original by shay_reynolds
Remix Title: Insufficient Data
Remix Author: ninhursag
Original Story: Falling Down
Original Author: shay_reynolds
Rating: NC-17
Pairings: Sam/Jess, Sam/Dean
Summary: Jess may be dead, but there's plenty of people that never stopped.
Warnings: non-con
Until the day she died Jessica Moore never worried about ghosts, God or monsters and never needed to. It was just never necessary, because she had math. Long clean lines of numbers and columns that always came out right if you pushed them hard enough, graphing themselves into infinite lines and cones.
When she died she spent an indeterminable amount of time trying to draw out the equation to explain what was happening to her now, to figure out the whys and wheres and the... the point. So long that the reaper that followed her around for the first few days finally threw up his hands in frustration and told her to hurry up and figure it out before she lost her mind and turned into a haunt.
No matter how long she worked on the problem of her death though, it kept coming up insufficient data. A man who wasn't a man. A man with yellow eyes pinning her to the ceiling and ripping her stomach open, that was all she had. That and pain. Insufficient data. There was no point.
She filled up reams of graph paper and the batteries on a couple of calculators that probably belonged to the math department, but she didn't care, her tuition was paid up through at least the end semester. She figured Stanford owed it to her and then some.
Of course she knew what the missing variable was, she'd known it all along, but Jess had never pretended to be a rational creature. She left that to the Aspergers guys in her department. Former department. It was just that she needed more time before she was ready to figure out how to deal with the Sam element.
She didn't keep track of time so she had no idea how much of it passed before she finally looked up from her tenth graphing notebook and slammed the fucker closed. A discarded calculator lay smashed on the floor next to her-- the batteries never used to run out this fast. It was the middle of the night and she could see the moon outside, bright and full.
“I'm a ghost,” she said, mostly for the novelty of hearing herself speak out loud. “I need more information.” She left the math department and booted up a library computer instead so she could run a search for ghosts and occult. It really was a hell of a day when Occam's Razor suggested that fucking ghosts were actually the simplest possible solution. It was a hell of day when she was dead.
She didn't let herself think the simple, obvious truth about what had really happened until a long while later when she was sitting on the library floor reading a dusty, rancid smelling book about a monster that kept its own still beating heart in a box. Right there in front of her on the page was Sam's handwriting in the margins. She'd seen it a thousand times, loopy and eccentric, leaving notes tucked under her door in the dorms or by her pillow when he'd left when it was too early for her to be awake. Love notes and grocery lists. Homework.
Sam. These notes in his handwriting, they were about hunting monsters. Terse short hand, but Jess knew Sam. Everything, always, in the last two years of her life, in these last insane days of her death, everything had come back to Sam. Sam, who apparently spent a lot of time writing shorthand notes in the margins of a dusty book to figure out how a person would hunt and kill a monster that kept its heart in a box.
It wasn't that she hadn't known something was off about her boyfriend. Jess liked math, but that didn't make her people stupid. She thought of Sam, and not being stupid and everything he must never have told her, must have lied to her face about, until it was half past too late and she was already dead.
As soon as she decided she wanted to, needed to, see him again it was easy, like a few years of sharing bed, breakfast and newspaper sections meant that he was somehow part of her. She could recognize him like she recognized her arm and he was just as hard to lose. She didn't think about whether or not he'd recognize her too, or think she was another monster. She just knew.
“Sam,” she said and she saw him in her mind's eye. The way she imagined he'd look, or maybe the way she knew he really did. Soft eyed, hair growing ragged out of the cut she'd bullied him into getting, dressed in a floppy sweat-shirt that hid the contours of his shoulders. “Sam.” And she was there.
She didn't know where there was, middle of the sidewalk in a town that looked like a post card of flyover country. There was a big black car growling down the road and when Jess opened her eyes she was looking right into Sam's through the passenger-side window.
His mouth fell open and he pressed his fingers to the glass, but the car drove right on by without stopping. His red, sweet mouth, that kissed her away from discrete mathematics, making the proofs into skin and nonsense. His eyes, hazel green and muddy.
“Sam,” Jess said out loud. She wondered if he'd seen her, really seen her, or if the feel of his stare had just been her imagination. She wondered if she'd ever really seen him or if she were still dying on the ceiling and this was the crazy dreaming that came out of misfiring brain synapses.
Insufficient data. She closed her eyes. For a long time, a very long time, she kept them closed and she didn't see anything at all. While her eyes were closed, she dreamed.
She dreamed that her reaper came back, came back and stood beside her and whispered to her. “You have to move on, Jessica Moore. There's nothing left for you to do. Nothing but pain for you if you stay.”
“I don't believe you,” she said. “I don't believe you.” But still she kept her eyes squeezed tight, good and closed, until the reaper finally went away again.
