Fic: Not Dead Yet
Title: Not Dead Yet
Gifter: Alyndra
Pairing/Characters: Jess/Sam
Word count/Medium: 3.8k
Rating: G
Warnings: None
Summary: Jess gets kicked from the apocalyse-world to this one. Who is Sam Winchester?
Spoilers: through the end of Season 12; no Season 13 material is used.
Notes: Written for SPN-J2-Xmas on Livejournal, for madebyme_x who said she liked Sam/Jess, AUs, apocalypse, happy endings, domestic feels, outsider POV, the Impala, the Bunker, and Stanford Era, among other things! And then I never even got to the actual prompts, but I hope you like it anyway, and can forgive me its lateness and that there's a much longer fic shining through the seams here than is written!
ETA: And I hadn't even noticed that SHE'D ALREADY WRITTEN SAM MEETING APOCALYPSE!JESS! Check it out! It's delightful and makes a neat opposite to this one!
Thanks to dugindeep for uber-last-minute heroism in betaing for me, you're a life-saver!
AO3 link
OR
The universe has certain rules.
There are parallel realities, but they require balancing to continue to run parallel.
For a soul to reside in a reality other than its own, there must be an equal and opposite reaction.
When one door closes, another door opens.
In the moment after the rift caused by Jack's birth closed with Lucifer and Mary on the side not their own, another rift opened.
In a cookie-cutter suburban house in southern California, it destroyed half the living room and the coat closet, and two figures stumbled out of it. The rift closed immediately with a whoosh like big-city commuter trains, like a huffy housewife dumping the neighbor's kids back at their own door after unsorting them from her own.
One of the newcomers was blonde, female, tall. She wore rough canvas clothing like armor and carried a rifle, which she swung around suspiciously as she searched for threats.
Finding none, she turned to her companion. He was tall enough to make her look average by comparison, hair black and face stony. He carried only a slender silver blade, but stood with a confidence that said he didn't need it.
"Archangel Michael, sir?" she asked. "Where are we?"
"I will assess the situation," he pronounced. "Remain here and wait." With a flutter of air, he disappeared.
The woman waited five seconds, then tore the front door open. With one sweeping glance around, she darted out into the street. There were only occasional cars; houses stretched as far as she could see, all neat and trim instead of war-torn, decaying husks. "Like I'm waiting for him," she muttered to herself. "Self-righteous asshole can fuck off forever."
Clearly, no apocalypse had touched this neighborhood. Which meant-she hoped it meant-no apocalypse had happened to the rest of the world, either. Everything was different now.
Her parents. Her parents could still be alive here. Her sister, her friends-she had to find a phone.
There probably had been a phone in the house she'd just left, but she wanted to put it as far behind her as possible; firstly in case Michael came back, and secondly in case regular people-homeowners or neighbors, she didn't know if anyone had been nearby and she didn't care-started noticing the damage from the rift and thought she'd been breaking and entering, emphasis on the breaking.
She trotted down the sidewalk. Nobody else was jogging this time of day, and if they had been they wouldn't have been wearing clothes designed to be thick and durable and blend into a dusty wasteland.
Or carrying a gun. If this was truly a world without any apocalypse, she should abandon it; she wouldn't need it, and it would make her stand out, make people suspicious and maybe even get the cops called on her. The best way to get a phone was simply to ask a stranger, yet seeing a gun would make strangers wary.
Well, too bad if it would be easier; she'd been sleeping with her gun for the past four years, and she wasn't going to just drop it like trash. Besides, she didn't know anything about this world: it might not be as peaceful as it looked.
She got to a street she recognized. Ironically, she wasn't far from Stanford. And she knew where to find a phone on campus.
"Hello?"
"Mom?"
Silence for a beat. And then… "This is a very bad idea of a joke, and if you don't tell me who you are in the next two seconds, I am hanging up this phone…"
"No, wait, please don't hang up…" It was her mother's voice. She was alive, she could go see her, and Dad… "I swear this isn't a joke, it's just a very long story…"
"Sam Winchester killed you." Her mom sounded so shaken, and no wonder. Wow. So she was dead in this world… she'd never heard of any Winchesters, this Sam person who had killed her alternate self.
Lucky her. Sort of. She readjusted her rifle and scanned outside the phone cubby for threats: just more students, strolling by without care, more people than she'd seen in one place for years. It made her twitchy and it was hard to remember she'd once been one of them, running occasionally when she was late for a class, panicking over midterms.
"Is Dad there? Is Chrissy okay? This is going to sound so fu-so freaking unbelievable, but I want to see you. Please. Do you still live on Ridgeview Drive?"
"I…I can't do this. I don't know who you are. I'm sorry." Click.
Jessica stared as the dial tone filled her ear. Her mom had hung up on her.
