SPN fic: "Transmutation"
Fic! Fic! OMG, it's DONE. \o/
Title: Transmutation
Word Count: 3,616
Rating/Pairing: Dean, Sam and Jess are in this story. And there is adult content and Wincest. I think that's all I'll say.
Spoilers: Just the Pilot, it goes AU after that.
A/N: This fic is fucked up, you guys. I mean the way this verse is in my head is also fucked up and I don't think I'll ever be happy with trying to describe it. But here is my best effort.
poisontaster is a total h0r, a total godsend, and pwns my soul as ever. starsouls1013 gives amazing grammar nazi and last-minute-flail damage control. I ended up going with "Transmutation" as the title so thanks to tayloredjustice for bringing it to my attention again. I also tried to work in a number of the other words my lovely flist supplied because it's fun and I'm a word geek like that.
Summary: Sam stops halfway to the door and everything changes.
"You'll call me if you find him? Maybe I can meet up with you later."
Dean knew, he knew that Sam was going to leave for his so goddamn important 'interview on Monday' but he'd hoped anyway, maybe Sam would see… But that was just stupid. "Yeah, all right."
Sam taps the windowsill and walks away.
Dean starts the car, waiting to watch Sam get inside like when he used to drop him off at school or with his few, intermittent friends. Old habits.
"Sam!" He stops halfway to the door and looks back. "You know, we made a hell of a team back there."
"Yeah." Despite his words, Dean frowns a little in surprise when Sam walks toward him and leans in the window again. "Look, man. Why don't you just come inside? You could crash here tonight if you want. I know you can make it to Colorado by morning, but you'll be exhausted when you get there if you're not sharing the driving. I don't want you to, like, run off the road or something."
Dean can't help but think "why do you suddenly care if I'm alone?" Still, he agrees to come in for a cup of coffee, and to get some sandwiches and Jess's cookies for the road. Sam says she'll like it if he says hello before he goes and Sam's asking, so Dean says yes.
~~~
Something seems Off right away.
Sam's too desensitized these days to feel it ("That's because you're outta practice…") but Dean already has one hand on the butt of his gun as they walk through the kitchen. He follows Sam to the doorway of the bedroom as Sam moves through it, calling out toward the running shower, "Jess? Hey Jess! We're back - Dean's here. Baby…?"
Dean looks up, was trained against biological instinct since he was four years old to always look up. "People don't intuitively look above them for danger. There's nothing natural can seriously injure or kill humans from the air. But we don't deal in the Natural, son…" It was the first lesson and Sam's forgotten it.
Dean sees her first, has one foot up on the bed before he chokes out, "Sammy!" and starts trying to pull the bleeding girl off the ceiling. Sam recoils in horror and freezes for a deadly-long moment before Dean barks "Sam!" triggering a long-ingrained obedience. "The holy water. In your bag, do it! The salt, circle the bed. Quick! Now, Sam!"
have to get her down. before. before it finishes. dad taught me, he told me what to do if…
Jessica's eyes are open and lucid - Dean's staring right into them - when the flames start.
Dean doesn't let her go and feels the tops of his hands and arms start to sizzle before Sam shouts out the final line of Latin and Dean's yanks her into his arms, crashes both of them into the mattress. She's still on fire, the flames painfully hot but somehow not burning Dean except where he grips her neck and hip.
Sam sobs and throws a blanket over them both, smothering the flames quickly. He and Dean carry Jess and drag each other outside in a desperate clutch of limbs and fear. Before the ambulance arrives, they sprawl in a crumpled pile on the damp lawn, twisted all three together in the blackened blanket. Jessica is unconscious - thank God - and Dean is sure that Sammy has no idea how hard he's squeezing Dean's arm or how close Dean holds him as he rocks Jess in his lap and cries like he did when Dean carried him away from the first fire.
"Take your brother outside as fast as you can and don't look back! Now, Dean! Go!"
~~~
Sam's friends Becky and Zach stop by the hospital to see Jess but they're obviously there for Sam. The doctors had put Jess into a coma while the deepest layers of skin heal but they came anyway, asking gentle questions and hugging Sam, and that makes Dean like them despite their expensive clothes. It's nice to know that Sammy met good people here, people who cared about him.
After they go, Dean, trying for Sam's coveted "normal", says they seem like a nice couple.
"They're brother and sister," Sam replies quietly and doesn't make eye contact.
Dean tips his chin up then down in a jerky, aborted nod. He opens his mouth to say something then closes it again and turns away.
Sam's a wreck the whole five weeks Jessica is unconscious. An absolute fucking disaster area.
He doesn't sleep or eat. He wouldn't remember to shower or change his clothes if Dean didn't strip him down at regular intervals, shove him under the hot spray and wash his hair like a child.
