Fic: Like Luggage of Some Departed Traveller; Three

[britomart_is]

Master Post

Prologue | One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six






TWO: JESS

The pace of Jess's breathing kicks up a notch. "Am I doing this right?"

Dean wraps his hand around Jess's and squeezes gently, guiding her. "There you go. Just takes a little finessing. Don't pull too hard. Just enough pressure to get the job done."

The kickback jolts through Jess's shoulder and she can feel herself rock into Dean's body behind her. She's at least nicked the coffee can, because it's fallen off the fencepost. She watches Dean trudge over to the fence to see how good her shot was. He picks the can up off the ground and whistles. He spins it in his hands and holds it high in the air. He squints through the glare of the noonday sun to see Jess. Heat rises in shimmying waves from the dirt of the vacant lot. "Nice shooting, little lady!"

Jess flips him off, but grins and expends enough effort for a tiny victory dance. Just enough to make Dean throw his head back and laugh as he walks back, can in hand. He tosses it to her and she nearly drops the sun-hot metal. She's put a hole clean through the 'O' in Folger's.

She doesn't mind Dean's steady stream of teasing condescension any more. It's been months since her aim was really worthy of mockery. They've been getting plenty of practice time in lately because the dry heat of the Midwestern summer has slowed them down to a crawl. It infuriates Jess to know that she's the one slowing them down, no matter how much Dean bitches about the loss of his car and his air conditioning. Her feet swell, her joints ache, and she's tired after an hour of walking when it wasn't that long ago she could power through a twenty-mile hike with nothing but bravado and trail mix to fuel her.

She's showing a little now. She catches Dean staring with regularity. On the occasions when they stop by a populated town or warily cross paths with other travelers, people invariably assume that Dean's the father.

That part hasn't gotten any easier.

They're not even halfway to Minnesota yet, but they're determined to make it before the baby comes, and Jess can only guess at the due date. With no way of communicating with John, they won't know the results of his journey until the day - if there ever is such a day - he shows up in Minnesota to meet them after having made his way to Wyoming. And that's not even touching whether John will show up empty-handed.

It's been one hundred and twelve days since Jess has seen Sam.

She has no expectations about whether she will again.

It's not something she thinks about.

"Hey," cuts through her thoughts. Dean grips her arm. "Where'd you go?" He waves a hand in front of her eyes and she wonders how long he's been talking to her.

"Guess," she says. The light dies in Dean's eyes.

Dean takes the Glock from her and goes back to his pack. She watches the hunch of his shoulders as he stows the gun away safely, then heaves the pack up onto his back. "Let's get you outta the sun. It'll cool down later."

That's how it goes. Every time anything reminds Dean of Sam, he starts fussing over Jess. Even more than usual.

These last few months, Jess has been gaining a much deeper understanding of Sam's childhood. He really wasn't kidding about Dean's protectiveness.

She's learning a lot along those lines. About Dean, and by extension about Sam. Only knowing Dean as the jackass who sent Sam off to college looking like a skittish dog that's been beaten too often, she'd always been skeptical of the hero worship. She'd always figured it was easier for Sam to idealize his big brother than accept the fact that the guy was kind of a jackass.

She's never liked people who hurt Sam, and she knows Dean hurt him, even more than his father did.

They rest in an empty farmhouse in the heat of the day. They stretch out on too-short twin beds in a small room decorated with old-fashioned cowboys. They twirl their lassos across the wallpaper and canter over the crown molding, white hats faded yellow. Jess doesn't have the energy to wonder where the children who lived here are now. Compassion fatigue set in some time in between the endless shitstorm of natural disasters, the diseases killing everyone she knew, and leaving the man she loves behind for dead. She drapes her forearm over her eyes. Selfishly, she just wishes Sam were there fussing over her, making a big deal out of keeping her comfortable. She feels like a feverish little kid who just wants to be spoiled and fed soup.

