Fic: No, Make Something Up (Supernatural)
Jul. 31st, 2006 08:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
apocalypsosTitle: No, Make Something Up
Author: Troll Princess
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: R
Word Count: 3,750 words
Spoilers: The pilot
Characters/Pairings: Sam/Jess
Warnings: Bad words, sexual situations.
Disclaimer: I don't own the Winchester boys, mostly because I can't afford the shipping.
Summary: How to be honest in seven easy lessons. An Stanford-era AU.
Author's note: I finally finished a fic again! *sighs with relief*
*****
No, Make Something Up
*****
Lesson One:
Never start lying in the first place.
When he tells her, they aren't even on a date.
You can look at it that way if you want. Saturday night in the bar and everyone not in possession of a real ID has one close enough to pass, the drinks coming slow but steady and Sam's arm slung easily over Jess's shoulder like it was carved to fit right there. They've had three real dates already -- the Chinese restaurant, the beach, the movies. Sam had to argue with Jess for them to go see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind over Dawn of the Dead. She has a thing for horror movies. Maybe he should have known then.
But this time it's different, because it's not just the two of them. It's Zach hitting on a redhead at the bar and Becky making a crack about his sad excuse for a love life as she and Jess down shots. It's Mark and Dave at the pool table getting their asses kicked by a guy who might even give Dean a hurting, the way he plays. The cue ball pops easily over the eight to sink his target, and Mark and Dave groan like they're about to die.
It's good.
Hell, it's better than good. It's normal.
Jess keeps talking about her family and how her cousin got wasted at her own wedding and danced on a tabletop. Her hands flutter through the air like birds as she talks about her sister Colleen in culinary school and her mom writing the next cheesy romance novel she'll be publishing.
She's going so fast that Sam and his half-empty second bottle of beer don't even notice she's stopped until she repeats her question.
"Sam?" She's calling out this time, like she thinks he didn't hear her. "I said, you never told me what your dad did for a living."
Later on, he counts his drinks again like two beers are really that fucking difficult to forget.
In case you were wondering, they're not.
"He hunts ghosts," Sam hears himself say.
Two beers should not be anyone's alcohol limit at which they admit their deepest darkest secrets.
There's a brief startling moment where Sam wonders if he really is drunk, if he's buzzed or if he's as sober as anything. Maybe he's possessed. He whispers, "Christo," and is almost disappointed when it doesn't hurt.
There's no one else around, Zach still at the bar and Becky gone over to watch, Mark and Dave losing all of their trust fund cash to that smug pool shark. There's just Jess and the shot of tequila in her hand, those big pretty eyes of hers staring at him over the top of the shot glass. Her lips tug into this confused smile.
"Seriously?"
Maybe it's a bad thing that she sounds so fucking amused by that.
*
Lesson Two:
Never take back the truth with a lie. It's like using a crowbar on your kid to take back your grandmother's eyes.
Sam's brilliant plan is three days.
Three days should be good enough. Sunday to supposedly sleep it off, Monday to be too busy with classes and homework to call, and Tuesday to call with a dozen heartfelt apologies and some bullshit story about watching reruns on the Sci-Fi Channel. He doesn't even have the Sci-Fi Channel, but if there's one thing growing up a Winchester taught him, it's how to lie at Academy Award levels.
Jess calls him Sunday afternoon. He should have expected that.
"Did I wake Will?" she asks.
Sam glances over at the other bed in the room, shakes his head as if she can see him. Will has been his roommate since freshman year like a bad habit he can't shake. Sam can't remember a time Will has ever woken up before nightfall on a Sunday. It's possible he's in a coma, but Sam can't summon forth the energy to check.
She doesn't give him a chance to come up with a verbal answer. "So ... seriously?"
It's easy enough to come up with something to cover his ass on this one. It could be a bad joke, right? His jokes have always been pretty awful attempts at humor -- Dean was, is now and always will be the funny one -- so Jess will totally buy it if he says he was just pulling her leg. He overheard someone at the bar talking about Ghostbusters or something. It won't be that difficult to --
"No, really. My brother, too."
-- let himself run off at the mouth with the God's honest truth, apparently.
Jess makes this weird sound at the other end of the phone, like she's going to start laughing, figures that would be rude, and chokes on her giggles like water gone down the wrong pipe. "You realize," she says finally, her voice raspy, "that you are so going to have to give up all of the sordid little details about that one, right?"
Sam sighs and says, "Yeah, figured as much."
Weird, how it doesn't feel half as awkward as Sam thought it might, telling her all this.