Sam can't focus on shit. He's got an aching, damaged look in his eyes all the time that Dean hasn't seen since Sam snapped Jimmy Giandrea's wrist in a playground fight in the 5th grade, anger overrunning training, sense and caution. Sam looks like he's irreparably shattered his most precious possession.
So later, if Dean sucks Sam off, sloppy and rough in the hospital stairwell with Jess breathing through a machine two floors above. If he makes Sam mindless and begging and writhing under his hands. If he muffles Sam's cries around fingers shoved between his brown-pink lips…
missed you. love you. need you. i'm sorry. i'm so sorry.
…Dean would never tell anyone the real reason for it.
~~~
Jess's hair is growing out, uneven and wispy, by the time she wakes up. White blond streaks grow through the uneven scar tissue on her scalp and wind at random among strands of her apparently natural light brown.
The skin on the left half of her face - wavering in a diagonal line from the corner of her eye to the corner of her mouth - is melted. It doesn't look like anything other than what it is, charred and annealed flesh. The other side of her face is largely untouched and her neck is a long, pale, perfect reminder of Before. Dean doesn't think about the skin of her arms and back but distracts himself with wondering how it's possible for her to be more beautiful now than she was before she was tempered and vitrified.
Her expensive-smelling mother begs and weeps when Jess says, "I don't want it. I don't want the plastic surgery. Just make me so I'm not an open wound and let me get the hell out of here." Mrs. Moore glares at Dean and Sam accusingly on her way out the door, clearly embarrassed and unsettled that her daughter would insist they stay for the discussion at all. Dean is sure she blames them for this, he's seen that look before, and he couldn't fucking care less. But he wishes it didn't make Sam go hollow-eyed and pinched around the mouth.
One day when the scars are red and raw and new, Jess looks over, turning her head slowly and painfully across the stark white pillow. Sam sits in a chair close to her side and Dean leans against the wall near her head. She looks dead into Sam's eyes and says, "This is it. This is all the things you didn't want me to know. All the things you didn't ever want to talk about." It isn't a question. She turns her face away again. "I thought your Dad was a drunk. I thought he beat you."
Dean's eyes snap to Sam's. He's surprised and betrayed that Sam let her think Dad would hurt them and he must look it, because Sam shuts his eyes and gasps in a little breath like a sharp pain.
Sam opens his mouth but doesn't seem able to make a sound, so Dean answers for him. Dean explains it all to her the best he can. Which isn't all that great, really, but she deserves to know everything they know. She deserves it after this.
He starts with, "Our mother died in a fire when Sam was a baby. She was pinned to the ceiling in his nursery and her stomach…" and finally finishes, "We didn't find him in Jericho. We still don't know if he's even… Anyway, I'm sorry. What happened to you? Happened because of us. Maybe because I took Sam away when I did, I don't know. It burned our mom on All Soul's Day too. We've spent our whole lives hunting this thing and we still don't know a lot. But I'm sorry."
She listens quietly, nods in all the right places and when he's done she says, looking only at Dean, "I didn't see much. It was in the shadows. Just yellow, glowing eyes. And it smiled at me before it slid me up the wall, before the pain started. I don't know if that helps." She pulls her hand from Sam's death grip and reaches up like she's trying to push back long hair that's no longer there.
"I'm coming with you when I get out of here."
~~~
"She could have died, Dean. She should have died. It's only because you came in, you saw her and we… It would have been much worse if she'd died." Sam's babbling again, talking non-stop and pacing back and forth, all the energy he tamps down for hours of calm stillness at the hospital bubbling up now that they're alone. "…Dean? Right?"
"Come to bed, Sam."
Would haves. Ifs. A lot of shit that doesn't matter.
Because he'd done the right thing, the only thing, and saved the girl. It doesn't matter that if she'd died, Sam could've been kept alive inside by rage and the spirit of vengeance until something better came along. Doesn't matter that Dean would've had Sam all to hims-
no. don't even think it.
~~~
Dean had gotten a text message (a text message, for Christ's sake) from Dad a month after the fire.
tell s. im sorry re: j. -- leave w. coast ASAP & keep moving - its angry
When he tried to call back, the number was disconnected. None of the steady repetitive ring Dean had lulled himself to sleep with some of the shameful nights he'd spent alone between Louisiana and California. Dad doesn't want them looking for him; he doesn't even want them to tell him where they are. Situation normal, all fucked up.
Jess checks herself out of the hospital as soon as she can move on her own and long before the doctors would like her to. Dean doesn't ask what Jess told her family or what she and Sam told their friends; he just loads them and their gear into the Impala and hauls ass eastward.