“You will,” he whispered. The parting words crackled, like they were supposed to sting, but Jess didn't feel it, not yet.
When she opened her eyes again the air crackled around her and she was somewhere else. She could smell the place, peeling paint stink and rotting wood, the faint suggestion of perfume covering it up. The perfume, she realized, that part wasn't real, or no more real than Jess herself.
There was music playing in the background, tinny, jerky and bright. A woman's voice braying over a guitar line. We're desperate , the woman wailed. Get used to it. The music was pouring out of a stereo leaning precariously against a wall. It wasn't plugged in.
“You look lost, honey.” The voice almost made Jess jump out of her skin before she remembered she was dead. She spun around anyway. Spun around and then she jumped at what she saw after all. “You looking for a job?” The woman asked.
Jess was looking into her own face. Hers and not hers. Jessica Lee Moore, with lipstick stained teeth and a red, red dress on, the kind she wore on Halloween when all the boys dressed like girls and all the girls dressed like whores. That was just the way the game was played.
“This isn't funny,” Jess said. Her voice rang loud and uncertain. This was another data point, it had to be, but Jess couldn't place it on her graphs. The math was wrong, it had been since the beginning.
“You can help me out,” the woman with Jess' face offered. Her red lips were parted into a smile and she offered a hand with a cool, languid motion that was nothing like the way Jess moved. “Are you angry? In my house an angry girl can do anything she wants. A girl like you could get some revenge if she was so minded.”
Jess frowned and took a step back, like she could hit the wall and keep on going. “Revenge?”
“There was a man, wasn't there?” the woman said. Her nail polish was silver, the same color as Jess'. “He was the reason you died. He's the reason you came here.”
“Insufficient data,” Jess said, sharp and fast. She remembered yellow eyes and blood. She remembered Sam's face. The look that was on his face when she bled and she screamed. She didn't know if it was guilt. “I don't know that. I don't know why I'm here.”
The woman laughed. Harsh cascades of laughter. “Don't tell me you're not angry. Don't be a damned fool,” she said. “You girl, you ain't nothing to him but a grave to weep over and marker for his quest. That's what you're dead for, that's all your life comes down to.”
Jess breathed in. Or made a motion of chest and mouth that felt like breathing. “What do you know about it?” she asked.
Jess watched the woman's face-- her own face-- twist up into more laughter, her own head get thrown back, styled yellow hair shifting with the motions. “Everything he did, and you're still feeling sorry for him? Well, I can use your pain as well as your anger. Come on, girl,” she said, “Let me show you what your pretty boyfriend looks like when he begs.” She turned around and opened the door behind her wide, wide enough that Jess could see over her shoulder.
Wide enough so that she could see the body, the warm, living breathing body tied to the floor. He looked bigger than he'd used to, broader in the shoulder. His eyes were closed tight.
“Sam,” Jess breathed. “Sam.”
His eyes snapped open, but he wasn't looking at her, he was looking at the other one. He looked hazy, dazed, lashes fluttering and pupils huge like he'd taken a blow to the head. "Jess," he whispered and held out one uncurled hand, fingers wide. He couldn't move it far, not with the way he was tied down, but he stretched it out anyway. "That you?"
The woman wearing Jess' face smiled at him, big and wide and syrupy. “I'm whoever you want me to be, Sammy,” she said.
“Stop it,” Jess said. Her voice came out sharp, rough. Sam didn't even blink, didn't look at her. His eyes were on the other one, blown and blank. “You, stop it.” The other one didn't turn around, just walked right toward Sam.
“You're not her,” Sam whispered, voice shaky, but decisive. “I'm not that stupid. I know exactly what you are and taking her face isn't going to help you.”
The other one laughed, bright and sour, head thrown back. If that was the way Jess' laughter had sounded, she didn't want to know. “I've got more than her face, you silly boy,” It said. “I am her, or good as. I am her and she knows everything.” Sam flinched and drew back, pressed to the limits of his bonds and Jess made a noise, low in her throat and took a running step towards him.
The other one turned and winked. Her eyes-- Jess' eyes, like looking in some twisted mirror-- they shone, bright and playful. “She knows you couldn't save her,” It said. “All you could do was weep and wail and gnash your teeth. That should piss her off, but the poor idiot loves you. Too bad she can't save you anymore than you saved her. She can just watch me eat you from the inside and rattle her chains like a silly little ghost.”
Jess saw that she was moving before she felt it. Faster than a run, like thinking about motion was enough to drive her closer to that thing. It was less surprising than it should have been and a thousand times more stomach churningly painful when her fists went right through the thing without touching it.
“No,” she hissed and drew back for another punch, but all she felt was air and nothing.
It laughed and winked at Jess, like it thought it was being so cute, so funny. If she had a stomach, she'd have thrown up. “All you can do is weep and wail and watch. Watch what I'm going to do and tell me if you're having fun.”