*
Lesson Three:
Sometimes when you tell the truth, you're still going to have to prove you're not entirely full of shit.
There isn't a haunting nearby, not one that Sam's willing to drag Jess within a hundred feet of. He's not about to go hunting for creatures in the woods with her or scout around for demons like some sort of ... well, like some sort of Winchester.
So Sam does the only thing he can do. He just keeps talking.
Once the floodgates open, they can't stop. Two years of pressure, of holding something in, and he bursts.
He tells her about women in white and spirits on a mission, that vampires aren't real but he can tell her just what the breath of a werewolf smells like. He tells her about the time Dean threw himself between Sam and a Black Dog and the fifteen stitches he had to tug through Dean's torn flesh in some rest stop bathroom afterwards. He reads aloud to her from the newspaper, translating the sports page into Latin as he goes just to prove he can. He gives her a running list of what's warded off by silver, by salt, by lead and iron. He takes every steak knife in her apartment's shabby kitchen and throws them all into the center of a hastily drawn paper target on the far wall.
"Damn, Sam, you've been holding out on me," she says.
He tugs the knives from the wall, glaring at the small notches they left behind. "I just wanted to be normal," he says quietly.
"Then why did you tell me about your dad?"
Sam doesn't know and doesn't answer, but Jess gets it anyway. Her hand presses lightly against his shoulder but it steers him back against the wall just fine. Deft fingers pull at his zipper, and when they slip inside his baggy jeans he forgets how to breathe.
It doesn't even occur to him at all that she might be learning something along the way. That thought comes later.
*
Lesson Four:
If you think chicks dig scars, you should see how much they love them when you've got a great true story to back them up.
"What about this one?"
Jess trails her fingertip over a five-inch long raised ridge of flesh on Sam's side. Her tongue follows after it, and Sam immediately blanks on the cover story he'd told the only other girl he ever slept with about that scar. Something about kidney surgery when he was a kid, maybe. He can barely remember his own name at this point
"Poltergeist," Sam says. "Threw me down a flight of stairs when I was sixteen."
"Poor baby," Jess teases.
She mouths hot wet kisses across the scar and his skin feels like it's fallen asleep in heated tingles. Hs fingers sink into her hair, silky blond waves warming his hand. "Yeah, well, I landed on Dean."
"I really hope you're not trying to get me to do this to him," she says, and slithers down his body.
A moment later her lips slip over the head of his cock and the world descends into a spectacular hum of white noise.
*
Lesson Five:
You can refrain from lying and not tell the whole truth all at the same time. Just watch.
Last Christmas was ramen noodles and that twenty-four-hour marathon of A Christmas Story and this big box with too much postage and Dean's name on it. Sam really didn't want to open it, that much he remembers vividly. He'd been positive ever since he'd signed for it that opening it would release a bomb or a portal into a hell dimension or a spell that would turn his hair orange for a week. It would be just like Dean, sitting back somewhere out there and snickering at the thought of Sam stuck looking like Ronald McDonald. Maybe it was just socks and Sam was agonizing for nothing. That'd make Dean laugh that much harder, come to think of it.
Right after Ralphie's little brother whined for a third time that he couldn't put his arms down, Sam finally cracked and opened the box.
It was a stuffed lobster doll.
Sam just doesn't get Dean sometimes.
He could see it in his head, though, Dean grabbing the first thing at hand in the store just so he could hit on the hot salesgirl. It would explain a lot.
So, yeah, Sam's expecting more of the same this year. Maybe this time he'll mix it up. Go pick up a Happy Meal or make himself a peanut butter sandwich. Watch National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation or Emmet Otter's Jugband Christmas over and over again until his brain explodes. Think about Dean and Dad out there somewhere, hunkered down in a crappy motel room cleaning their guns without even noticing what day it is.
But then the phone rings, and Sam picks it up to hear Jessica say, "Hey, stud, got any plans for the weekend? See, my parents have this empty guest bedroom and this insane need to have it filled, and ... you know."
Her voice trails off, but Sam can hear the hesitant plea hidden there.
He stares at the peanut butter sandwich in his hand for the longest time and bites back the urge to ask it, "You did this, didn't you?"
It hadn't, but it was a nice gesture just the same.
So here's what happens during a real Christmas, if his visit to the Moore residence is any indication. He gets up on Christmas morning to a hot of steaming coffee and a quick hug from Jess's mom, something comforting and foreign all at once. The tree's mostly covered with dozens of ornaments Jess and her sister Colleen have made over the years, paper angels and badly painted ceramic reindeer and cross-stitched squares of cloth in popsicle stick frames. Presents pass from hand to hand until a pair of them land in his lap. One's from Jessica's sister, the other from her parents. He's never met any of them before, and it doesn't even matter.