Dean and Sam trade off the driving and they don't stop at all for a very long time. They are three again and it feels good and wrong and fucking terrifying.
Jess is so still, still for hundreds of miles at a time. When Dean catches her reflection in the rearview mirror, his heart leaps up into his throat because she could be the burn-scarred spirit of his mother. Dean knows that she isn't exactly the woman Sam knew because of the way his face twists and his eyes widen uncertainly, how they go more green than brown, when he looks at her. Sam changes her bandages with light, careful fingertips, never touching her anywhere else even when they sleep in the same motel bed.
Traveling with a girl is so incredibly different in such mundane ways from everything Dean's known that he isn't sure what to make of it. Tampons mix in with his shaving kit after they have to move out in the wee hours because of that credit card thing. Bras hang in the bathroom, casting irregular shapes in the shadowy dark that make Dean go for the gun not at his hip when he stumbles in to take a piss in the middle of the night. A flowery lotion smell lingers in the air when Jess gets out of the shower in the morning and both Sam and Dean are helpless against their upbringing and curse at each other much less than they had.
Jess doesn't talk much, even when Dean coaxes Sam into snarking with him about pointless crap; she mostly just sits in the backseat of the car and stares out the window, ghosts into their motel rooms, tucks herself into corners to read one of the occult texts or practice disassembling the gun she'd demanded. If the fact of her presence wasn't a constant, low, prickling heat on the backs of their necks, recalibrating everything between he and Sam, Dean might forget she was with them entirely.
~~~
Once Jess can fully stretch out the skin of her back, shoulders and legs again, she sets to becoming the most fearsome little thing Dean's ever seen. It takes a while for her to learn to fight the recoil on their large shotguns, but she's tough and Dean's a good teacher. He remembers what it feels like to be small and weak, to have a weapon much too large for you in your hands, between you and your death.
She's scary good with knives, just like Sam. Natural talent. Aptitude. She actually smiles when Dean gives her a set of thin, light, perfectly balanced throwing knives and Sam hands her a shining, Marine-issue ka-bar knife with a dark and serious look.
Then Dean goes hand-to-hand with her and her new blade, the dirty back-alley moves he taught her flying fast and vicious, until she's good enough to bleed him each time.
She never apologizes. Dean never asks her to hold back.
~~~
They stay in a shithole apartment somewhere in Salt Lake City to rest up for a while. Sam's hiding, pulling another marathon research session at the local library. He's always hidden that way; nose tucked in a book and "this is important, Dean" and the soft microfiche glow painting words over his face in a gentle caress.
Dean's suffering from a case of brain overload so he studiously applies himself to a handle of Jim Beam all evening long and doesn't think about if it makes him like his father. He's mindlessly staring at something flickering on the TV with no idea how full or empty the bottle is anymore when Jess comes out of the back bedroom. He'd nearly forgotten she was in there again she's so damn quiet.
Jess stops in the doorway and silently watches him; she could be a stone idol, a mannequin, but for the rhythmic rise and fall of her breasts. Dean stares back, the top button of his jeans undone, shirtless and sweating in the high summer nighttime with golden-hot bourbon sloshing through his veins.
He doesn't realize how fucked up he is until he tries to stand and completely fails. When the room stops spinning and Dean opens his eyes again, Jess is standing in front of him, sudden in ghostly stop-motion. Her gaze burns through his hazy brain and the platinum streaks in her hair seem to glow in the light of the yellow lampshade.
Jess matter-of-factly strips off her long-sleeved shirt - her clothes are always loose and lengthy now, sleeves to her wrists and high necklines, long skirts and linen pants - then stands there in her bra and keeps looking at him. Dean doesn't know what this is, if it's a test or penance or a question or even who it's for; him or Sam or herself.
When he doesn't speak or look away - doesn't do anything but let his eyes calmly roam the mottled scar on her belly, the ridged pink and white skin that cascades over her shoulders down to mid-forearm in a frozen wave - Jess lifts the layers of her skirt and slides her panties off, delicately lifting one bare foot at a time.
Dean's mouth and hands fall open at the same time. The bottle rolls away from the couch with a glassy gurgle and thump. He finally averts his gaze, swallows hard and tilts his head to the side a little. "Jess…"
She straddles his lap in a single graceful lunge - "Shut up. Just shut the fuck up." - and licks at his bottom lip, quick and wet, before biting down and grinding her hips into his rapidly hardening cock.
Dean bends her, fucks her over the back of the couch in the flickering light of the television. She twists and growls and moans his name and "more, faster ", and "that all you got? c'mon, your little Sammy fucked me harder than …oh fuck, yes, just like that... just like…"
~~~
It is cold as fuck in the mountains this time of year.