What it did to Sam... Jess had grown up knowing-- even if she never wanted to think about it-- that things like this could happen, could happen to her friends, could happen to her. Not monsters. Human monsters.
She knew the word rape. She was tall, strong handed, but things could happen-- like when her best friend crawled into her lap and whispered some shame faced story about too much to drink and a guy with wide, rough hands. It never happened to Jess, though, and she'd never seen it, never been so helpless to do anything but see it and see it and see it.
It touched him--- it touched Sam, when Jess couldn't. Sam made a sound, a deep, gasping noise Jess had never heard from him except when he was asleep and seconds away from screaming himself awake. For a second all Jess could think was that she should have known about monsters all along, should absolutely have known something was very wrong with Sam that first screaming, begging nightmare. Maybe if she'd known, things could have been different. If she had known, she wouldn't have died and everything would be different.
She wouldn't be dead. She'd have hands and a body and she would be able to help him.
It shimmied out of its dress, its bright, shimmery red dress, laughing like a coy little girl while Sam tried to squirm away. Jess could see it in his face, confusion chasing fear, pupils blank from what was probably a concussion. He whimpered and Jess remembered her best friend crying and saying, 'It was like a nightmare. I remember it like a nightmare.'
“Stop it,” Jess begged. She was on her knees without knowing how she'd got there. She couldn't feel the floor, it didn't hurt. “Stop it.” The thing laughed and tossed its hair. It straddled Sam's thighs and leaned down to kiss him, wet and loud and visibly messy.
Sam didn't speak at all, not when it pulled down his jeans and put its hands on his dick, rough and easy, the way Sam had always liked it best, like it was digging the knowledge out of his head or hers. It spoke all through it, half to Sam and half to Jess, smirking over its shoulder and laughing and laughing. “You like it,” it crooned while it slid itself down and down. “You like it just fine, you're hard enough.”
It breathed hard, panting, rasping breaths in time with Sam's whimpers. “Everything is happening because of you. I'm not at peace because of you, I died because of you. Admit it's your fault, admit you like it.”
Sam's lower lip bled bright red drops like he was biting it through. His lashes fluttered closed and she could see the trails of wet on them.
“Admit it,” It hissed while Sam shook his head over and over. Jess could taste salt in her mouth, like she was really alive. It grinned at her, like it could smell her crying. “You see what he is? He's nothing worth dying for. You died for nothing.”
Sam whimpered while it rode him. Jess could see the second his eyes rolled back like he was going to come in spite of everything. His lips moved, barely a whisper. “She didn't die for nothing. I'll stop you,” he whispered.
“How are you going to do that?” It laughed while he thrashed underneath it. Jess could smell blood and salt and come. “You can't even move.”
“I know where your heart is,” Sam mumbled. “Your heart's in the box on the mantle.” Jess' gaze went right over there. The box on the mantle, she'd barely noticed it before. She hadn't noticed anything at all in the room, but Sam, disheveled, bare and bound, like a sick little set piece. “Break it and you die.”
Sam, and the laughing, twisting thing with Jess' own face that kept touching him. “You're going to break my heart? Poor Sam, even if I untied you, you couldn't move fast enough to do that. I doubt you could move at all.”
Sam looked right past it. Looked right past it, over its shoulder and right into Jess' eyes. For a moment, just a second, his expression was clear. “I'm not deaf or stupid. She's here. I'm not the only one you're torturing.”
Its heart was in the box. For a second Jess had no clue what that even meant, would have had no clue at all if it hadn't been for all those weeks of research in the stacks at Stanford. Occult and ghosts and monsters. Creatures that kept their hearts in boxes and fed on torture.
She was on her feet and diving for the box before she even had a chance to blink. She almost expected it not to work, for her hands to slide right through it, like they had the thing, like they had Sam. They didn't, like whatever type of magic was in the box was on the same place that she was. The box felt more real under her hands than anything she'd ever touched. Warm and heavy to the touch, pulsing like she had her fingers on a living, beating heart already, not a thin wooden box.
“Drop it or I'll kill him!” the creature howled the second Jess' hands closed over it. She tried to shove it open, but it was locked, good and tight and she couldn't see a key. “I'll kill him before you break it.”
“Break it. Do it!” Sam gasped, almost too softly to be heard. “Jess. Hurry.” She never expected to hear him say her name again, not to her, not like he saw her. Not like she was alive. “Jess.” He sounded like he was cracking.
Jess didn't turn around, but she didn't have to. She could hear Sam's voice cut off, hear him gasp and sputter and choke and she could feel the monster's hands on his throat like they were on her own. It was choking Sam to death and she couldn't do anything more about it than when it had raped him in front of her. She couldn't do anything more than Sam could have when he watched her die.