It was tempting to try to call right back, but no. She should wait until she could be there in person. Once they could see her face, it would be a lot harder to deny who she was. And she could explain … what? That she'd come through a portal from an alternate universe? It sounded crazy to her, and she'd been living with the reality of angels and demons since they started blowing up the world nine years ago.
No, she needed more information about this universe first. Did people know about the supernatural? Why hadn't there been an apocalypse? Was her family still the same?
She could find the computer lab, try to scrounge a login somehow, but her rifle was drawing looks as it was and she was barely on the edge of campus. She had to beg quarters for another phone call: once she had enough, she stared at the phone box like it was an enemy combatant. Who else could she even try to reach?
Her friend Rebecca Warren had had the same cell phone number from high school right through Stanford, and she knew it from memory. She dialed.
"Who's this?"
"Becky? Becky, don't hang up. I need your help. What do you know about Sam Winchester?"
Silence, again. Jess held her breath and hoped she'd chosen the right question.
"I must be certifiably crazy to be meeting up here," Becky was muttering as she picked her way around little coffee shop tables. She was scanning sharply; as soon as Jess half-rose from the one way in the back, with a good view of both exits, Becky zeroed in on her. "What-" She pressed her lips together until she got closer, glancing around at the other customers. "What are you?" She hissed finally, hovering right outside Jess's reach.
So Becky, at least, knew that humans weren't alone in the world. But the rest of the people in the shop were going about their business, paying no undue attention; they weren't jumpy or nervous.
"I'm just human, but from an alternate universe," Jess said. There weren't many ways to explain away being dead, and she couldn’t think of any story to sell that she wouldn’t just get caught lying in. The truth was better, unbelievable as it was: it had the virtue of simplicity. She needed information too badly to risk getting complicated.
Becky's eyes narrowed thoughtfully. "Prove it," she said, holding out a tiny silver sewing needle.
Jess held out a finger and Becky pricked it; they both watched a single drop of blood well up, and then Becky heaved a sigh and dropped into the booth across from her. "…Alternate universe?"
"Crazy, I know,” Jess said, almost giddy with relief. She had a friend back, someone who’d been long dead in her own timeline, and Becky believed her. She wasn’t alone.
“What made you ask about Sam?” Becky asked, eyes narrow.
“I never heard of him in my universe,” Jess admitted. “But I called my mom and she said Sam Winchester killed me. This universe’s me.”
Becky snorted out an explosive breath. “Yeah, right. Your mom’s got it wrong,” she said confidently. “You started dating Sam here at Stanford, and for eighteen months you were the most sickeningly perfect couple anybody could imagine. Then his brother swung in and grabbed him for a weekend, and next thing anybody knew, you were dead in a house fire and Sam was gone for good with his brother on a ‘road trip,’” she made finger quotes. “A lot of people figured it was suspicious, but I found out the truth a couple months later.”
“What truth?’ Jessica leaned in, engaged despite herself with the story. What could have been.
“Sam and his brother were hunters,” Becky said, lowering her voice dramatically. “They saved me and my brother from a shifter. Later Sam told me that he’d been trying to get out of the life when he went to Stanford, but something followed him. Something that killed you just like his mom was killed when he was baby, and the whole family, them and their dad, they were trying to track it down.”
“Did they get it?”
Becky shrugged. “I don’t know. Sam kept up with me by email for a little while-longer than any of his other friends-but then a year later, he had to stop because he and Dean were on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. It was shapeshifters, really, but try telling the FBI that.” She snorted scornfully, making Jess wonder if she really had tried telling the FBI that.
“So most people still don’t know about the supernatural here?”
“Nooo,” Becky said thoughtfully. “There’s been a bunch of stuff the last few years that’s not exactly subtle, so more people believe than used to. I’ve gotten some more contacts, people who had different experiences, people in the know, even another hunter. But the general public? Clueless, pretty much.” She tilted her head at Jess. “Does that mean it’s different, where you come from? I’ve told you a lot, c’mon, Jess, your turn to share with me. A lot must have happened, for you to be carrying like that,” she said, nodding at Jess’s gun.
“Yeah, it’s different,” Jess said grimly. She knew her expression was dark, too dark for this bubbly, unaffected girl. “The Apocalypse happened. Most people died. The ones left, we try to stay out of the way. The angels won, so we have to suck up to them, but everybody hates them. They wouldn’t lift a finger if you were dying.” She remembered holding her father as he bled out, begging and pleading for help. One touch of an angel’s finger could have healed him, but none of them had stopped to help.
Becky looked shocked. “Oh my God, Jess, I’m so sorry.”
“God’s got nothing to do with it,” Jess said automatically, a well-worn phrase.
Becky nodded acknowledgement, and then, with a true friend’s sensitivity, changed the subject. “What are you doing here then?”