The ghoul-zombie-thing is slobbering and lurching toward him. Fuck these necromancers who can't control their own gross-ass flesh experiments. Dean's unarmed, there's nothing on the ground around him but slippery wet grass, his ankle's turned and it's coming too damn fast, faster than any kind of zombie he's ever seen. He's not going to stop it and it's going to rip through this town when it's done with them.
Dean has enough time to see Sam slumped unconscious against a nearby tree trunk and to think - "This is it. This is how I die. Shit." - before the dead thing's ribcage blows apart in a crimson shower of blood and bone and thick chunks of flesh. It falls forward, nearly landing on Dean.
Jess is standing there behind it with shotgun raised and blank eyes. She chambers the next round, wincing against the wicked bruise Dean knows she must have on that shoulder now. Without hesitation, she takes aim at the still-twitching monster and fires another shell into its skull. It stills and collapses in on itself, dry flesh sinking into hollows.
Well, hell.
Dean wipes globs of dead ghoul-zombie-thing off his cheek and takes the hand Jess offers to haul himself upright.
Jess is actually tall enough to support Dean's weight when she throws one of his arms over her shoulders and gets him into the car. Sam wakes up just after that (thank god, oh thank god…) and Jess drives all night long.
~~~
Jess walks in, just opens the door hours before they expect her back from her typically endless, solitary walk and finds her boyfriend lost in sucking his brother off, finds him moaning around Dean's cock in his mouth.
She presses herself against the door, eyes growing wider every infinite second that Dean scrabbles at Sam's hair. "Sam, Sam, Sam, shit, Sammy, stop!" But not until the sharp snick of the door closing against Jess's back does Sam heed him. His mouth makes an obscenely wet noise as he pulls off, then stops breathing and gapes at Jess with an expression that goes beyond terror or horror.
Jess starts to laugh - wildly, hysterically - and slides down to the floor, the sounds melting seamlessly from laughter to sobs as she sinks. "I knew it. I totally knew it. Oh God, oh God."
"Jess. Jesus Christ…" Sam's still on his knees.
Dean sits down shakily on the edge of the rumpled bed, jeans pulled up but still unzipped, and doesn't say a word when Sam crawls to her.
Dean doesn't say a word as they start to yell at each other, about him and them and everything all at once. Dean is an outsider in his own life as he watches them; he's the connective tissue between his brother and this girl who was all of Sam's dreams of being a real boy until Dean came back for him. He doesn't say a word because he fucked them both to keep them all together and now it's falling apart.
Dean doesn't say a word as Sam tries to touch her and she kicks at him, catching him in the mouth and drawing blood. Dean taught her that kick.
Dean doesn't say a word when Sam gets angry and crouches up. "You fucked him too. I saw you, I smelled him on you…"
"Oh fuck you, Sam." Jess struggles awkwardly to her feet and pushes Sam away from her, makes him stumble up and back, his knees hitting the bed and tossing him into the tangle of blankets at Dean's side. "He's not my brother, you fucking pervert! You treat me like glass, he treats me like I'm real, like I didn't break! I am in this now, Sam. This is who I am now and you can't fucking act like…"
Dean doesn't say a word when Sam's face shatters and crumbles then sets. When Sam shouts again and she screams back at him. When Jess hits and scratches at Sam's face and chest and he just takes it, tears running freely down his bloodied cheeks. When she moves to strike out at Dean…he doesn't say a word.
He grabs her wrists tight in his fists, leaving bruises that will last for days, holding her up until she stills and falls against him. Until she collapses into Dean's lap then slithers up to devour his mouth, her lips salted and wet with tears. Until she reaches out for Sam and he comes to her--to them--and strokes Dean's hair as he licks and sucks at Jess's scarred shoulders.
Dean doesn't say a word until he slides into Sam while Sam slides into Jess and then he moves on them, in them. He thrusts back inside Sam and Sam rocks forward into Jess, once, twice, again and again and says, "Sammy. Jesus. Ah. Fuck. Jess…"
And they answer him, together and apart, "Dean. Oh, please… God. Dean, yes."
~finis~
And finally, as always, the soundtrack.
Placebo - Blind
If I could tear you from the ceiling
And guarantee a source divine
Rid you of possessions fleeting
Remain your funny valentine
Don't go and leave me
And please don't drive me blind
If I could tear you from the ceiling
I know the best have tried
I'd fill your every breath with meaning
And find a place we both could hide
Don't go and leave me
And please don't drive me blind
You don't believe me, but you do this every time
Please don't drive me blind.