She shouldn't have thought of soup. It's too hot. Jess groans without thinking, and immediately hears the squeak of bed springs decompressing. Socked footsteps pad over to her side of the room. "Jess?"

She feels selfish again. She knows from experience that Dean will jump on any indication of discomfort, and he's got to be just as tired as she is. She knows that he's been silently altering the balance of their packs, taking more of the weight in his own, and she can't bring herself to protest when she constantly feels like she's going to drop where she stands. "I'm fine," she says. Her back is throbbing in a steady drumbeat.

"Feet or back?" It's hard to hide anything from Dean for a day much less of three months of traveling together.

"Back," she says, and she's already rolling over.

Dean always sits to the side of her and leans when he does this. Keeps a careful radius of distance. She remembers a time when Dean had no compunction about leering at her, wrapping an arm around her shoulders, leaning into her personal space uninvited. But that was before.

He kneads at her lower back with strong hands. It's always a bit painful when he does this, not what she'd ever have asked for. She doesn't think it's ever occurred to him to tone down the force of his hands for the sake of the woman beneath them, out of some sense of her fragility. He would if she said something. But she thinks that this is how he'd treat Sam, so she says nothing.

The suspension bridge over the Shipsea River groans on broken cables, the asphalt swaybacked and precarious.

"Shit," Dean says. They make their way down the steep concrete bank to the murky river. "Shit."

"I say we caulk the wagon and float it," Jess says.

Dean stares.

"Jesus, you had a sad childhood," Jess says. "I tried to ford the river and my fucking oxen died?"

Dean narrows his eyes.

She waves a hand. "Forget it. Find another way around?"

They loop ten miles out of their way, and they're picking their slippery way over a rusting pipeline across the river. Jess is keenly aware of every tiny stabilizing muscle in her ankles, her legs, her ass, her back, trying to compensate for her heavy pack and her own changing center of gravity.

"It wasn't that bad, you know." Dean's showing off, arms splayed wide like a tightrope walker as he leads the way. He skips a rusty bolt off the pipe and into the water.

"Sorry?"

"Growing up the way we did,'" he says. "I don't know what Sam told you, but it wasn't that bad."

Jess hitches her pack higher on her back, tries to redistribute the weight between her shoulders. "He didn't tell me much. Used to drive me crazy."

The climb back down the ladder on the other side seems endless. The narrow metal rungs cut into the joint at her thumb, and her arms ache. She needs to work on her upper-body strength. Watching Sam back together with Dean, seeing them train, had helped her understand the kind of discipline gained when nothing but your own diligence is going to keep you alive.

And Jess has to do more than just keep herself alive now. There's this strange little creature inside of her that she's somehow managing to nourish. It's half-Sam and half-her and ostensibly is going to turn into a real grownup human being someday, which seems impossible. That's on Jess's head now, making sure that this idea, this potential, this theoretical human in her belly does go on and grow up. Grow tall, maybe look like Sam. Even when she wants to sit down in the middle of the road and not get up again, she can't. Even when missing Sam is like missing an internal organ, her body slowly shutting down in agony in its absence, Jess doesn't have the luxury of giving up.

Half-her and half-Sam, and that might be the most she ever has of Sam again.

She shakes her arms out when her shoes hit gravel. "You taught me how to shoot," she tells Dean. "Teach me how to fight."

Dean raises an eyebrow.

"What? You don't think I need to be able to defend myself?"

"Nah," Dean says, "that was just really hot."

Jess takes the lead as they head down the rocky beach. "I've been warned about you," she shouts back over her shoulder.

"Hey!" Dean says, feet sliding on the rocks. "I thought he didn't tell you anything about me!"

"He told me enough!" She laughs.

The shore is layered with the dull pewter-gleam of dead fish.

Jess's eyes snap open and take a while to focus in the darkness. Something rustles outside the tent.

A large hand wraps around her upper arm. Dean holds a finger to his lips, then gets up on quiet feet, unzips the tent ever so slowly. He disappears out of view. Then comes a booming,"What the ever-loving fuck do you think you're doing?"