Sam doesn't clean blood out of anything, none of his bones are broken, and no one punctuates the holiday by finishing off a bottle of whiskey at the first mention of Mrs. Moore.
All it does is make Sam feel oddly bereft in a way he really doesn't want to think about.
At Christmas dinner, Sam's piling his plate high with ham and sweet potatoes -- "Eat up, Sam, there's plenty more where that came from," Mrs. Moore says, and something inside Sam chokes off at the smile on her face -- and that's when Colleen asks, "So, Sam, if you don't mind my asking, why'd you skip out of Christmas with your own family?"
There's a thump under the table and she winces, Jess flashing her a dark look that even makes Sam cringe a little. But enough practice has Sam smoothly plastering on the smile that Dean always claimed could get a prostitute to give him a sandwich and a freebie. "We had a fight a while back," he says. "Besides, my dad and brother travel around a lot, so ..."
He shrugs, and that's enough for Colleen, it seems, although he thinks the kick to her leg helped that along.
Mr. Moore, on the other hand ... "Oh, really? Jessica never told us what your dad does. She said something about a family business?"
His normal responses come to mind. Traveling salesmen comes first, bounty hunters a distant second. It depends on who he's talking to.
"Oh, Mr. Winchester's a folklorist."
Sam narrows his eyes at Jess, holding a forkful of his mashed potatoes frozen in midair. Jess just tilts her head on the other side of the table, this amused twinkle in her eye, and Sam suddenly gets it. Sam read one of her mom's romance novels once on a dare from Jess, flipping through it in a couple of hours on a lazy Sunday afternoon. Aside from the highly detailed sex scenes, the historical aspects were actually pretty decently researched. And her dad is a surgeon, some higher-up at one of Minnesota's best hospitals.
She's playing to her audience, is what she's doing.
Her mom perks up at that. "A folklorist? That's interesting."
"Oh, sure," Sam says, catching up. "He travels around documenting firsthand accounts of ghost stories. It's weird, but you get used to it."
"Has he written anything?"
Sam thinks of the journal, just as much a member of the Winchester family as Dad or Dean or the Impala. "Just one book, but it's not published."
Mrs. Moore grins, soft and gentle. "I'm sure he's got a lot of really great stories to tell."
"A few," Sam says.
In his mind, he desperately grabs at any jobs he can remember that didn't end in blood and tears and pain, just in case, but then Jess changes the subject and that's the end of that line of questioning for the rest of the weekend.
*
Lesson Six:
Telling the truth just makes it a hell of a lot easier later on when the truth turns around and bites you in the ass.
Sam wakes up in a cold sweat for a week.
Every time he does after that first time, Jess curls up beside him and slips an arm over his chest. She tucks her head into the curve of his neck, nuzzles at him like a sleepy puppy, and tightens her grip on him until he can barely breathe anymore. But he doesn't care. After what he's woken up from, he doesn't care if Jess squeezes him until he cracks a rib, as long as she's there.
But then someone's in the living room and --
"Hey, tiger."
-- and it's Dean, that son of a bitch, that cocky grin of his in full display. And then Jess comes in and Dean flirts with her -- you know, because he's awake -- and Sam's had just about enough. He demands a reason for Dean's visit, if you can even call it visiting when there's breaking and entering involved.
"Dad hasn't been home in a few days," Dean says.
Sam tenses. If any of his friends were in the room, he'd play the drunken father card, but it's not his friends. It's Jess, so he gets right to the point.
"What was he hunting?"
Dean's gaze darts to Jess, a confused look in his eyes. She doesn't even flinch, and neither does Sam. "Really?"
"No, make something up," Sam says in a dry tone of voice. "C'mon, Dean, Jess knows. Out with it already."
It takes a minute and a vaguely suave, "Damn, princess, he must really like you," but Dean finally pulls it together and tells them both about what he knows. Men disappearing in Jericho, California, EVP on a message John Winchester left on his son's voicemail. Nothing that Dean couldn't handle alone, Sam points out.
"Yeah, but I don't want to," Dean mutters under his breath.
Sam thinks of his free ride, then sighs and says yes anyway.