I know we're broken
If I could tear you from the ceiling
I'd freeze us both in time
Find a brand new way of seeing
Your eyes forever glued to mine
Don't go and leave me
And please don't drive me blind
I know I broke it
Title: Transmutation
Word Count: 3,616
Rating/Pairing: Dean, Sam and Jess are in this story. And there is adult content and Wincest. I think that's all I'll say.
Spoilers: Just the Pilot, it goes AU after that.
A/N: This fic is fucked up, you guys. I mean the way this verse is in my head is also fucked up and I don't think I'll ever be happy with trying to describe it. But here is my best effort.
poisontaster is a total h0r, a total godsend, and pwns my soul as ever. starsouls1013 gives amazing grammar nazi and last-minute-flail damage control. I ended up going with "Transmutation" as the title so thanks to tayloredjustice for bringing it to my attention again. I also tried to work in a number of the other words my lovely flist supplied because it's fun and I'm a word geek like that.
Summary: Sam stops halfway to the door and everything changes.
"You'll call me if you find him? Maybe I can meet up with you later."
Dean knew, he knew that Sam was going to leave for his so goddamn important 'interview on Monday' but he'd hoped anyway, maybe Sam would see… But that was just stupid. "Yeah, all right."
Sam taps the windowsill and walks away.
Dean starts the car, waiting to watch Sam get inside like when he used to drop him off at school or with his few, intermittent friends. Old habits.
"Sam!" He stops halfway to the door and looks back. "You know, we made a hell of a team back there."
"Yeah." Despite his words, Dean frowns a little in surprise when Sam walks toward him and leans in the window again. "Look, man. Why don't you just come inside? You could crash here tonight if you want. I know you can make it to Colorado by morning, but you'll be exhausted when you get there if you're not sharing the driving. I don't want you to, like, run off the road or something."
Dean can't help but think "why do you suddenly care if I'm alone?" Still, he agrees to come in for a cup of coffee, and to get some sandwiches and Jess's cookies for the road. Sam says she'll like it if he says hello before he goes and Sam's asking, so Dean says yes.
~~~
Something seems Off right away.
Sam's too desensitized these days to feel it ("That's because you're outta practice…") but Dean already has one hand on the butt of his gun as they walk through the kitchen. He follows Sam to the doorway of the bedroom as Sam moves through it, calling out toward the running shower, "Jess? Hey Jess! We're back - Dean's here. Baby…?"
Dean looks up, was trained against biological instinct since he was four years old to always look up. "People don't intuitively look above them for danger. There's nothing natural can seriously injure or kill humans from the air. But we don't deal in the Natural, son…" It was the first lesson and Sam's forgotten it.
Dean sees her first, has one foot up on the bed before he chokes out, "Sammy!" and starts trying to pull the bleeding girl off the ceiling. Sam recoils in horror and freezes for a deadly-long moment before Dean barks "Sam!" triggering a long-ingrained obedience. "The holy water. In your bag, do it! The salt, circle the bed. Quick! Now, Sam!"
have to get her down. before. before it finishes. dad taught me, he told me what to do if…
Jessica's eyes are open and lucid - Dean's staring right into them - when the flames start.
Dean doesn't let her go and feels the tops of his hands and arms start to sizzle before Sam shouts out the final line of Latin and Dean's yanks her into his arms, crashes both of them into the mattress. She's still on fire, the flames painfully hot but somehow not burning Dean except where he grips her neck and hip.
Sam sobs and throws a blanket over them both, smothering the flames quickly. He and Dean carry Jess and drag each other outside in a desperate clutch of limbs and fear. Before the ambulance arrives, they sprawl in a crumpled pile on the damp lawn, twisted all three together in the blackened blanket. Jessica is unconscious - thank God - and Dean is sure that Sammy has no idea how hard he's squeezing Dean's arm or how close Dean holds him as he rocks Jess in his lap and cries like he did when Dean carried him away from the first fire.
"Take your brother outside as fast as you can and don't look back! Now, Dean! Go!"
~~~
Sam's friends Becky and Zach stop by the hospital to see Jess but they're obviously there for Sam. The doctors had put Jess into a coma while the deepest layers of skin heal but they came anyway, asking gentle questions and hugging Sam, and that makes Dean like them despite their expensive clothes. It's nice to know that Sammy met good people here, people who cared about him.
After they go, Dean, trying for Sam's coveted "normal", says they seem like a nice couple.
"They're brother and sister," Sam replies quietly and doesn't make eye contact.
Dean tips his chin up then down in a jerky, aborted nod. He opens his mouth to say something then closes it again and turns away.
Sam's a wreck the whole five weeks Jessica is unconscious. An absolute fucking disaster area.
He doesn't sleep or eat. He wouldn't remember to shower or change his clothes if Dean didn't strip him down at regular intervals, shove him under the hot spray and wash his hair like a child.