If Dean's talking to it - well, casting aspersions on its mother's honor, at the moment - it's probably human. Jess pops her head out of the tent. Their packs are open, contents strewn all over the dirt. Dean's got a scrawny middle-aged man pinned prone to the ground, a knee dug into his back. Jess watches as, with a hand on the back of his neck, Dean forces the man's face harder into the dirt. The man gasps and coughs. "Dean, stop it." The man's wheezing, red-faced now. "Stop it, you're going to kill him."

Dean's gaze snaps up to her, and though Jess knew he was capable of great violence, that's never actually scared her before. He breathes harshly for a long moment, then lets up on the man's neck, but doesn't move the knee digging into the man's spine. "He was taking our shit."

Jess surveys the wreckage. They really couldn't have done without the supplies; by stealing them this man would have been crippling them, maybe killing them. He'd taken bandages, peanut butter, a bag of rice. A fresh peach from an orchard they passed, only half-bruised. Bottles of clean water. Then she sees Sam's lucky sock. It's threadbare and unraveling at the top and there's a hole in the toe, and he'd steadfastly refused to throw the pair out all the way through college and the first year of grad school, claiming he aced every test he took while wearing them. When he lost one half of the pair to a hungry laundromat dryer, he kept on wearing the survivor. "Let him up," Jess says tightly.

Dean digs his knee in pointedly before he does.

"Who takes one fucking sock?" Jess asks. "It's a sock. What's wrong with you, stealing a sock?"

"Jesus, lady," the thief says. "Keep your fucking sock."

She hits him, taking a perverse pleasure in the crunch of cartilage in his nose. He runs. He's skinny. He probably needed the food. But he shouldn't have taken the sock.

They gather their things, now muddy, back together in silence. Rice has spilled out of the bag. Jess gathers it grain by grain so she can rinse it next time they find a stream. Dean joins her, big hands picking out each tiny grain from the mud. His sleeves are too long, dragging around his knuckles. Jess takes a closer look at the blue cotton shirt he's sleeping in, and realizes she knows exactly how soft that well-worn fabric is, has fallen asleep with her cheek pressed to it.

"He stole that shirt at the end of freshman year," she says, "out of the piles people were throwing away when they moved out of the dorms."

Dean freezes like he's been caught out, then eases back into searching for rice in the dark, carefully casual as if he'd never reacted so strongly. "It isn't stealing if they were throwing a perfectly good shirt out." He reaches over her arm to drop a pinch of rice in the bag. "Sam was a champ at raiding the lost-and-found back in the day. Only way to keep him in shoes once he started growing like a weed."

They pack up and move on the off chance that scrawny guy comes back pissed and armed. Dean leads the way. Branches catch on his pack and whip back at her, try to scratch her face. "I thought I missed him more than you," she says.

"What was that?"

"I ought to listen more to you," she says, louder. "You told me our gear was vulnerable when we slept with it outside." She catches a spiky pine branch before it can blind her. "We could try pulleying it up in the trees, like you do in bear country."

"Damn straight you oughta listen, Buttercup." Jess wonders whether Dean's even aware of how compulsively he assigns nicknames to the people around him.

When they finally bed down again for a few hours' sleep before daybreak, Jess fights her heavy eyelids till she's sure Dean's asleep, then inches closer till she can smell the trace-memory of Sam on the shirt, mingled with Dean's scent but still discernible. It's not like any of them are all that pleasant-smelling these days, with their unwashed clothes and creek-bathing, but the smell is undeniably Sam - even stinky Sam - and it means he was here. He was here, he was real. She didn't make him up inside her head. He vanished in an instant, without a trace, but he was here, living and breathing and sweating.

She wakes up with her nose tucked against Dean's ribcage, pressed against soft cotton. His hand rests so lightly on her back that she knows he's awake.