Jess trails after him into the bedroom, silent as she shadows him. He grabs a handful of newly washed clothes from the laundry basket and stares at them like they're going to tell him what to say next. If there's something he can say to Jess to reassure her, he can't come up with anything. If she didn't know about all of this, if he'd never just blurted it out over two beers in a crowded bar, maybe this would be simpler. An easy smile, a kiss on the cheek, and a gentle goodbye ... that's all. Sam can even picture it in his head, and tries to ignore how fake it feels.
There's a sound from the kitchen, Dean rummaging through their fridge, and resolve sets in Jess's shoulders as she stands at his side.
"I'm coming with you."
He shakes his head nonono, but she's not listening. She's already packing a fucking bag, is what she's doing. She ducks and dodges around him like he's a statue in her way, still and solid while she digs up her oldest pair of jeans and her running sneakers and the knives he's got tucked away in the nightstand.
She leans up to kiss him before tossing some clothes into an overnight bag and her hair still smells like smoke that only existed in his head.
That's why he says nothing, he realizes later on. That's why.
*
Lesson Seven:
You think being honest is hard, but then again, so are most things that save lives.
They have no proof other than a starburst of flames that starts on the ceiling over their bed and engulfs their entire apartment like it's eating the life they've made together. Dean says something in passing one night, the three of them speeding through Kentucky on their way to kill something slaughtering virgins in Maryland. He takes his chance while Sam's asleep in the front seat, she notices. He mentions that they're not sure the demon did it, that they don't know for sure it's not safe for her to go back to Palo Alto.
"I don't need any proof," Jess says from the back seat of the Impala. Her eyes go hard and glassy in the rear view. "Do you?"
Dean shakes his head reluctantly. Months and months on the road together with Sam and Jess, and he's not sure he's willing to risk leaving her back there, either.
Jess won't listen -- not to him, and not to Sam. She learns bits and pieces of Latin, enough to get by. She gets decent with a knife, pretty damn good with a gun, and dead on target with a well-thrown punch. But she won't go home ... not to Palo Alto, and not to her parents.
"I just want to kill the son of a bitch before he comes after us again," Sam tells her one night in their motel room, long after Dean's fallen asleep in the other bed. "You didn't have to come --"
"I did," she says. "I couldn't ... I just did, Sam."
Sam has this proposal in his head, a tastefully small but glittering diamond and a candlelit Italian dinner, but he ends up doing it one day while she's stitching him up in the back seat of the Impala. They've just gotten done going after a spirit who had a lot of fun throwing them all against walls, and with Sam, it aimed for a mirror. Jess spends ten minutes pulling slivers of glass from his arm and waits for Sam to take a pull off the bottle of Jack Daniels that Dean passes to him before she tugs the needle through his skin. She's three stitches into it when she hears, "Will you marry me?"
In the front seat, Dean chokes on the alcohol he's just downed and coughs like he's dying.
Sam looks up at her hopefully, and she wipes the blood on her fingers on his shirt before going back to her stitching. "Ask me again after you kill the demon," she says quietly.
"Why?" he blurts out. It wasn't the answer he expected, she gathers.
"I have my reasons."
"Like when you came with us to look for Dad?"
She finishes up as quick as she can, too much practice these past few months making the sewing swift and neat, and ties the thread off. She and Dean exchange a quick look from opposite sides of the car, and she puts away the medical supplies in the first aid kit without looking at Sam.
"Sometimes when you have nightmares," she says in a soft voice, "you talk in your sleep."
She lets the full meaning of that set in as she leans out of the open back door to pour bottled water over her hands, to wash Sam's blood from her palms.
Sam doesn't ask her to go home after that.
Author: Troll Princess
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: R
Word Count: 3,750 words
Spoilers: The pilot
Characters/Pairings: Sam/Jess
Warnings: Bad words, sexual situations.
Disclaimer: I don't own the Winchester boys, mostly because I can't afford the shipping.
Summary: How to be honest in seven easy lessons. An Stanford-era AU.
Author's note: I finally finished a fic again! *sighs with relief*
No, Make Something Up
*****
Never start lying in the first place.
When he tells her, they aren't even on a date.
You can look at it that way if you want. Saturday night in the bar and everyone not in possession of a real ID has one close enough to pass, the drinks coming slow but steady and Sam's arm slung easily over Jess's shoulder like it was carved to fit right there. They've had three real dates already -- the Chinese restaurant, the beach, the movies. Sam had to argue with Jess for them to go see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind over Dawn of the Dead. She has a thing for horror movies. Maybe he should have known then.