Sam can't focus on shit. He's got an aching, damaged look in his eyes all the time that Dean hasn't seen since Sam snapped Jimmy Giandrea's wrist in a playground fight in the 5th grade, anger overrunning training, sense and caution. Sam looks like he's irreparably shattered his most precious possession.
So later, if Dean sucks Sam off, sloppy and rough in the hospital stairwell with Jess breathing through a machine two floors above. If he makes Sam mindless and begging and writhing under his hands. If he muffles Sam's cries around fingers shoved between his brown-pink lips…
missed you. love you. need you. i'm sorry. i'm so sorry.
…Dean would never tell anyone the real reason for it.
~~~
Jess's hair is growing out, uneven and wispy, by the time she wakes up. White blond streaks grow through the uneven scar tissue on her scalp and wind at random among strands of her apparently natural light brown.
The skin on the left half of her face - wavering in a diagonal line from the corner of her eye to the corner of her mouth - is melted. It doesn't look like anything other than what it is, charred and annealed flesh. The other side of her face is largely untouched and her neck is a long, pale, perfect reminder of Before. Dean doesn't think about the skin of her arms and back but distracts himself with wondering how it's possible for her to be more beautiful now than she was before she was tempered and vitrified.
Her expensive-smelling mother begs and weeps when Jess says, "I don't want it. I don't want the plastic surgery. Just make me so I'm not an open wound and let me get the hell out of here." Mrs. Moore glares at Dean and Sam accusingly on her way out the door, clearly embarrassed and unsettled that her daughter would insist they stay for the discussion at all. Dean is sure she blames them for this, he's seen that look before, and he couldn't fucking care less. But he wishes it didn't make Sam go hollow-eyed and pinched around the mouth.
One day when the scars are red and raw and new, Jess looks over, turning her head slowly and painfully across the stark white pillow. Sam sits in a chair close to her side and Dean leans against the wall near her head. She looks dead into Sam's eyes and says, "This is it. This is all the things you didn't want me to know. All the things you didn't ever want to talk about." It isn't a question. She turns her face away again. "I thought your Dad was a drunk. I thought he beat you."
Dean's eyes snap to Sam's. He's surprised and betrayed that Sam let her think Dad would hurt them and he must look it, because Sam shuts his eyes and gasps in a little breath like a sharp pain.
Sam opens his mouth but doesn't seem able to make a sound, so Dean answers for him. Dean explains it all to her the best he can. Which isn't all that great, really, but she deserves to know everything they know. She deserves it after this.
He starts with, "Our mother died in a fire when Sam was a baby. She was pinned to the ceiling in his nursery and her stomach…" and finally finishes, "We didn't find him in Jericho. We still don't know if he's even… Anyway, I'm sorry. What happened to you? Happened because of us. Maybe because I took Sam away when I did, I don't know. It burned our mom on All Soul's Day too. We've spent our whole lives hunting this thing and we still don't know a lot. But I'm sorry."
She listens quietly, nods in all the right places and when he's done she says, looking only at Dean, "I didn't see much. It was in the shadows. Just yellow, glowing eyes. And it smiled at me before it slid me up the wall, before the pain started. I don't know if that helps." She pulls her hand from Sam's death grip and reaches up like she's trying to push back long hair that's no longer there.
"I'm coming with you when I get out of here."
~~~
"She could have died, Dean. She should have died. It's only because you came in, you saw her and we… It would have been much worse if she'd died." Sam's babbling again, talking non-stop and pacing back and forth, all the energy he tamps down for hours of calm stillness at the hospital bubbling up now that they're alone. "…Dean? Right?"
"Come to bed, Sam."
Would haves. Ifs. A lot of shit that doesn't matter.
Because he'd done the right thing, the only thing, and saved the girl. It doesn't matter that if she'd died, Sam could've been kept alive inside by rage and the spirit of vengeance until something better came along. Doesn't matter that Dean would've had Sam all to hims-
no. don't even think it.
~~~
Dean had gotten a text message (a text message, for Christ's sake) from Dad a month after the fire.
tell s. im sorry re: j. -- leave w. coast ASAP & keep moving - its angry
When he tried to call back, the number was disconnected. None of the steady repetitive ring Dean had lulled himself to sleep with some of the shameful nights he'd spent alone between Louisiana and California. Dad doesn't want them looking for him; he doesn't even want them to tell him where they are. Situation normal, all fucked up.
Jess checks herself out of the hospital as soon as she can move on her own and long before the doctors would like her to. Dean doesn't ask what Jess told her family or what she and Sam told their friends; he just loads them and their gear into the Impala and hauls ass eastward.