She smashed the box against the wall like she could tear it open with her bare hands. She could, she knew she could, but not before it strangled Sam. “Please,” she mumbled, while the thin wood splintered, but too slow, too damned slow.
All she could hear was the sound of the box smashing against the wall and the thick, heavy thuds of the heart inside. Sam's choking, gasping sobs were silenced. “Please,” she mumbled.
She didn't know what she was begging for; she already knew there was no way this was going to work, not in time to stop It from killing Sam.
That was when the door smashed open. Jess didn't stop, didn't stop hacking at the splintering wood, but if she had she knew what face she would have seen. She didn't need to hear It say, “Look, big brother's here to join the fun.” She only hoped it had taken that precious second to loosen its hands from Sam's throat.
“Big brother's here to fucking kill you,” Dean Winchester spat out.
It might have said something, it might have laughed, but that was the second that the box shattered in Jess's hands, sending the heart skittering to the floor. She crushed it under the soles of her invisible boots and crumpled and dissolved like it had been a spun sugar replica of a heart, never the real thing. Jess stared at it blankly for a few long, meaningless seconds.
When she turned around, when she finally gathered the guts, Dean was kneeling down in the dust and ashes that were left of the creature that had stolen Jess' face, right next to Sam's sprawled, broken body. He wasn't making any noise, not at first. Just staring.
Jess stared too. She blinked and between blinks, something tore out of him. One twisted, gasping breath. Then he was crying. Wide, messy, noisy tears. “Sam,” he howled. “Sammy. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Fuck.”
Sam sat up next to his own body and watched Dean cry for a long, blank moment. By the time Jess got up and went to him Dean was doing CPR, chest compression between sobs, between begging and yelling. “Breathe!” Dean screamed. “Breathe! Fuck you, you can't leave me, breathe!”
“Sam,” Jess said. Her palm caught against Sam's and she could feel the chill in it, thick and spreading, like even the ghost of him was leaching out heat as he died.
“Sam,” she said. “Sam.” Sam stared at her. His body under Dean didn't move except where Dean shoved against it, didn't breathe. Neither of them turned back to look at it broken on the ground. He looked at Jess instead and she looked at him.
“Jess,” Sam mumbled, like it was an answer. His fingers slid through hers and tightened. His hand felt cold, like he was dead, like they both were.
“I get it now,” she said. She put her free arm around him. For a moment he flinched like she was the monster that hurt him, but just for a moment and then he clung back just as hard. She could see all the answers to every question she had, every important one she'd tried to graph out and failed. All those solution sets in the way Sam held onto her. “I get it,” she said and she smiled at him.
He frowned like she was talking math at him or something even more confusing. The familiar gesture turned strange in this small, fetid room over the sound of his brother weeping like the whole world had died. “Get what?”
“The missing data, the things I didn't know about you. You killed monsters.” She smiled again, a thin almost kind of smile. “You would have stopped though. For me.”
“Not just for you,” Sam said. He lay his head on her shoulder, pressing his cheek down hard into her collarbone and curling up close like he could make his body small if he just wanted it badly enough. “I hated it. I hate it. I just wanted to be safe, I just wanted to be happy. I just wanted you to live.”
Jess nodded. She cupped one hand over the back of his neck, loose and gentle, and stroked like she could soothe him, like she could make the last few minutes of death and horror disappear. “You can come with me,” she whispered. “We can get out of here.” She didn't think she'd need to call the reaper very hard before it showed up. “No one will ever hurt you again, I won't let them.”
“Yeah,” Sam mumbled. “I want to. I really want to. I really love you.” Over his shoulder, Jess watched Dean weep. Watched him quake and put his mouth over Sam's mouth like he was trying to breathe for him. Watched him call Sam's name.
“Yeah, me too,” Jess said and pressed her lips against the crown of Sam's head. “You won't though, will you?”
“Sorry,” Sam whispered, little boy weak. “I'm so sorry.”
Jess shook her head. She didn't have time to say anything at all before the Sam in her arms faded away. The body under Dean's hands made a tearing, gasping noise and breathed. His eyes snapped open.
“Sammy, come on, come on, breathe,” Dean begged. “I just need you to breathe.” Sam did it, he breathed. Coughed and spat and gagged his way back to life.
Jess knelt on the floor and watched Dean's face, watched Sam's. Maybe she should have been surprised when Dean leaned down and kissed Sam, full on the mouth with a desperate tenderness Jess had never seen in any other person but Sam. Sam, when he used to kiss her. Maybe she should have been grossed out that someone would do this, that Sam would do this with his own blood.
Instead she just knelt and watched, watched and waited. Dean had to half carry Sam out of the room and Jess didn't follow them. When the reaper finally came back a third time and offered her his hand Jess took it and the world faded away to light.