But this time it's different, because it's not just the two of them. It's Zach hitting on a redhead at the bar and Becky making a crack about his sad excuse for a love life as she and Jess down shots. It's Mark and Dave at the pool table getting their asses kicked by a guy who might even give Dean a hurting, the way he plays. The cue ball pops easily over the eight to sink his target, and Mark and Dave groan like they're about to die.
It's good.
Hell, it's better than good. It's normal.
Jess keeps talking about her family and how her cousin got wasted at her own wedding and danced on a tabletop. Her hands flutter through the air like birds as she talks about her sister Colleen in culinary school and her mom writing the next cheesy romance novel she'll be publishing.
She's going so fast that Sam and his half-empty second bottle of beer don't even notice she's stopped until she repeats her question.
"Sam?" She's calling out this time, like she thinks he didn't hear her. "I said, you never told me what your dad did for a living."
Later on, he counts his drinks again like two beers are really that fucking difficult to forget.
In case you were wondering, they're not.
"He hunts ghosts," Sam hears himself say.
Two beers should not be anyone's alcohol limit at which they admit their deepest darkest secrets.
There's a brief startling moment where Sam wonders if he really is drunk, if he's buzzed or if he's as sober as anything. Maybe he's possessed. He whispers, "Christo," and is almost disappointed when it doesn't hurt.
There's no one else around, Zach still at the bar and Becky gone over to watch, Mark and Dave losing all of their trust fund cash to that smug pool shark. There's just Jess and the shot of tequila in her hand, those big pretty eyes of hers staring at him over the top of the shot glass. Her lips tug into this confused smile.
"Seriously?"
Maybe it's a bad thing that she sounds so fucking amused by that.
Lesson Two:
Never take back the truth with a lie. It's like using a crowbar on your kid to take back your grandmother's eyes.
Sam's brilliant plan is three days.
Three days should be good enough. Sunday to supposedly sleep it off, Monday to be too busy with classes and homework to call, and Tuesday to call with a dozen heartfelt apologies and some bullshit story about watching reruns on the Sci-Fi Channel. He doesn't even have the Sci-Fi Channel, but if there's one thing growing up a Winchester taught him, it's how to lie at Academy Award levels.
Jess calls him Sunday afternoon. He should have expected that.
"Did I wake Will?" she asks.
Sam glances over at the other bed in the room, shakes his head as if she can see him. Will has been his roommate since freshman year like a bad habit he can't shake. Sam can't remember a time Will has ever woken up before nightfall on a Sunday. It's possible he's in a coma, but Sam can't summon forth the energy to check.
She doesn't give him a chance to come up with a verbal answer. "So ... seriously?"
It's easy enough to come up with something to cover his ass on this one. It could be a bad joke, right? His jokes have always been pretty awful attempts at humor -- Dean was, is now and always will be the funny one -- so Jess will totally buy it if he says he was just pulling her leg. He overheard someone at the bar talking about Ghostbusters or something. It won't be that difficult to --
"No, really. My brother, too."
-- let himself run off at the mouth with the God's honest truth, apparently.
Jess makes this weird sound at the other end of the phone, like she's going to start laughing, figures that would be rude, and chokes on her giggles like water gone down the wrong pipe. "You realize," she says finally, her voice raspy, "that you are so going to have to give up all of the sordid little details about that one, right?"
Sam sighs and says, "Yeah, figured as much."
Weird, how it doesn't feel half as awkward as Sam thought it might, telling her all this.
Lesson Three:
Sometimes when you tell the truth, you're still going to have to prove you're not entirely full of shit.
There isn't a haunting nearby, not one that Sam's willing to drag Jess within a hundred feet of. He's not about to go hunting for creatures in the woods with her or scout around for demons like some sort of ... well, like some sort of Winchester.
So Sam does the only thing he can do. He just keeps talking.
Once the floodgates open, they can't stop. Two years of pressure, of holding something in, and he bursts.
He tells her about women in white and spirits on a mission, that vampires aren't real but he can tell her just what the breath of a werewolf smells like. He tells her about the time Dean threw himself between Sam and a Black Dog and the fifteen stitches he had to tug through Dean's torn flesh in some rest stop bathroom afterwards. He reads aloud to her from the newspaper, translating the sports page into Latin as he goes just to prove he can. He gives her a running list of what's warded off by silver, by salt, by lead and iron. He takes every steak knife in her apartment's shabby kitchen and throws them all into the center of a hastily drawn paper target on the far wall.
"Damn, Sam, you've been holding out on me," she says.
He tugs the knives from the wall, glaring at the small notches they left behind. "I just wanted to be normal," he says quietly.
"Then why did you tell me about your dad?"
