is how we met,” he says, referring to her worn tennis shoes that ran past him so long ago when the sidewalks were safer and the nights quieter.
“That’s what you were supposed to believe,” she replies.
“Oh?” he asks, stopping and looking down at her. He’s framed by the early sun rising, and she has to squint to make eye contact with him.
“Sam,” she says, “there’s something I’ve got to tell you about that.” She pulls him back to her.
He sighs, easy and quiet.
As she walks to the motel room with Sam pressed against her, she thinks of how she never knows what tomorrow will bring for her. Where she will rest her head at night. What they will kill and who they will save. Her future holds so much uncertainty except for this. Except for Sam.
Sam is certain. He is home and he is hers. With him, she has found everything she wants. She doesn’t need to search any longer.
End