Remix Author: ninhursag
Original Story: Falling Down
Original Author: shay_reynolds
Rating: NC-17
Pairings: Sam/Jess, Sam/Dean
Summary: Jess may be dead, but there's plenty of people that never stopped.
Warnings: non-con
Until the day she died Jessica Moore never worried about ghosts, God or monsters and never needed to. It was just never necessary, because she had math. Long clean lines of numbers and columns that always came out right if you pushed them hard enough, graphing themselves into infinite lines and cones.
When she died she spent an indeterminable amount of time trying to draw out the equation to explain what was happening to her now, to figure out the whys and wheres and the... the point. So long that the reaper that followed her around for the first few days finally threw up his hands in frustration and told her to hurry up and figure it out before she lost her mind and turned into a haunt.
No matter how long she worked on the problem of her death though, it kept coming up insufficient data. A man who wasn't a man. A man with yellow eyes pinning her to the ceiling and ripping her stomach open, that was all she had. That and pain. Insufficient data. There was no point.
She filled up reams of graph paper and the batteries on a couple of calculators that probably belonged to the math department, but she didn't care, her tuition was paid up through at least the end semester. She figured Stanford owed it to her and then some.
Of course she knew what the missing variable was, she'd known it all along, but Jess had never pretended to be a rational creature. She left that to the Aspergers guys in her department. Former department. It was just that she needed more time before she was ready to figure out how to deal with the Sam element.
She didn't keep track of time so she had no idea how much of it passed before she finally looked up from her tenth graphing notebook and slammed the fucker closed. A discarded calculator lay smashed on the floor next to her-- the batteries never used to run out this fast. It was the middle of the night and she could see the moon outside, bright and full.
“I'm a ghost,” she said, mostly for the novelty of hearing herself speak out loud. “I need more information.” She left the math department and booted up a library computer instead so she could run a search for ghosts and occult. It really was a hell of a day when Occam's Razor suggested that fucking ghosts were actually the simplest possible solution. It was a hell of day when she was dead.
She didn't let herself think the simple, obvious truth about what had really happened until a long while later when she was sitting on the library floor reading a dusty, rancid smelling book about a monster that kept its own still beating heart in a box. Right there in front of her on the page was Sam's handwriting in the margins. She'd seen it a thousand times, loopy and eccentric, leaving notes tucked under her door in the dorms or by her pillow when he'd left when it was too early for her to be awake. Love notes and grocery lists. Homework.
Sam. These notes in his handwriting, they were about hunting monsters. Terse short hand, but Jess knew Sam. Everything, always, in the last two years of her life, in these last insane days of her death, everything had come back to Sam. Sam, who apparently spent a lot of time writing shorthand notes in the margins of a dusty book to figure out how a person would hunt and kill a monster that kept its heart in a box.
It wasn't that she hadn't known something was off about her boyfriend. Jess liked math, but that didn't make her people stupid. She thought of Sam, and not being stupid and everything he must never have told her, must have lied to her face about, until it was half past too late and she was already dead.
As soon as she decided she wanted to, needed to, see him again it was easy, like a few years of sharing bed, breakfast and newspaper sections meant that he was somehow part of her. She could recognize him like she recognized her arm and he was just as hard to lose. She didn't think about whether or not he'd recognize her too, or think she was another monster. She just knew.
“Sam,” she said and she saw him in her mind's eye. The way she imagined he'd look, or maybe the way she knew he really did. Soft eyed, hair growing ragged out of the cut she'd bullied him into getting, dressed in a floppy sweat-shirt that hid the contours of his shoulders. “Sam.” And she was there.
She didn't know where there was, middle of the sidewalk in a town that looked like a post card of flyover country. There was a big black car growling down the road and when Jess opened her eyes she was looking right into Sam's through the passenger-side window.
His mouth fell open and he pressed his fingers to the glass, but the car drove right on by without stopping. His red, sweet mouth, that kissed her away from discrete mathematics, making the proofs into skin and nonsense. His eyes, hazel green and muddy.
“Sam,” Jess said out loud. She wondered if he'd seen her, really seen her, or if the feel of his stare had just been her imagination. She wondered if she'd ever really seen him or if she were still dying on the ceiling and this was the crazy dreaming that came out of misfiring brain synapses.
Insufficient data. She closed her eyes. For a long time, a very long time, she kept them closed and she didn't see anything at all. While her eyes were closed, she dreamed.
She dreamed that her reaper came back, came back and stood beside her and whispered to her. “You have to move on, Jessica Moore. There's nothing left for you to do. Nothing but pain for you if you stay.”
“I don't believe you,” she said. “I don't believe you.” But still she kept her eyes squeezed tight, good and closed, until the reaper finally went away again.