It's the heat that woke her up. They must have overslept. The sun, high in the sky, beats down through the synthetic tent wall. A dragonfly lands on the outside and she watches the shadow of its twitching wings. It's too hot.

Nothing's doing in the town of Windward. The first thing Jess sees when they pass the dusty gas station is a family of four going through their dead neighbors' pockets.

"You let Candace go to the fall formal with Aaron Spurlock when she was fourteen," says the younger of the two teenage girls as she unties a dead man's boots.

"Leave me out of this," the older girl says at the same time the father says, "Candace is more responsible than you." He's carefully checking a toddler's pockets, then crossing the body's arms gently over its chest when he's done.

"Was she more responsible than me when she had sex with Pierce Pollock in the hot tub and didn't clean it after?"

"Candace!" says the mother.

"Fuck you, you little bitch," says Candace, and she bursts into tears. "I hate you."

"Just let me go over tonight," the younger girl begs. "Will's parents will be there the whole time."

"Apologize to your sister," the father says. He struggles to unclench the arms of a grown woman in full rigor so he can access her coat pockets. "Come on, lend a hand, this is a team effort." His older daughter joins him in pulling on the dead woman's arm.

The bodies, two adults and three children, are laid out on the front lawn with clothing over their faces, waiting to be collected. Another two bodies are similarly laid out down the street, and a block further a man is pulling a dead teenager onto a cart.

Dean asks a gaunt-cheeked man who's trimming his desiccated brown begonias and he says it's cholera; they're all drawing from one well since the municipal water system went down and the well's bad. Bad as in carelessly contaminated or bad as in poisoned they don't know, but the dead teenager down the street didn't drink the water and didn't get sick and did get beaten to death with an aluminum baseball bat in his own back yard last night.

The dominant theory, apparently, is deliberate contamination.

Friendly Village Mobile Home Park sprawls on the outskirts of the town. Some of the homes are built up, with bushes and porches and construction that looks more solid than it is. Some are tin cans with wheels. Doors hang open and creaking. Dean toes them open, lets the barrel of his shotgun precede him when he peers inside.

While Jess goes through the property manager's on-site office for duct tape and tupperware, Dean rummages in the trailers. He emerges from an ivory-and-taupe Gulf Stream with his arms overflowing with tiny jars of baby food, a romper with cartoon giraffes, and a box of diapers sticking incongruously out of his zipped-up coat.

"That's amazing," Jess says. "Is there formula?" Dean grabs her as she ascends the steps to the trailer.

"Don't," he says. He shakes his head. "Don't go in there."

Jess's eyes flicker over the bounty of supplies in Dean's arms. "Oh."

They decide to bed down in a shiny silver Airstream, where Jess beats Dean to the bathroom stall with a happy sigh. She struggles with her too-tight pants and sits, then catches her breath in confusion.

There's a single spot of bright red blood on her white cotton panties.

Dean bangs on the door. "What's the hold-up, sweetheart? If you've got performance anxiety, let me go first!"

Jess has never solved a problem by sitting on the toilet with her panties around her knees, so she zips back up. When she gets out Dean is peeing in the kitchenette sink. "Gross, Dean."

They fall asleep to cicadas and Jess wakes up to a tap-tap-tapping. A hand, limned in moonlight, pauses before rapping again at the window next to the trailer door.

"Hello?" a quiet voice says politely. "Hello, excuse me?"

"Dean," Jess whispers. "Dean."

Dean snores on the opposite bunk.

Jess traces a nervous index finger over the grip of her gun as she walks quietly to the door and swings it open.

The dead teenager's hand is raised as if he's going to knock again.

"This is for you," he says. He holds out a pitcher of water.

"That's all right," she says, bare feet digging into the edge of the doorway. "No thank you."

"Take it," the boy says. His face is badly bruised, jaw askew. "The baby needs water."