Dean and Sam trade off the driving and they don't stop at all for a very long time. They are three again and it feels good and wrong and fucking terrifying.
Jess is so still, still for hundreds of miles at a time. When Dean catches her reflection in the rearview mirror, his heart leaps up into his throat because she could be the burn-scarred spirit of his mother. Dean knows that she isn't exactly the woman Sam knew because of the way his face twists and his eyes widen uncertainly, how they go more green than brown, when he looks at her. Sam changes her bandages with light, careful fingertips, never touching her anywhere else even when they sleep in the same motel bed.
Traveling with a girl is so incredibly different in such mundane ways from everything Dean's known that he isn't sure what to make of it. Tampons mix in with his shaving kit after they have to move out in the wee hours because of that credit card thing. Bras hang in the bathroom, casting irregular shapes in the shadowy dark that make Dean go for the gun not at his hip when he stumbles in to take a piss in the middle of the night. A flowery lotion smell lingers in the air when Jess gets out of the shower in the morning and both Sam and Dean are helpless against their upbringing and curse at each other much less than they had.
Jess doesn't talk much, even when Dean coaxes Sam into snarking with him about pointless crap; she mostly just sits in the backseat of the car and stares out the window, ghosts into their motel rooms, tucks herself into corners to read one of the occult texts or practice disassembling the gun she'd demanded. If the fact of her presence wasn't a constant, low, prickling heat on the backs of their necks, recalibrating everything between he and Sam, Dean might forget she was with them entirely.
~~~
Once Jess can fully stretch out the skin of her back, shoulders and legs again, she sets to becoming the most fearsome little thing Dean's ever seen. It takes a while for her to learn to fight the recoil on their large shotguns, but she's tough and Dean's a good teacher. He remembers what it feels like to be small and weak, to have a weapon much too large for you in your hands, between you and your death.
She's scary good with knives, just like Sam. Natural talent. Aptitude. She actually smiles when Dean gives her a set of thin, light, perfectly balanced throwing knives and Sam hands her a shining, Marine-issue ka-bar knife with a dark and serious look.
Then Dean goes hand-to-hand with her and her new blade, the dirty back-alley moves he taught her flying fast and vicious, until she's good enough to bleed him each time.
She never apologizes. Dean never asks her to hold back.
~~~
They stay in a shithole apartment somewhere in Salt Lake City to rest up for a while. Sam's hiding, pulling another marathon research session at the local library. He's always hidden that way; nose tucked in a book and "this is important, Dean" and the soft microfiche glow painting words over his face in a gentle caress.
Dean's suffering from a case of brain overload so he studiously applies himself to a handle of Jim Beam all evening long and doesn't think about if it makes him like his father. He's mindlessly staring at something flickering on the TV with no idea how full or empty the bottle is anymore when Jess comes out of the back bedroom. He'd nearly forgotten she was in there again she's so damn quiet.
Jess stops in the doorway and silently watches him; she could be a stone idol, a mannequin, but for the rhythmic rise and fall of her breasts. Dean stares back, the top button of his jeans undone, shirtless and sweating in the high summer nighttime with golden-hot bourbon sloshing through his veins.
He doesn't realize how fucked up he is until he tries to stand and completely fails. When the room stops spinning and Dean opens his eyes again, Jess is standing in front of him, sudden in ghostly stop-motion. Her gaze burns through his hazy brain and the platinum streaks in her hair seem to glow in the light of the yellow lampshade.
Jess matter-of-factly strips off her long-sleeved shirt - her clothes are always loose and lengthy now, sleeves to her wrists and high necklines, long skirts and linen pants - then stands there in her bra and keeps looking at him. Dean doesn't know what this is, if it's a test or penance or a question or even who it's for; him or Sam or herself.
When he doesn't speak or look away - doesn't do anything but let his eyes calmly roam the mottled scar on her belly, the ridged pink and white skin that cascades over her shoulders down to mid-forearm in a frozen wave - Jess lifts the layers of her skirt and slides her panties off, delicately lifting one bare foot at a time.
Dean's mouth and hands fall open at the same time. The bottle rolls away from the couch with a glassy gurgle and thump. He finally averts his gaze, swallows hard and tilts his head to the side a little. "Jess…"
She straddles his lap in a single graceful lunge - "Shut up. Just shut the fuck up." - and licks at his bottom lip, quick and wet, before biting down and grinding her hips into his rapidly hardening cock.
Dean bends her, fucks her over the back of the couch in the flickering light of the television. She twists and growls and moans his name and "more, faster ", and "that all you got? c'mon, your little Sammy fucked me harder than …oh fuck, yes, just like that... just like…"
~~~
It is cold as fuck in the mountains this time of year.