The upshot of it all was that after contacting Becky’s hunter friend, who knew a guy who could get in touch with the Winchesters, she found herself in the middle of nowhere, Kansas, driving a beat-up Jeep of no particular pedigree into a no-tell motel with a signpost the shape of a giant plastic cornstalk. The parking lot was mostly empty, except for a low-slung glossy black muscle classic. Becky had told her to watch for that car, and her hunter friend had spoken of it with a hushed sort of awe, like it went out and killed monsters itself.
The important thing was that it meant they were here. For people she’d never heard of in her own universe, it sure seemed like everybody knew something about them here. They’d been right in the thick of whatever had passed for this world’s Apocalypse, and the fact that they were still alive said that they were very skilled, very lucky, or both.
She should assume they had eyes on her already. She swung out of the Jeep, rifle settling easily over her shoulder as she strode across the parking lot. No point in showing hesitation: she’d come this far.
The Winchesters were easy to identify once she was in the lobby. Thick, sturdy clothing that could conceal any number of weapons, gazes that snapped straight to her when she opened the door. They were seated in the little breakfast cafe that directly adjoined the motel desk area, and one of them started to rise before the other put a hand on his arm.
She walked over. “Sam Winchester?”
The one who’d kept the other seated nodded. “That’s me. This is Dean,” he tipped his head to the other man, who grimaced. “I hear you’re from another universe?”
“Yep. You got a test for that?” she asked.
Sam waved a hand. “We believe you.” The other one-Dean-scowled like he would have liked to object, eyes on the rifle she still had slung over her back. Sam politely ignored it. “You wouldn’t have got this far if you were a shifter or anything else we could test for,” Sam continued calmly. “And...alternate universe makes a certain amount of sense, considering.”
Considering what, she almost asked, but it was too obvious a question. He wanted her to ask. She didn’t want to play that game. And she didn’t like how calm he was: too calm, if she was really his long-dead girlfriend. “Why does my mother believe you killed me?”
It hit home: she saw him flinch. His calm cracked enough to show that it was only a thin veneer covering a well of emotion. But he held it, and said steadily enough, “You were killed because of me. The farther I stay away, the better.”
She snorted. “I thought Becky said you were supposed to be smart.”
“Hey,” Dean said. “We’re here because you said you had important intel for us. So what is it?”
She decided to let the subject change. For now. “It’s the archangel,” she said. “I wasn’t the only one who came through the universe rift, or whatever it was. I figured you guys should know, if you’re the paranormal sheriffs around here.”
“Archangel? Which-” Sam cut himself off. “No, don’t answer that, they hear their own names sometimes. We need to get under angel warding.”
Dean was already looking around at the walls. They were decorative latticework, pretty but impossible to spraypaint a wardsign on. “This place isn’t defensible at all,” he said. “We’re better off in Baby.”
And just like that they were moving, hustling out to the black beast of a car-“Baby,” she realized belatedly-and into it.
“Are you attached to that Jeep?” Sam asked.
She shook her head no, and the engine roared to life around them. Thirty seconds later, they were out on the road.
“We might be in luck,” Sam said. “If he hasn’t shown by now, he’s probably not paying attention.”
“I’ll feel a hell of a lot better once we’re in the Bunker,” Dean said grimly. “And if we’re taking her home with us, you can damn well do the tests while we drive.”
In her world, everybody knew you had to move quick or die. Seeing it here, in these hunters, was kind of comforting. Even more comforting was the fact that no one else in this whole reality had been like this, though. Jess leaned against the window, feeling like she could let her guard down for the first time since the angels had started their war on Earth.
They hadn’t even objected to her keeping her rifle.
‘The Bunker’ turned out to be an underground Cold War relic entirely devoted to cataloguing supernatural threats and methods of dealing with them. Just driving into the garage was amazing, and Jess wondered aloud why there was no equivalent in her world.
“It’s pretty well-hidden,” Sam said. “Everybody from back then got killed by a Knight of Hell, so it’s just us now.”
Sam was another little shock. She hadn’t really noticed his height until they all got out of the car in the underground garage. A lot of guys were shorter than her, and the rest weren’t usually enough taller to really notice. Dean was taller than her, but only by a couple inches.
Sam, when he opened the door for her like a gentleman, was tall enough that she had to tilt her head back to look at him. Oh. And he was built, too, solid muscle and no fat, and he had the grace of someone who could move any way he wanted, not just push weights in a gym.
All the pieces she’d seen so far of him, and suddenly her body was telling her yes, go.
She shook her head and focused on her surroundings. “Nice cars.” The rest of the vehicles in here made the brothers’ Baby look young; cars of the forties and fifties, and a few motorcycles for flavor. “Are we safe to talk here?”
“Let’s get into the library,” Dean said.
“We’re warded here too,” Sam said. “But come see the place, as long as you’re here.” He ducked his head, oddly shy.
Dean rolled his eyes. “Remember she’s still a stranger, Sammy.”