“You will,” he whispered. The parting words crackled, like they were supposed to sting, but Jess didn't feel it, not yet.
When she opened her eyes again the air crackled around her and she was somewhere else. She could smell the place, peeling paint stink and rotting wood, the faint suggestion of perfume covering it up. The perfume, she realized, that part wasn't real, or no more real than Jess herself.
There was music playing in the background, tinny, jerky and bright. A woman's voice braying over a guitar line. We're desperate , the woman wailed. Get used to it. The music was pouring out of a stereo leaning precariously against a wall. It wasn't plugged in.
“You look lost, honey.” The voice almost made Jess jump out of her skin before she remembered she was dead. She spun around anyway. Spun around and then she jumped at what she saw after all. “You looking for a job?” The woman asked.
Jess was looking into her own face. Hers and not hers. Jessica Lee Moore, with lipstick stained teeth and a red, red dress on, the kind she wore on Halloween when all the boys dressed like girls and all the girls dressed like whores. That was just the way the game was played.
“This isn't funny,” Jess said. Her voice rang loud and uncertain. This was another data point, it had to be, but Jess couldn't place it on her graphs. The math was wrong, it had been since the beginning.
“You can help me out,” the woman with Jess' face offered. Her red lips were parted into a smile and she offered a hand with a cool, languid motion that was nothing like the way Jess moved. “Are you angry? In my house an angry girl can do anything she wants. A girl like you could get some revenge if she was so minded.”
Jess frowned and took a step back, like she could hit the wall and keep on going. “Revenge?”
“There was a man, wasn't there?” the woman said. Her nail polish was silver, the same color as Jess'. “He was the reason you died. He's the reason you came here.”
“Insufficient data,” Jess said, sharp and fast. She remembered yellow eyes and blood. She remembered Sam's face. The look that was on his face when she bled and she screamed. She didn't know if it was guilt. “I don't know that. I don't know why I'm here.”
The woman laughed. Harsh cascades of laughter. “Don't tell me you're not angry. Don't be a damned fool,” she said. “You girl, you ain't nothing to him but a grave to weep over and marker for his quest. That's what you're dead for, that's all your life comes down to.”
Jess breathed in. Or made a motion of chest and mouth that felt like breathing. “What do you know about it?” she asked.
Jess watched the woman's face-- her own face-- twist up into more laughter, her own head get thrown back, styled yellow hair shifting with the motions. “Everything he did, and you're still feeling sorry for him? Well, I can use your pain as well as your anger. Come on, girl,” she said, “Let me show you what your pretty boyfriend looks like when he begs.” She turned around and opened the door behind her wide, wide enough that Jess could see over her shoulder.
Wide enough so that she could see the body, the warm, living breathing body tied to the floor. He looked bigger than he'd used to, broader in the shoulder. His eyes were closed tight.
“Sam,” Jess breathed. “Sam.”
His eyes snapped open, but he wasn't looking at her, he was looking at the other one. He looked hazy, dazed, lashes fluttering and pupils huge like he'd taken a blow to the head. "Jess," he whispered and held out one uncurled hand, fingers wide. He couldn't move it far, not with the way he was tied down, but he stretched it out anyway. "That you?"
The woman wearing Jess' face smiled at him, big and wide and syrupy. “I'm whoever you want me to be, Sammy,” she said.
“Stop it,” Jess said. Her voice came out sharp, rough. Sam didn't even blink, didn't look at her. His eyes were on the other one, blown and blank. “You, stop it.” The other one didn't turn around, just walked right toward Sam.
“You're not her,” Sam whispered, voice shaky, but decisive. “I'm not that stupid. I know exactly what you are and taking her face isn't going to help you.”
The other one laughed, bright and sour, head thrown back. If that was the way Jess' laughter had sounded, she didn't want to know. “I've got more than her face, you silly boy,” It said. “I am her, or good as. I am her and she knows everything.” Sam flinched and drew back, pressed to the limits of his bonds and Jess made a noise, low in her throat and took a running step towards him.
The other one turned and winked. Her eyes-- Jess' eyes, like looking in some twisted mirror-- they shone, bright and playful. “She knows you couldn't save her,” It said. “All you could do was weep and wail and gnash your teeth. That should piss her off, but the poor idiot loves you. Too bad she can't save you anymore than you saved her. She can just watch me eat you from the inside and rattle her chains like a silly little ghost.”
Jess saw that she was moving before she felt it. Faster than a run, like thinking about motion was enough to drive her closer to that thing. It was less surprising than it should have been and a thousand times more stomach churningly painful when her fists went right through the thing without touching it.
“No,” she hissed and drew back for another punch, but all she felt was air and nothing.
It laughed and winked at Jess, like it thought it was being so cute, so funny. If she had a stomach, she'd have thrown up. “All you can do is weep and wail and watch. Watch what I'm going to do and tell me if you're having fun.”