Sam doesn't know and doesn't answer, but Jess gets it anyway. Her hand presses lightly against his shoulder but it steers him back against the wall just fine. Deft fingers pull at his zipper, and when they slip inside his baggy jeans he forgets how to breathe.
It doesn't even occur to him at all that she might be learning something along the way. That thought comes later.
Lesson Four:
If you think chicks dig scars, you should see how much they love them when you've got a great true story to back them up.
"What about this one?"
Jess trails her fingertip over a five-inch long raised ridge of flesh on Sam's side. Her tongue follows after it, and Sam immediately blanks on the cover story he'd told the only other girl he ever slept with about that scar. Something about kidney surgery when he was a kid, maybe. He can barely remember his own name at this point
"Poltergeist," Sam says. "Threw me down a flight of stairs when I was sixteen."
"Poor baby," Jess teases.
She mouths hot wet kisses across the scar and his skin feels like it's fallen asleep in heated tingles. Hs fingers sink into her hair, silky blond waves warming his hand. "Yeah, well, I landed on Dean."
"I really hope you're not trying to get me to do this to him," she says, and slithers down his body.
A moment later her lips slip over the head of his cock and the world descends into a spectacular hum of white noise.
Lesson Five:
You can refrain from lying and not tell the whole truth all at the same time. Just watch.
Last Christmas was ramen noodles and that twenty-four-hour marathon of A Christmas Story and this big box with too much postage and Dean's name on it. Sam really didn't want to open it, that much he remembers vividly. He'd been positive ever since he'd signed for it that opening it would release a bomb or a portal into a hell dimension or a spell that would turn his hair orange for a week. It would be just like Dean, sitting back somewhere out there and snickering at the thought of Sam stuck looking like Ronald McDonald. Maybe it was just socks and Sam was agonizing for nothing. That'd make Dean laugh that much harder, come to think of it.
Right after Ralphie's little brother whined for a third time that he couldn't put his arms down, Sam finally cracked and opened the box.
It was a stuffed lobster doll.
Sam just doesn't get Dean sometimes.
He could see it in his head, though, Dean grabbing the first thing at hand in the store just so he could hit on the hot salesgirl. It would explain a lot.
So, yeah, Sam's expecting more of the same this year. Maybe this time he'll mix it up. Go pick up a Happy Meal or make himself a peanut butter sandwich. Watch National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation or Emmet Otter's Jugband Christmas over and over again until his brain explodes. Think about Dean and Dad out there somewhere, hunkered down in a crappy motel room cleaning their guns without even noticing what day it is.
But then the phone rings, and Sam picks it up to hear Jessica say, "Hey, stud, got any plans for the weekend? See, my parents have this empty guest bedroom and this insane need to have it filled, and ... you know."
Her voice trails off, but Sam can hear the hesitant plea hidden there.
He stares at the peanut butter sandwich in his hand for the longest time and bites back the urge to ask it, "You did this, didn't you?"
It hadn't, but it was a nice gesture just the same.
So here's what happens during a real Christmas, if his visit to the Moore residence is any indication. He gets up on Christmas morning to a hot of steaming coffee and a quick hug from Jess's mom, something comforting and foreign all at once. The tree's mostly covered with dozens of ornaments Jess and her sister Colleen have made over the years, paper angels and badly painted ceramic reindeer and cross-stitched squares of cloth in popsicle stick frames. Presents pass from hand to hand until a pair of them land in his lap. One's from Jessica's sister, the other from her parents. He's never met any of them before, and it doesn't even matter.
Sam doesn't clean blood out of anything, none of his bones are broken, and no one punctuates the holiday by finishing off a bottle of whiskey at the first mention of Mrs. Moore.
All it does is make Sam feel oddly bereft in a way he really doesn't want to think about.
At Christmas dinner, Sam's piling his plate high with ham and sweet potatoes -- "Eat up, Sam, there's plenty more where that came from," Mrs. Moore says, and something inside Sam chokes off at the smile on her face -- and that's when Colleen asks, "So, Sam, if you don't mind my asking, why'd you skip out of Christmas with your own family?"
There's a thump under the table and she winces, Jess flashing her a dark look that even makes Sam cringe a little. But enough practice has Sam smoothly plastering on the smile that Dean always claimed could get a prostitute to give him a sandwich and a freebie. "We had a fight a while back," he says. "Besides, my dad and brother travel around a lot, so ..."
He shrugs, and that's enough for Colleen, it seems, although he thinks the kick to her leg helped that along.