“I know, I wasn’t…” Sam huffed, realized the futility of arguing, and strode toward the door. “Through here.”
The Bunker turned out to be enormous, and even Dean, despite his grumbling, seemed pleased to show it off. Jess cooed appropriately over the weapons collection and the firing range, and finally she asked hesitantly about angel bombardment.
“What if they found out you were here and decided to blast you?”
“This place can’t be located on a map,” Sam said. “Our friend Charlie tried to triangulate based on GPS from our phones, and all she could get was a fifteen-mile fuzzy area.”
“And angels don’t have the juice to get in here unless they’re invited,” Dean added. “You have to be a level above them, or else have inside knowledge, to even make a dent in this place.”
“It’s safe? Really safe?” she breathed, hardly believing it. She’d been on the run, fighting to survive, for so long.
“Safe as it gets in this world,” Sam said, smiling gently. “Now, which archangel are we dealing with this time?”
“Mi-Michael,” she said. And the very fact that there were people here who seemed confident they could deal with him, that he wasn’t the undisputed terror of the world, with puny humans doomed to flee before him, was stealing her breath and the strength from her knees. “I’m sorry,” she managed, sitting down in the nearest chair. “But-who are you?”
Sam and Dean exchanged glances. “Long story,” said Sam, perching on a seat. “But I never told you-my Jess-any of it when I could have. I was just running then. Looking for someplace safe,” his lips quirked in a slight, bitter smile. “Demons killed you, just to fuck with me. They wanted me to follow a dark road, because they wanted me to be Lucifer’s vessel.”
Lucifer’s vessel. It was all Jess could do not to laugh hysterically. An alternate universe version of her had been dating Lucifer’s vessel in college.
Had Sam Winchester still been Lucifer’s vessel in her universe? She didn’t know anything about whoever that poor bastard had been, no name or history, but Michael had shown an image of the final battle, once, to emphasize his victory, and the Devil hadn’t looked anything like Sam. If that was the difference between her apocalyptic wasteland and this living world…
“You said no,” she breathed. “You said no to Lucifer?”
“We both did,” Sam said. “Dean was supposed to be Michael’s vessel, too. But they were all dicks.” He shrugged. “We fought as hard as we could. It was barely enough.” His eyes went dark. There had to be more to the story than that. He probably had good reason to not want to tell it.
“Where is he now? Did Michael still kill him?”
“No. Actually,” he hesitated, glancing at Dean, “another long story, but…”
“We lost him in an alternate universe,” Dean finished. “Possibly yours.”
“Along with our mom,” Sam added.
“You’re kidding-no, you’re not kidding, no one has this terrible a sense of humor,” Jess said, covering her face. “You’re dead serious. You think it’s related to why Michael and I came through the rift-of course you do,” she finished for herself. “Was it three days ago?”
“The time matches exactly, from what you told Becky,” Sam said solemnly. “We need to find Michael, make sure he’s not causing trouble, figure out how to open the rift again, and then figure out how to get Lucifer and our mom back on this side.”
“I say we leave Lucifer there,” Dean said. “No offense,” he added to Jess, “but your world seems pretty shot to hell already, so what difference does it make?”
“Dean!” Sam was glaring, yet not shocked. They’d had this conversation before. “There are still humans alive there, and he’ll wipe them out unless someone stops him. He’s our mess to clean up.”
“What about me?” Jess asked. “Once you put everything right, will I have to go back over there too?”
“You wouldn’t want to?” Dean seemed surprised. “No one you want to get back to?”
She stared at him, stony-faced.
“Yeah, okay, who would want to be there if they didn’t have to be,” Dean said hurriedly.
“I don’t know for sure, so I don’t want to make you any promises,” Sam said. “But we can sure as hell try to keep you here.” He looked at Jess, and for a dangerous, deadly giant, it was remarkable how much heart he could put into his eyes. Jess had met puppies with nothing on that gaze. “So how about it? You willing to stick around and help?”
Jess thought about it. “I want to go see my parents first,” she said. “They deserve to know they can stop hating you.”
Sam flinched, then said, “But…”
“But nothing,” she said firmly. “I died here. So what? Where I come from, everybody I loved died, and we have to fight for our lives while the angels keep blasting away at us and there’s never enough of anything but bullet holes. From what I can tell, the difference is mostly down to you two. So don’t be sorry I died here.”
“I missed you,” Sam said sincerely, while Dean theatrically rolled his eyes and escaped in the direction of the kitchen. “You have no idea…”
Having an ex-boyfriend she didn’t remember was a little weird, but she was starting to think it was something she could handle okay. “Maybe I’d like to get a little of that idea,” she said, daring to flirt. Perfect couple, Becky had said.
Sam picked up on it immediately. He looked kind of poleaxed in a good way. “I don’t know what I did without you.”
“Who knows?” she said, happiness creeping in from some long-dark corner where it had curled and waited to die. “I’m here now!”