She feels her gorge rising and her throat works to keep it down. Her eyes slam shut. The nausea's overwhelming suddenly, and she sways in the doorway, braces herself with both hands on the frame. "What did you do to me?" She thinks back to every sip of water she's had that day. It's clean, it's all been clean, hasn't it? She got it from Dean, she can trust Dean, she can.

"Go away," she croaks through her tense throat, around the roiling sickness. "Go away."

"Jess?"

Jess's eyes snap open. The dead teenager is nowhere in sight. Sam's in front of her, beautiful, muddy, tired-looking, lank hair sticking to his face. He sways. He drops to his knees at the bottom of the stairs. "Sam? Baby?" Shaking, sick, she tries to descend the trailer steps on her butt. "Where were you?"

Sam opens his mouth and it's gleaming red. He's bleeding into his mouth.

"Sam, baby, talk to me." She has to stop to curl in on herself, a wave of nausea overtaking her entirely.

Sam's mouth moves but he's inaudible, the words lost somewhere between his brain and his vocal cords. Sam's eyes roll back in his head, whites unseeing, and he crumples forward like a puppet with its strings cut.

Head aching and eyes burning, Jess vomits red down the front of her shirt and smells copper.

"Jessica. Jessica."

Jess snaps awake, leans over the side of the bed, and throws up on Dean's bare feet. They dance back quickly and he makes a noise of disgust, but his shoulders slump with a sigh and he goes ahead and stands in the puddle to crouch down by her head.

"You were freaking out in your sleep," he says. The cicadas are still clicking their songs outside.

"I think I'm sick," she tells him.

"I think you're pregnant," he says, hand smoothing over her hair.

"I can't do this," she says, "I really can't do this here. I can't do this on my own."

Dean looks away and she can't, she can't worry about his stung feelings right now. "I can't fix this shitty situation," he says. "But I won't let anything happen to you."

There's an elderly dermatologist in Windward with skin like paper and scattered memories of her OB/GYN rotation. "Totally … normal," she says slowly. "Probably nothing."

Jess points out that those two statements don't mean the same thing.

"I can prescribe you some retinoid cream," the dermatologist says, "or a Vitamin E lotion." Her eyes flutter shut. She's very thin. "Just try to get lots of rest. Don't exert yourself."

Jess laughs through tears as they leave. If she gets lots of rest, she'll be delivering this baby in a two-man tent in a cornfield.

Dean's twisting, arms caught in the straps of his heavy pack. It's got him stuck on his back like an overturned turtle as he writhes. Jess feels the cartilage in her knees crackle unhappily as she tries to haul him up, his weight and the weight of her pack driving her heavy into the grit of the road.

"Please return to the main road," the guard shouts through cupped hands. "This is private property."

"Fuck you!" Jess wrestles Dean free of his gear and hooks arms under his shoulders. His feet push and slide in the dirt as she drags him back toward the road.

"I can walk," he says, "Jess, stop, I can walk."

"Shut up, shut up, shut up," she says. "Just shut up and stop bleeding." She drops him, more abruptly than she'd like to, at the junction where the main road turns into the private drive for Avalon Estates. The gated community's manicured lawns are brown, but apparently they're still paying their security team. Apparently they haven't used up their ammunition. She heads back down the driveway toward their dropped packs.

"Do not approach the property," the guard shouts. The sight of his rifle is up again.

Jess stops and throws her arms wide. She's entirely aware of how visibly pregnant she is now. "You going to shoot me, too? That how you want this day to go?" She gathers up their bags. Dean's bag is sticky with blood, tacky in her hand. They're at least forty pounds each, and she drags them scraping over the ground, prays that the fabric isn't on its last legs.

Dean's hauled himself up, hands clutching his middle. There's something strangely childlike about the way he sits with shoulders hunched, legs sprawled straight in front of him. He looks from his red hands back at the security guard in his little booth. "Hey," he says indignantly, and passes out.