Mr. Moore, on the other hand ... "Oh, really? Jessica never told us what your dad does. She said something about a family business?"
His normal responses come to mind. Traveling salesmen comes first, bounty hunters a distant second. It depends on who he's talking to.
"Oh, Mr. Winchester's a folklorist."
Sam narrows his eyes at Jess, holding a forkful of his mashed potatoes frozen in midair. Jess just tilts her head on the other side of the table, this amused twinkle in her eye, and Sam suddenly gets it. Sam read one of her mom's romance novels once on a dare from Jess, flipping through it in a couple of hours on a lazy Sunday afternoon. Aside from the highly detailed sex scenes, the historical aspects were actually pretty decently researched. And her dad is a surgeon, some higher-up at one of Minnesota's best hospitals.
She's playing to her audience, is what she's doing.
Her mom perks up at that. "A folklorist? That's interesting."
"Oh, sure," Sam says, catching up. "He travels around documenting firsthand accounts of ghost stories. It's weird, but you get used to it."
"Has he written anything?"
Sam thinks of the journal, just as much a member of the Winchester family as Dad or Dean or the Impala. "Just one book, but it's not published."
Mrs. Moore grins, soft and gentle. "I'm sure he's got a lot of really great stories to tell."
"A few," Sam says.
In his mind, he desperately grabs at any jobs he can remember that didn't end in blood and tears and pain, just in case, but then Jess changes the subject and that's the end of that line of questioning for the rest of the weekend.
Lesson Six:
Telling the truth just makes it a hell of a lot easier later on when the truth turns around and bites you in the ass.
Sam wakes up in a cold sweat for a week.
Every time he does after that first time, Jess curls up beside him and slips an arm over his chest. She tucks her head into the curve of his neck, nuzzles at him like a sleepy puppy, and tightens her grip on him until he can barely breathe anymore. But he doesn't care. After what he's woken up from, he doesn't care if Jess squeezes him until he cracks a rib, as long as she's there.
But then someone's in the living room and --
"Hey, tiger."
-- and it's Dean, that son of a bitch, that cocky grin of his in full display. And then Jess comes in and Dean flirts with her -- you know, because he's awake -- and Sam's had just about enough. He demands a reason for Dean's visit, if you can even call it visiting when there's breaking and entering involved.
"Dad hasn't been home in a few days," Dean says.
Sam tenses. If any of his friends were in the room, he'd play the drunken father card, but it's not his friends. It's Jess, so he gets right to the point.
"What was he hunting?"
Dean's gaze darts to Jess, a confused look in his eyes. She doesn't even flinch, and neither does Sam. "Really?"
"No, make something up," Sam says in a dry tone of voice. "C'mon, Dean, Jess knows. Out with it already."
It takes a minute and a vaguely suave, "Damn, princess, he must really like you," but Dean finally pulls it together and tells them both about what he knows. Men disappearing in Jericho, California, EVP on a message John Winchester left on his son's voicemail. Nothing that Dean couldn't handle alone, Sam points out.
"Yeah, but I don't want to," Dean mutters under his breath.
Sam thinks of his free ride, then sighs and says yes anyway.
Jess trails after him into the bedroom, silent as she shadows him. He grabs a handful of newly washed clothes from the laundry basket and stares at them like they're going to tell him what to say next. If there's something he can say to Jess to reassure her, he can't come up with anything. If she didn't know about all of this, if he'd never just blurted it out over two beers in a crowded bar, maybe this would be simpler. An easy smile, a kiss on the cheek, and a gentle goodbye ... that's all. Sam can even picture it in his head, and tries to ignore how fake it feels.
There's a sound from the kitchen, Dean rummaging through their fridge, and resolve sets in Jess's shoulders as she stands at his side.
"I'm coming with you."
He shakes his head nonono, but she's not listening. She's already packing a fucking bag, is what she's doing. She ducks and dodges around him like he's a statue in her way, still and solid while she digs up her oldest pair of jeans and her running sneakers and the knives he's got tucked away in the nightstand.
She leans up to kiss him before tossing some clothes into an overnight bag and her hair still smells like smoke that only existed in his head.
That's why he says nothing, he realizes later on. That's why.
Lesson Seven:
You think being honest is hard, but then again, so are most things that save lives.
They have no proof other than a starburst of flames that starts on the ceiling over their bed and engulfs their entire apartment like it's eating the life they've made together. Dean says something in passing one night, the three of them speeding through Kentucky on their way to kill something slaughtering virgins in Maryland. He takes his chance while Sam's asleep in the front seat, she notices. He mentions that they're not sure the demon did it, that they don't know for sure it's not safe for her to go back to Palo Alto.