The End
Gifter: Alyndra
Pairing/Characters: Jess/Sam
Word count/Medium: 3.8k
Rating: G
Warnings: None
Summary: Jess gets kicked from the apocalyse-world to this one. Who is Sam Winchester?
Spoilers: through the end of Season 12; no Season 13 material is used.
Notes: Written for SPN-J2-Xmas on Livejournal, for madebyme_x who said she liked Sam/Jess, AUs, apocalypse, happy endings, domestic feels, outsider POV, the Impala, the Bunker, and Stanford Era, among other things! And then I never even got to the actual prompts, but I hope you like it anyway, and can forgive me its lateness and that there's a much longer fic shining through the seams here than is written!
ETA: And I hadn't even noticed that SHE'D ALREADY WRITTEN SAM MEETING APOCALYPSE!JESS! Check it out! It's delightful and makes a neat opposite to this one!
Thanks to dugindeep for uber-last-minute heroism in betaing for me, you're a life-saver!
AO3 link
OR
The universe has certain rules.
There are parallel realities, but they require balancing to continue to run parallel.
For a soul to reside in a reality other than its own, there must be an equal and opposite reaction.
When one door closes, another door opens.
In the moment after the rift caused by Jack's birth closed with Lucifer and Mary on the side not their own, another rift opened.
In a cookie-cutter suburban house in southern California, it destroyed half the living room and the coat closet, and two figures stumbled out of it. The rift closed immediately with a whoosh like big-city commuter trains, like a huffy housewife dumping the neighbor's kids back at their own door after unsorting them from her own.
One of the newcomers was blonde, female, tall. She wore rough canvas clothing like armor and carried a rifle, which she swung around suspiciously as she searched for threats.
Finding none, she turned to her companion. He was tall enough to make her look average by comparison, hair black and face stony. He carried only a slender silver blade, but stood with a confidence that said he didn't need it.
"Archangel Michael, sir?" she asked. "Where are we?"
"I will assess the situation," he pronounced. "Remain here and wait." With a flutter of air, he disappeared.
The woman waited five seconds, then tore the front door open. With one sweeping glance around, she darted out into the street. There were only occasional cars; houses stretched as far as she could see, all neat and trim instead of war-torn, decaying husks. "Like I'm waiting for him," she muttered to herself. "Self-righteous asshole can fuck off forever."
Clearly, no apocalypse had touched this neighborhood. Which meant-she hoped it meant-no apocalypse had happened to the rest of the world, either. Everything was different now.
Her parents. Her parents could still be alive here. Her sister, her friends-she had to find a phone.
There probably had been a phone in the house she'd just left, but she wanted to put it as far behind her as possible; firstly in case Michael came back, and secondly in case regular people-homeowners or neighbors, she didn't know if anyone had been nearby and she didn't care-started noticing the damage from the rift and thought she'd been breaking and entering, emphasis on the breaking.
She trotted down the sidewalk. Nobody else was jogging this time of day, and if they had been they wouldn't have been wearing clothes designed to be thick and durable and blend into a dusty wasteland.
Or carrying a gun. If this was truly a world without any apocalypse, she should abandon it; she wouldn't need it, and it would make her stand out, make people suspicious and maybe even get the cops called on her. The best way to get a phone was simply to ask a stranger, yet seeing a gun would make strangers wary.
Well, too bad if it would be easier; she'd been sleeping with her gun for the past four years, and she wasn't going to just drop it like trash. Besides, she didn't know anything about this world: it might not be as peaceful as it looked.
She got to a street she recognized. Ironically, she wasn't far from Stanford. And she knew where to find a phone on campus.
"Hello?"
"Mom?"
Silence for a beat. And then… "This is a very bad idea of a joke, and if you don't tell me who you are in the next two seconds, I am hanging up this phone…"
"No, wait, please don't hang up…" It was her mother's voice. She was alive, she could go see her, and Dad… "I swear this isn't a joke, it's just a very long story…"
"Sam Winchester killed you." Her mom sounded so shaken, and no wonder. Wow. So she was dead in this world… she'd never heard of any Winchesters, this Sam person who had killed her alternate self.
Lucky her. Sort of. She readjusted her rifle and scanned outside the phone cubby for threats: just more students, strolling by without care, more people than she'd seen in one place for years. It made her twitchy and it was hard to remember she'd once been one of them, running occasionally when she was late for a class, panicking over midterms.
"Is Dad there? Is Chrissy okay? This is going to sound so fu-so freaking unbelievable, but I want to see you. Please. Do you still live on Ridgeview Drive?"
"I…I can't do this. I don't know who you are. I'm sorry." Click.
Jessica stared as the dial tone filled her ear. Her mom had hung up on her.