She hauls him under the shelter of a bus stop before she gets his shirts off to take a look at the wound. It's high and to the side and Jess tries to remember whether that's good or bad, but she's only judging from movies anyway. "Crap, crap, crap." She hauls out the zippered bag with their first aid kit and cuts a coil of fishing wire. "Fuck." She's watched Sam put a line of stitches into Dean's bicep after a brush with some sheet metal in a junkyard, and that's it. "Fuck."

"Do you know how to do this?" Dean's eyes barely slit open, then close.

"I was a lifeguard in high school," she says.

"With the little red swimsuit? Mmph." That makes Dean laugh, at least, which makes him pass out again, and perhaps that's for the best.

She threads the needle.

Jess curses at the campfire as it devours the kindling without catching the rest of the wood.

"Winchester family curse," Dean says. He's loaded up on extra-strength Tylenol, which does approximately nothing to dull the pain, judging from the rasp in his voice. "None of us can start a fire worth a damn without soaking everything in lighter fluid."

"Good thing I'm not a Winchester," she says, tucking dry grass into the embers at strategic points. "I'll get it. I'm getting it." The grass flares up. A pine branch catches, sticky sap popping and crackling as it burns.

Dean's fingering his stitches exactly the way he shouldn't be doing. She spreads out the map, corners under rocks, and traces their route for tomorrow with a finger. She circles over the steep topographical lines of Spruce Peak. They're behind schedule, and with Dean in this state they're going to have to find a way around the thickly-wooded peak instead of over it. "Sure you are," Dean's saying.

"Sorry?"

He looks uncomfortable in a way that has nothing to do with gunshot wounds. "A Winchester," he says, making brief eye contact and flickering away.

Jess's thoughts backtrack for a moment. "Oh," she says. Her eyes track a moth circling the fire.

They stop for an early lunch at the base of Spruce Peak. Rabbit jerky and factory-stolen Cocoa Puffs, and if Jess actually goes back in time and makes it so she never sees a Cocoa Puff in the first place it'll be too soon. Jess eyes the jars of baby food longingly and fantasizes about applesauce and pureed carrots and those pallid, processed meat sticks. Her mouth fills with spit and her stomach rumbles.

She disciplines herself by thinking about trying to feed an infant rabbit jerky, but then she's thinking about a fragile newborn and hemorrhaging from between the legs in the middle of the woods and accidentally raising a feral child or a serial killer, and then she's thinking about whether it'll have Sam's ski-slope nose. She chokes on her tough, gristly rabbit. Dean pounds on her back.

Dean insists on going over the peak. He barely stumbles on the way. When they reach the bottom, she unbuttons his coat to check for redness and swelling and finds that he's bled through his shirt. He'll have been bleeding for hours.

"I want you to think about what happens if you die," Jess says. She feels like an asshole for twisting a knife in Dean's weak spot, but she'll do whatever she needs to. "I need you," she says.

Dean sways, hand wrapped around the trunk of a slender paper birch. "I got you," he says. "I won't let anything happen to you."

"Good," she says. "So sit down and I'll redo your stitches."

Dean blinks at her. "I think you cheated."

She smiles. "I'm sneaky." She fixes Dean's stitches while he hisses and flinches. She knows she's hurting him unnecessarily and she knows the wound will scar, probably badly. But it's the best she can do. She didn't grow up doing this, and she's suddenly struck by a staggering sense of her own inadequacy. "Hey," she says. "I'm sorry I'm not him."

Dean wipes a hand over his forehead, already wet with pain-sweat, and leaves a streak of blood. "Think you're stealing my lines." He grimaces.

Four days after Dean gets shot by a Rent-a-Cop with an overinflated sense of his own importance, Jess lies awake wondering whether she might be able to hold up other travelers at gunpoint to get some antibiotics. Dean shivers and mumbles next to her. She hears Sam's name.

Six days after Dean gets shot by a jackass with no idea how many lives Dean's saved, Jess lies awake in the tent hunched over her own knees, head in her hands.