The ghoul-zombie-thing is slobbering and lurching toward him. Fuck these necromancers who can't control their own gross-ass flesh experiments. Dean's unarmed, there's nothing on the ground around him but slippery wet grass, his ankle's turned and it's coming too damn fast, faster than any kind of zombie he's ever seen. He's not going to stop it and it's going to rip through this town when it's done with them.
Dean has enough time to see Sam slumped unconscious against a nearby tree trunk and to think - "This is it. This is how I die. Shit." - before the dead thing's ribcage blows apart in a crimson shower of blood and bone and thick chunks of flesh. It falls forward, nearly landing on Dean.
Jess is standing there behind it with shotgun raised and blank eyes. She chambers the next round, wincing against the wicked bruise Dean knows she must have on that shoulder now. Without hesitation, she takes aim at the still-twitching monster and fires another shell into its skull. It stills and collapses in on itself, dry flesh sinking into hollows.
Well, hell.
Dean wipes globs of dead ghoul-zombie-thing off his cheek and takes the hand Jess offers to haul himself upright.
Jess is actually tall enough to support Dean's weight when she throws one of his arms over her shoulders and gets him into the car. Sam wakes up just after that (thank god, oh thank god…) and Jess drives all night long.
~~~
Jess walks in, just opens the door hours before they expect her back from her typically endless, solitary walk and finds her boyfriend lost in sucking his brother off, finds him moaning around Dean's cock in his mouth.
She presses herself against the door, eyes growing wider every infinite second that Dean scrabbles at Sam's hair. "Sam, Sam, Sam, shit, Sammy, stop!" But not until the sharp snick of the door closing against Jess's back does Sam heed him. His mouth makes an obscenely wet noise as he pulls off, then stops breathing and gapes at Jess with an expression that goes beyond terror or horror.
Jess starts to laugh - wildly, hysterically - and slides down to the floor, the sounds melting seamlessly from laughter to sobs as she sinks. "I knew it. I totally knew it. Oh God, oh God."
"Jess. Jesus Christ…" Sam's still on his knees.
Dean sits down shakily on the edge of the rumpled bed, jeans pulled up but still unzipped, and doesn't say a word when Sam crawls to her.
Dean doesn't say a word as they start to yell at each other, about him and them and everything all at once. Dean is an outsider in his own life as he watches them; he's the connective tissue between his brother and this girl who was all of Sam's dreams of being a real boy until Dean came back for him. He doesn't say a word because he fucked them both to keep them all together and now it's falling apart.
Dean doesn't say a word as Sam tries to touch her and she kicks at him, catching him in the mouth and drawing blood. Dean taught her that kick.
Dean doesn't say a word when Sam gets angry and crouches up. "You fucked him too. I saw you, I smelled him on you…"
"Oh fuck you, Sam." Jess struggles awkwardly to her feet and pushes Sam away from her, makes him stumble up and back, his knees hitting the bed and tossing him into the tangle of blankets at Dean's side. "He's not my brother, you fucking pervert! You treat me like glass, he treats me like I'm real, like I didn't break! I am in this now, Sam. This is who I am now and you can't fucking act like…"
Dean doesn't say a word when Sam's face shatters and crumbles then sets. When Sam shouts again and she screams back at him. When Jess hits and scratches at Sam's face and chest and he just takes it, tears running freely down his bloodied cheeks. When she moves to strike out at Dean…he doesn't say a word.
He grabs her wrists tight in his fists, leaving bruises that will last for days, holding her up until she stills and falls against him. Until she collapses into Dean's lap then slithers up to devour his mouth, her lips salted and wet with tears. Until she reaches out for Sam and he comes to her--to them--and strokes Dean's hair as he licks and sucks at Jess's scarred shoulders.
Dean doesn't say a word until he slides into Sam while Sam slides into Jess and then he moves on them, in them. He thrusts back inside Sam and Sam rocks forward into Jess, once, twice, again and again and says, "Sammy. Jesus. Ah. Fuck. Jess…"
And they answer him, together and apart, "Dean. Oh, please… God. Dean, yes."
~finis~
And finally, as always, the soundtrack.
Placebo - Blind
If I could tear you from the ceiling
And guarantee a source divine
Rid you of possessions fleeting
Remain your funny valentine
Don't go and leave me
And please don't drive me blind
If I could tear you from the ceiling
I know the best have tried
I'd fill your every breath with meaning
And find a place we both could hide
Don't go and leave me
And please don't drive me blind
You don't believe me, but you do this every time
Please don't drive me blind.
I know we're broken
If I could tear you from the ceiling
I'd freeze us both in time
Find a brand new way of seeing
Your eyes forever glued to mine
Don't go and leave me
And please don't drive me blind
I know I broke it