It was tempting to try to call right back, but no. She should wait until she could be there in person. Once they could see her face, it would be a lot harder to deny who she was. And she could explain … what? That she'd come through a portal from an alternate universe? It sounded crazy to her, and she'd been living with the reality of angels and demons since they started blowing up the world nine years ago.
No, she needed more information about this universe first. Did people know about the supernatural? Why hadn't there been an apocalypse? Was her family still the same?
She could find the computer lab, try to scrounge a login somehow, but her rifle was drawing looks as it was and she was barely on the edge of campus. She had to beg quarters for another phone call: once she had enough, she stared at the phone box like it was an enemy combatant. Who else could she even try to reach?
Her friend Rebecca Warren had had the same cell phone number from high school right through Stanford, and she knew it from memory. She dialed.
"Who's this?"
"Becky? Becky, don't hang up. I need your help. What do you know about Sam Winchester?"
Silence, again. Jess held her breath and hoped she'd chosen the right question.
"I must be certifiably crazy to be meeting up here," Becky was muttering as she picked her way around little coffee shop tables. She was scanning sharply; as soon as Jess half-rose from the one way in the back, with a good view of both exits, Becky zeroed in on her. "What-" She pressed her lips together until she got closer, glancing around at the other customers. "What are you?" She hissed finally, hovering right outside Jess's reach.
So Becky, at least, knew that humans weren't alone in the world. But the rest of the people in the shop were going about their business, paying no undue attention; they weren't jumpy or nervous.
"I'm just human, but from an alternate universe," Jess said. There weren't many ways to explain away being dead, and she couldn’t think of any story to sell that she wouldn’t just get caught lying in. The truth was better, unbelievable as it was: it had the virtue of simplicity. She needed information too badly to risk getting complicated.
Becky's eyes narrowed thoughtfully. "Prove it," she said, holding out a tiny silver sewing needle.
Jess held out a finger and Becky pricked it; they both watched a single drop of blood well up, and then Becky heaved a sigh and dropped into the booth across from her. "…Alternate universe?"
"Crazy, I know,” Jess said, almost giddy with relief. She had a friend back, someone who’d been long dead in her own timeline, and Becky believed her. She wasn’t alone.
“What made you ask about Sam?” Becky asked, eyes narrow.
“I never heard of him in my universe,” Jess admitted. “But I called my mom and she said Sam Winchester killed me. This universe’s me.”
Becky snorted out an explosive breath. “Yeah, right. Your mom’s got it wrong,” she said confidently. “You started dating Sam here at Stanford, and for eighteen months you were the most sickeningly perfect couple anybody could imagine. Then his brother swung in and grabbed him for a weekend, and next thing anybody knew, you were dead in a house fire and Sam was gone for good with his brother on a ‘road trip,’” she made finger quotes. “A lot of people figured it was suspicious, but I found out the truth a couple months later.”
“What truth?’ Jessica leaned in, engaged despite herself with the story. What could have been.
“Sam and his brother were hunters,” Becky said, lowering her voice dramatically. “They saved me and my brother from a shifter. Later Sam told me that he’d been trying to get out of the life when he went to Stanford, but something followed him. Something that killed you just like his mom was killed when he was baby, and the whole family, them and their dad, they were trying to track it down.”
“Did they get it?”
Becky shrugged. “I don’t know. Sam kept up with me by email for a little while-longer than any of his other friends-but then a year later, he had to stop because he and Dean were on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. It was shapeshifters, really, but try telling the FBI that.” She snorted scornfully, making Jess wonder if she really had tried telling the FBI that.
“So most people still don’t know about the supernatural here?”
“Nooo,” Becky said thoughtfully. “There’s been a bunch of stuff the last few years that’s not exactly subtle, so more people believe than used to. I’ve gotten some more contacts, people who had different experiences, people in the know, even another hunter. But the general public? Clueless, pretty much.” She tilted her head at Jess. “Does that mean it’s different, where you come from? I’ve told you a lot, c’mon, Jess, your turn to share with me. A lot must have happened, for you to be carrying like that,” she said, nodding at Jess’s gun.
“Yeah, it’s different,” Jess said grimly. She knew her expression was dark, too dark for this bubbly, unaffected girl. “The Apocalypse happened. Most people died. The ones left, we try to stay out of the way. The angels won, so we have to suck up to them, but everybody hates them. They wouldn’t lift a finger if you were dying.” She remembered holding her father as he bled out, begging and pleading for help. One touch of an angel’s finger could have healed him, but none of them had stopped to help.
Becky looked shocked. “Oh my God, Jess, I’m so sorry.”
“God’s got nothing to do with it,” Jess said automatically, a well-worn phrase.
Becky nodded acknowledgement, and then, with a true friend’s sensitivity, changed the subject. “What are you doing here then?”