"I don't need any proof," Jess says from the back seat of the Impala. Her eyes go hard and glassy in the rear view. "Do you?"
Dean shakes his head reluctantly. Months and months on the road together with Sam and Jess, and he's not sure he's willing to risk leaving her back there, either.
Jess won't listen -- not to him, and not to Sam. She learns bits and pieces of Latin, enough to get by. She gets decent with a knife, pretty damn good with a gun, and dead on target with a well-thrown punch. But she won't go home ... not to Palo Alto, and not to her parents.
"I just want to kill the son of a bitch before he comes after us again," Sam tells her one night in their motel room, long after Dean's fallen asleep in the other bed. "You didn't have to come --"
"I did," she says. "I couldn't ... I just did, Sam."
Sam has this proposal in his head, a tastefully small but glittering diamond and a candlelit Italian dinner, but he ends up doing it one day while she's stitching him up in the back seat of the Impala. They've just gotten done going after a spirit who had a lot of fun throwing them all against walls, and with Sam, it aimed for a mirror. Jess spends ten minutes pulling slivers of glass from his arm and waits for Sam to take a pull off the bottle of Jack Daniels that Dean passes to him before she tugs the needle through his skin. She's three stitches into it when she hears, "Will you marry me?"
In the front seat, Dean chokes on the alcohol he's just downed and coughs like he's dying.
Sam looks up at her hopefully, and she wipes the blood on her fingers on his shirt before going back to her stitching. "Ask me again after you kill the demon," she says quietly.
"Why?" he blurts out. It wasn't the answer he expected, she gathers.
"I have my reasons."
"Like when you came with us to look for Dad?"
She finishes up as quick as she can, too much practice these past few months making the sewing swift and neat, and ties the thread off. She and Dean exchange a quick look from opposite sides of the car, and she puts away the medical supplies in the first aid kit without looking at Sam.
"Sometimes when you have nightmares," she says in a soft voice, "you talk in your sleep."
She lets the full meaning of that set in as she leans out of the open back door to pour bottled water over her hands, to wash Sam's blood from her palms.
Sam doesn't ask her to go home after that.
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no subject
Date: 2006-08-01 01:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-01 01:22 am (UTC)But I love this.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-01 03:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-01 03:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-01 04:08 am (UTC)*points upward* I'm speechless. It's that cool.
Okay, the speechlessness is over, but this is still awesome.
I like this mostly because it gives Jess a chance, you know? I don't really love the way women have been treated in the show so far, as throw-away characters or rationalizations for vedettas. Even the few who have been pretty cool aren't heard from again (well, so far...).
But you just gave Jess a chance to be cool, to be a character instead of a mythic saint. And even a little faulty, because she didn't tell Sam she knew what he was dreaming about. She holds her own with the boys and she's getting to be one of the team.
Thanks for giving Jess a personality. This is so going in my memories.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-01 04:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-01 04:44 am (UTC)Sam just doesn't get Dean sometimes.
I might have laughed like a little giggling girl, right about there. Because I can just see Dean, losing his shit as he packs this *thing* for his brother...bothering with all the postage, just *knowing* that Sam's gonna open it, know it's from him, and go "huh." ahahahaha. oh, oh Dean...
no subject
Date: 2006-08-01 05:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-01 05:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-01 06:01 am (UTC)Its an all-consuming going-to-cry-it-makes-me-so-happy type love. Ad Jess's last sentence? Gah.
I just...AUs are love.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-01 09:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-01 12:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-01 07:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-02 03:36 pm (UTC)I must have more.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-03 02:32 am (UTC)Just, running your mouth off at the wrong moment, or rather, forgetting to lie, and the way it leads on and on, one small action leading to another (and I see how that could go either way, but still - oh Sam, lying to her, all that time), and it working out like this instead.
Neat, totally neat.
;)
no subject
Date: 2006-08-04 03:52 am (UTC)I love him telling her the truth and her believing him and then her coming along and...he talks in his sleep.
Nice.
:)
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Date: 2006-08-06 11:45 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2007-02-26 02:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-30 11:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-26 11:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-27 04:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-16 01:09 am (UTC)Very wonderful. Loved how well it all fit together.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-23 05:22 am (UTC)perfect
Date: 2009-06-12 12:25 am (UTC)Your detail work and characterizations simply blow me away.
Here via the wicked awards.
Date: 2010-08-26 10:56 pm (UTC)