What it did to Sam... Jess had grown up knowing-- even if she never wanted to think about it-- that things like this could happen, could happen to her friends, could happen to her. Not monsters. Human monsters.
She knew the word rape. She was tall, strong handed, but things could happen-- like when her best friend crawled into her lap and whispered some shame faced story about too much to drink and a guy with wide, rough hands. It never happened to Jess, though, and she'd never seen it, never been so helpless to do anything but see it and see it and see it.
It touched him--- it touched Sam, when Jess couldn't. Sam made a sound, a deep, gasping noise Jess had never heard from him except when he was asleep and seconds away from screaming himself awake. For a second all Jess could think was that she should have known about monsters all along, should absolutely have known something was very wrong with Sam that first screaming, begging nightmare. Maybe if she'd known, things could have been different. If she had known, she wouldn't have died and everything would be different.
She wouldn't be dead. She'd have hands and a body and she would be able to help him.
It shimmied out of its dress, its bright, shimmery red dress, laughing like a coy little girl while Sam tried to squirm away. Jess could see it in his face, confusion chasing fear, pupils blank from what was probably a concussion. He whimpered and Jess remembered her best friend crying and saying, 'It was like a nightmare. I remember it like a nightmare.'
“Stop it,” Jess begged. She was on her knees without knowing how she'd got there. She couldn't feel the floor, it didn't hurt. “Stop it.” The thing laughed and tossed its hair. It straddled Sam's thighs and leaned down to kiss him, wet and loud and visibly messy.
Sam didn't speak at all, not when it pulled down his jeans and put its hands on his dick, rough and easy, the way Sam had always liked it best, like it was digging the knowledge out of his head or hers. It spoke all through it, half to Sam and half to Jess, smirking over its shoulder and laughing and laughing. “You like it,” it crooned while it slid itself down and down. “You like it just fine, you're hard enough.”
It breathed hard, panting, rasping breaths in time with Sam's whimpers. “Everything is happening because of you. I'm not at peace because of you, I died because of you. Admit it's your fault, admit you like it.”
Sam's lower lip bled bright red drops like he was biting it through. His lashes fluttered closed and she could see the trails of wet on them.
“Admit it,” It hissed while Sam shook his head over and over. Jess could taste salt in her mouth, like she was really alive. It grinned at her, like it could smell her crying. “You see what he is? He's nothing worth dying for. You died for nothing.”
Sam whimpered while it rode him. Jess could see the second his eyes rolled back like he was going to come in spite of everything. His lips moved, barely a whisper. “She didn't die for nothing. I'll stop you,” he whispered.
“How are you going to do that?” It laughed while he thrashed underneath it. Jess could smell blood and salt and come. “You can't even move.”
“I know where your heart is,” Sam mumbled. “Your heart's in the box on the mantle.” Jess' gaze went right over there. The box on the mantle, she'd barely noticed it before. She hadn't noticed anything at all in the room, but Sam, disheveled, bare and bound, like a sick little set piece. “Break it and you die.”
Sam, and the laughing, twisting thing with Jess' own face that kept touching him. “You're going to break my heart? Poor Sam, even if I untied you, you couldn't move fast enough to do that. I doubt you could move at all.”
Sam looked right past it. Looked right past it, over its shoulder and right into Jess' eyes. For a moment, just a second, his expression was clear. “I'm not deaf or stupid. She's here. I'm not the only one you're torturing.”
Its heart was in the box. For a second Jess had no clue what that even meant, would have had no clue at all if it hadn't been for all those weeks of research in the stacks at Stanford. Occult and ghosts and monsters. Creatures that kept their hearts in boxes and fed on torture.
She was on her feet and diving for the box before she even had a chance to blink. She almost expected it not to work, for her hands to slide right through it, like they had the thing, like they had Sam. They didn't, like whatever type of magic was in the box was on the same place that she was. The box felt more real under her hands than anything she'd ever touched. Warm and heavy to the touch, pulsing like she had her fingers on a living, beating heart already, not a thin wooden box.
“Drop it or I'll kill him!” the creature howled the second Jess' hands closed over it. She tried to shove it open, but it was locked, good and tight and she couldn't see a key. “I'll kill him before you break it.”
“Break it. Do it!” Sam gasped, almost too softly to be heard. “Jess. Hurry.” She never expected to hear him say her name again, not to her, not like he saw her. Not like she was alive. “Jess.” He sounded like he was cracking.
Jess didn't turn around, but she didn't have to. She could hear Sam's voice cut off, hear him gasp and sputter and choke and she could feel the monster's hands on his throat like they were on her own. It was choking Sam to death and she couldn't do anything more about it than when it had raped him in front of her. She couldn't do anything more than Sam could have when he watched her die.