The upshot of it all was that after contacting Becky’s hunter friend, who knew a guy who could get in touch with the Winchesters, she found herself in the middle of nowhere, Kansas, driving a beat-up Jeep of no particular pedigree into a no-tell motel with a signpost the shape of a giant plastic cornstalk. The parking lot was mostly empty, except for a low-slung glossy black muscle classic. Becky had told her to watch for that car, and her hunter friend had spoken of it with a hushed sort of awe, like it went out and killed monsters itself.
The important thing was that it meant they were here. For people she’d never heard of in her own universe, it sure seemed like everybody knew something about them here. They’d been right in the thick of whatever had passed for this world’s Apocalypse, and the fact that they were still alive said that they were very skilled, very lucky, or both.
She should assume they had eyes on her already. She swung out of the Jeep, rifle settling easily over her shoulder as she strode across the parking lot. No point in showing hesitation: she’d come this far.
The Winchesters were easy to identify once she was in the lobby. Thick, sturdy clothing that could conceal any number of weapons, gazes that snapped straight to her when she opened the door. They were seated in the little breakfast cafe that directly adjoined the motel desk area, and one of them started to rise before the other put a hand on his arm.
She walked over. “Sam Winchester?”
The one who’d kept the other seated nodded. “That’s me. This is Dean,” he tipped his head to the other man, who grimaced. “I hear you’re from another universe?”
“Yep. You got a test for that?” she asked.
Sam waved a hand. “We believe you.” The other one-Dean-scowled like he would have liked to object, eyes on the rifle she still had slung over her back. Sam politely ignored it. “You wouldn’t have got this far if you were a shifter or anything else we could test for,” Sam continued calmly. “And...alternate universe makes a certain amount of sense, considering.”
Considering what, she almost asked, but it was too obvious a question. He wanted her to ask. She didn’t want to play that game. And she didn’t like how calm he was: too calm, if she was really his long-dead girlfriend. “Why does my mother believe you killed me?”
It hit home: she saw him flinch. His calm cracked enough to show that it was only a thin veneer covering a well of emotion. But he held it, and said steadily enough, “You were killed because of me. The farther I stay away, the better.”
She snorted. “I thought Becky said you were supposed to be smart.”
“Hey,” Dean said. “We’re here because you said you had important intel for us. So what is it?”
She decided to let the subject change. For now. “It’s the archangel,” she said. “I wasn’t the only one who came through the universe rift, or whatever it was. I figured you guys should know, if you’re the paranormal sheriffs around here.”
“Archangel? Which-” Sam cut himself off. “No, don’t answer that, they hear their own names sometimes. We need to get under angel warding.”
Dean was already looking around at the walls. They were decorative latticework, pretty but impossible to spraypaint a wardsign on. “This place isn’t defensible at all,” he said. “We’re better off in Baby.”
And just like that they were moving, hustling out to the black beast of a car-“Baby,” she realized belatedly-and into it.
“Are you attached to that Jeep?” Sam asked.
She shook her head no, and the engine roared to life around them. Thirty seconds later, they were out on the road.
“We might be in luck,” Sam said. “If he hasn’t shown by now, he’s probably not paying attention.”
“I’ll feel a hell of a lot better once we’re in the Bunker,” Dean said grimly. “And if we’re taking her home with us, you can damn well do the tests while we drive.”
In her world, everybody knew you had to move quick or die. Seeing it here, in these hunters, was kind of comforting. Even more comforting was the fact that no one else in this whole reality had been like this, though. Jess leaned against the window, feeling like she could let her guard down for the first time since the angels had started their war on Earth.
They hadn’t even objected to her keeping her rifle.
‘The Bunker’ turned out to be an underground Cold War relic entirely devoted to cataloguing supernatural threats and methods of dealing with them. Just driving into the garage was amazing, and Jess wondered aloud why there was no equivalent in her world.
“It’s pretty well-hidden,” Sam said. “Everybody from back then got killed by a Knight of Hell, so it’s just us now.”
Sam was another little shock. She hadn’t really noticed his height until they all got out of the car in the underground garage. A lot of guys were shorter than her, and the rest weren’t usually enough taller to really notice. Dean was taller than her, but only by a couple inches.
Sam, when he opened the door for her like a gentleman, was tall enough that she had to tilt her head back to look at him. Oh. And he was built, too, solid muscle and no fat, and he had the grace of someone who could move any way he wanted, not just push weights in a gym.
All the pieces she’d seen so far of him, and suddenly her body was telling her yes, go.
She shook her head and focused on her surroundings. “Nice cars.” The rest of the vehicles in here made the brothers’ Baby look young; cars of the forties and fifties, and a few motorcycles for flavor. “Are we safe to talk here?”
“Let’s get into the library,” Dean said.
“We’re warded here too,” Sam said. “But come see the place, as long as you’re here.” He ducked his head, oddly shy.
Dean rolled his eyes. “Remember she’s still a stranger, Sammy.”
“I know, I wasn’t…” Sam huffed, realized the futility of arguing, and strode toward the door. “Through here.”