It's not that Dean's skin is the pale gray color of the mouse that used to live in her Palo Alto apartment, and it's not that he's stopped eating, and it's not that he's stopped calling out for Sam. That's not what has Jess so scared she can't think, can't plan, can't see a way out of this clusterfuck.

The wound smells. The whole tent does.

The man lying next to Jess smells like rotting meat.

The man lying next to Jess, strictly speaking, is rotting meat.

He's also so much more than that, and he needs to not die - not because Jess is afraid to be alone, which she is, and not because she can't bury one more person she loves, which she can't, but because he's Dean.

It's Dean, and he's dying in the sleeping bag one foot to her left.

Sam would understand why that makes her body revolt till it feels like her own organs are failing, a necrosis of the soul eating her from the inside the further Dean slips away.

Jess wants to curl into a ball, abdicate responsibility, and let someone else fix this mess, because she's just one stupid human, and she's had so much of her heart ripped out already and still has so much left to lose.

Jess misses her mom with a fierce and physical pang.

The cool cloth on Dean's forehead is soaked in lukewarm water that smells of iodine. Jess can't fix him and she thinks Sam would be fucking furious that she's letting this happen. She can't get a surgical team and she can't get a full course of antibiotics and she can't even get a bed with clean sheets. She has to work within her means, and she is seriously considering debriding Dean's wounds with maggots, because "I saw it on TV once," is the best she can fucking do with an economics degree and a taste for medical dramas. She envisions fat, pale little larvae wriggling on Dean's skin, nibbling the edges of his flesh, and tries to reconcile the image with the slow rise and fall of his chest.

"I'm sorry," Dean whispers in the early morning. The sky is a sallow color, still clinging to darkness.

She looks at the abject misery on his face and her heart races. "Don't you fucking dare, Dean."

His face twists and he looks strangely young, like a little boy squirming in discomfort because he can't scratch his chicken pox. "I keep on breaking my promises. Said I'd take care of you." His breath stutters out.

She drops her forehead to his chin, nose brushing his collarbone. "You need to be alive, Dean," she says nearly inaudibly. She doesn't know how to convince him how vitally important it is that Dean be alive in the world. She clenches a hand in his shirt. It's all just so heartbreakingly stupid and wasteful. "You can't go out like this."

"Thanks for," Dean says, and falls asleep with his mouth open.

At high noon on the eighth day, Dean cracks his eyes open and asks her, "Where's Sam?" His gaze roves the tent. With his skin so thin and pale, his cheekbones and jaw and the orbitals of his eyes stand out in sharp relief. Her grandmother looked like that in the nursing home when Jess visited her as a frightened eight year-old clutching her mother's hand. Gram was so wasted and withered that Jess couldn't look at her face without seeing her grinning skull underneath, taunting her: as you are now, so once was I. The bones are impatient. They want to come out and dance. Dean raises a hand from his side, gets tired, and drops it. "Where'd he - I want. Sam?"

Jess licks her lips. She's thirsty, been giving all the water to Dean and afraid to leave him long enough to get more. She cradles him against her front, his back to her chest, his head tucked beneath her chin. "Sam … Dean, Sam is -"

Dean's face screws up unhappily. "Sammy?"

"- out getting you some medication," she finishes. "He's been sitting with you all morning, he'll be so pissed he missed you waking up." She touches the cowlick in Dean's sleep-flattened, unwashed hair.

Dean smiles a little. "S'my brother, y'know."

Jess nods, face tight. "He'll be back any minute. He'll be so happy to see you."

"Missed him," Dean says. He drifts off before she can tell him how jealous she was when she first met Sam and thought he was still hung up on someone else, some girl who'd just broken his heart. There hadn't been any girl, though.

If Dean will just wake up, she'll tell him that she didn't figure out who broke Sam's heart until the Earth started inching toward its own demise and she met Dean. She watched them together and realized that while she'd seen Sam happy, she'd never seen him this complete.

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