She smashed the box against the wall like she could tear it open with her bare hands. She could, she knew she could, but not before it strangled Sam. “Please,” she mumbled, while the thin wood splintered, but too slow, too damned slow.
All she could hear was the sound of the box smashing against the wall and the thick, heavy thuds of the heart inside. Sam's choking, gasping sobs were silenced. “Please,” she mumbled.
She didn't know what she was begging for; she already knew there was no way this was going to work, not in time to stop It from killing Sam.
That was when the door smashed open. Jess didn't stop, didn't stop hacking at the splintering wood, but if she had she knew what face she would have seen. She didn't need to hear It say, “Look, big brother's here to join the fun.” She only hoped it had taken that precious second to loosen its hands from Sam's throat.
“Big brother's here to fucking kill you,” Dean Winchester spat out.
It might have said something, it might have laughed, but that was the second that the box shattered in Jess's hands, sending the heart skittering to the floor. She crushed it under the soles of her invisible boots and crumpled and dissolved like it had been a spun sugar replica of a heart, never the real thing. Jess stared at it blankly for a few long, meaningless seconds.
When she turned around, when she finally gathered the guts, Dean was kneeling down in the dust and ashes that were left of the creature that had stolen Jess' face, right next to Sam's sprawled, broken body. He wasn't making any noise, not at first. Just staring.
Jess stared too. She blinked and between blinks, something tore out of him. One twisted, gasping breath. Then he was crying. Wide, messy, noisy tears. “Sam,” he howled. “Sammy. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Fuck.”
Sam sat up next to his own body and watched Dean cry for a long, blank moment. By the time Jess got up and went to him Dean was doing CPR, chest compression between sobs, between begging and yelling. “Breathe!” Dean screamed. “Breathe! Fuck you, you can't leave me, breathe!”
“Sam,” Jess said. Her palm caught against Sam's and she could feel the chill in it, thick and spreading, like even the ghost of him was leaching out heat as he died.
“Sam,” she said. “Sam.” Sam stared at her. His body under Dean didn't move except where Dean shoved against it, didn't breathe. Neither of them turned back to look at it broken on the ground. He looked at Jess instead and she looked at him.
“Jess,” Sam mumbled, like it was an answer. His fingers slid through hers and tightened. His hand felt cold, like he was dead, like they both were.
“I get it now,” she said. She put her free arm around him. For a moment he flinched like she was the monster that hurt him, but just for a moment and then he clung back just as hard. She could see all the answers to every question she had, every important one she'd tried to graph out and failed. All those solution sets in the way Sam held onto her. “I get it,” she said and she smiled at him.
He frowned like she was talking math at him or something even more confusing. The familiar gesture turned strange in this small, fetid room over the sound of his brother weeping like the whole world had died. “Get what?”
“The missing data, the things I didn't know about you. You killed monsters.” She smiled again, a thin almost kind of smile. “You would have stopped though. For me.”
“Not just for you,” Sam said. He lay his head on her shoulder, pressing his cheek down hard into her collarbone and curling up close like he could make his body small if he just wanted it badly enough. “I hated it. I hate it. I just wanted to be safe, I just wanted to be happy. I just wanted you to live.”
Jess nodded. She cupped one hand over the back of his neck, loose and gentle, and stroked like she could soothe him, like she could make the last few minutes of death and horror disappear. “You can come with me,” she whispered. “We can get out of here.” She didn't think she'd need to call the reaper very hard before it showed up. “No one will ever hurt you again, I won't let them.”
“Yeah,” Sam mumbled. “I want to. I really want to. I really love you.” Over his shoulder, Jess watched Dean weep. Watched him quake and put his mouth over Sam's mouth like he was trying to breathe for him. Watched him call Sam's name.
“Yeah, me too,” Jess said and pressed her lips against the crown of Sam's head. “You won't though, will you?”
“Sorry,” Sam whispered, little boy weak. “I'm so sorry.”
Jess shook her head. She didn't have time to say anything at all before the Sam in her arms faded away. The body under Dean's hands made a tearing, gasping noise and breathed. His eyes snapped open.
“Sammy, come on, come on, breathe,” Dean begged. “I just need you to breathe.” Sam did it, he breathed. Coughed and spat and gagged his way back to life.
Jess knelt on the floor and watched Dean's face, watched Sam's. Maybe she should have been surprised when Dean leaned down and kissed Sam, full on the mouth with a desperate tenderness Jess had never seen in any other person but Sam. Sam, when he used to kiss her. Maybe she should have been grossed out that someone would do this, that Sam would do this with his own blood.
Instead she just knelt and watched, watched and waited. Dean had to half carry Sam out of the room and Jess didn't follow them. When the reaper finally came back a third time and offered her his hand Jess took it and the world faded away to light.