The Bunker turned out to be enormous, and even Dean, despite his grumbling, seemed pleased to show it off. Jess cooed appropriately over the weapons collection and the firing range, and finally she asked hesitantly about angel bombardment.
“What if they found out you were here and decided to blast you?”
“This place can’t be located on a map,” Sam said. “Our friend Charlie tried to triangulate based on GPS from our phones, and all she could get was a fifteen-mile fuzzy area.”
“And angels don’t have the juice to get in here unless they’re invited,” Dean added. “You have to be a level above them, or else have inside knowledge, to even make a dent in this place.”
“It’s safe? Really safe?” she breathed, hardly believing it. She’d been on the run, fighting to survive, for so long.
“Safe as it gets in this world,” Sam said, smiling gently. “Now, which archangel are we dealing with this time?”
“Mi-Michael,” she said. And the very fact that there were people here who seemed confident they could deal with him, that he wasn’t the undisputed terror of the world, with puny humans doomed to flee before him, was stealing her breath and the strength from her knees. “I’m sorry,” she managed, sitting down in the nearest chair. “But-who are you?”
Sam and Dean exchanged glances. “Long story,” said Sam, perching on a seat. “But I never told you-my Jess-any of it when I could have. I was just running then. Looking for someplace safe,” his lips quirked in a slight, bitter smile. “Demons killed you, just to fuck with me. They wanted me to follow a dark road, because they wanted me to be Lucifer’s vessel.”
Lucifer’s vessel. It was all Jess could do not to laugh hysterically. An alternate universe version of her had been dating Lucifer’s vessel in college.
Had Sam Winchester still been Lucifer’s vessel in her universe? She didn’t know anything about whoever that poor bastard had been, no name or history, but Michael had shown an image of the final battle, once, to emphasize his victory, and the Devil hadn’t looked anything like Sam. If that was the difference between her apocalyptic wasteland and this living world…
“You said no,” she breathed. “You said no to Lucifer?”
“We both did,” Sam said. “Dean was supposed to be Michael’s vessel, too. But they were all dicks.” He shrugged. “We fought as hard as we could. It was barely enough.” His eyes went dark. There had to be more to the story than that. He probably had good reason to not want to tell it.
“Where is he now? Did Michael still kill him?”
“No. Actually,” he hesitated, glancing at Dean, “another long story, but…”
“We lost him in an alternate universe,” Dean finished. “Possibly yours.”
“Along with our mom,” Sam added.
“You’re kidding-no, you’re not kidding, no one has this terrible a sense of humor,” Jess said, covering her face. “You’re dead serious. You think it’s related to why Michael and I came through the rift-of course you do,” she finished for herself. “Was it three days ago?”
“The time matches exactly, from what you told Becky,” Sam said solemnly. “We need to find Michael, make sure he’s not causing trouble, figure out how to open the rift again, and then figure out how to get Lucifer and our mom back on this side.”
“I say we leave Lucifer there,” Dean said. “No offense,” he added to Jess, “but your world seems pretty shot to hell already, so what difference does it make?”
“Dean!” Sam was glaring, yet not shocked. They’d had this conversation before. “There are still humans alive there, and he’ll wipe them out unless someone stops him. He’s our mess to clean up.”
“What about me?” Jess asked. “Once you put everything right, will I have to go back over there too?”
“You wouldn’t want to?” Dean seemed surprised. “No one you want to get back to?”
She stared at him, stony-faced.
“Yeah, okay, who would want to be there if they didn’t have to be,” Dean said hurriedly.
“I don’t know for sure, so I don’t want to make you any promises,” Sam said. “But we can sure as hell try to keep you here.” He looked at Jess, and for a dangerous, deadly giant, it was remarkable how much heart he could put into his eyes. Jess had met puppies with nothing on that gaze. “So how about it? You willing to stick around and help?”
Jess thought about it. “I want to go see my parents first,” she said. “They deserve to know they can stop hating you.”
Sam flinched, then said, “But…”
“But nothing,” she said firmly. “I died here. So what? Where I come from, everybody I loved died, and we have to fight for our lives while the angels keep blasting away at us and there’s never enough of anything but bullet holes. From what I can tell, the difference is mostly down to you two. So don’t be sorry I died here.”
“I missed you,” Sam said sincerely, while Dean theatrically rolled his eyes and escaped in the direction of the kitchen. “You have no idea…”
Having an ex-boyfriend she didn’t remember was a little weird, but she was starting to think it was something she could handle okay. “Maybe I’d like to get a little of that idea,” she said, daring to flirt. Perfect couple, Becky had said.
Sam picked up on it immediately. He looked kind of poleaxed in a good way. “I don’t know what I did without you.”
“Who knows?” she said, happiness creeping in from some long-dark corner where it had curled and waited to die. “I’m here now!”
The End