Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Some people have said that this is a story about two brothers, but it’s not, not just about them at least. In truth it’s a story about family, and as a wise man once said; family don’t end in blood.

I could tell you that the story starts when a cruel and capricious god locked away his sister, or when two angels, two brothers fought each other. I suppose we could start this story in Lawrence Kansas, but let’s skip ahead a bit, shall we?

The story starts in California, in an apartment near Stanford University. Where Sam Winchester is asleep in bed with his girlfriend Jessica Moore. They had finally fallen into bed after a Halloween party that had lasted long into the night (and that had made Sam very uncomfortable), and while Jessica was sleeping like a log, Sam had spent his formative years sleeping with one eye open, so when the sound of glass shattering echoed from somewhere down the hall, he was instantly awake. He slipped out of bed as quietly as he could, not waking Jess.

Making his way through the apartment, he peaked his head into the bathroom and saw the window was broken. Sucking in a breath, he listened for any movement, and when he heard nothing, he made a bee line for the coat closet. Or more specifically the suitcase he kept on the top shelf of the coat closet. Once he was at the door, he grabbed the handle and then froze for a second, some nameless sense telling him to look behind him. Luckily, he listened to that sense, so he was at least able to see his attacker coming. Unfortunately, that split second wasn’t enough, because Sam found himself being slammed into the wall.

“Sam Winchester?” A female voice asked.

“What the hell?” Was all Sam could think to say as he finally got a look at the person who had broken into his house, it was still dark enough that he couldn’t make out the details of her face, but he saw that she wasn’t just short, she was young, early teens at most.

Instead of answering Sam in anyway, the girl fished something out of her jacket pocket, Sam caught a glimpse of metal before he was splashed in the face with- he licked his lips, water? After a confused beat the girl swept Sam’s feet out from under him and pinned him to the ground with a strength someone her size should not possess. Throwing the metal flask to the side, the girl grabbed a butterfly knife from her belt and slashed a thin cut into Sam’s arm before he was able to grab her arms.

Once he had her arms restrained, he pushed her off of him and was ready to get the knife out of her hands when she asked again, “You’re Sam Winchester?” An urgency in her tone.

“I’ll ask the questions here.” Sam grunted back, the confusion and frustration of the whole situation finally getting to him. “Who are you and what- “

“What does Poughkeepsie mean?” She cut him off.

And that one word was enough to freeze Sam in place, he hadn’t heard it in years and yet it’s meaning, and the person he shared it with, were still fresh in his mind.

Naturally this was the moment that Jessica walked in.

“Sam?” His girlfriend’s voice sounded from the bedroom before the lights in the hallway flicked on, Sam manged to quickly get the two of them to their feet and wrenched the knife out of the girls’ hands hid it in the band of his pyjama pants before Jess walked in.

“Sam? I heard a noise…” Jessica’s voice trailed off as she took in the scene, the stranger girl, the cut on Sam’s arm, and the massive dent in the wall where Sam had been body slammed. Jessica looked on in confusion and mild horror for a split second, “What the hell is going on here?!”

Sam fumbled for anyway to explain this situation, “Jess- Uh, this- “

But the girl cut him off again, grabbing his arm, “Poughkeepsie, what does it mean?”

Sam looked back at the girl, he swallowed and said, “It’s a code word, one my brother and I used, it means… drop everything and run.”

The girl let go of his arm and slowly seemed to relax, nodding her head as if she was processing this information.

“I’m sorry but who are you?” Jessica spoke up again, in a less outraged but still firm voice.

The girl turned to face Jessica for the first time, straightening up and squaring off her shoulders, “My names Emma Winchester,” She turned to look at Sam, “I’m your niece.”

Sam’s head emptied of all thought, he just shook his head and moved to stand between Jessica and this stranger. “No,” he finally said, “that’s not possible.”

He had only been out of touch with Dean for two years, and this girl was at least thirteen. And Dean was only twenty-six, he couldn’t…

“None of this is important!” Emma burst out, that urgency cracking her voice and her expression. “I need your help, my dad- Dean, I haven’t heard from him in a couple of days.”

Sam let out a harsh breath that sounded like a scoff, wrapping an arm around Jessica as she came to stand beside him, needing a physical anchor, “Well I haven’t heard from him in a couple of years, so I don’t know what to tell you.”

Emma pressed her lips into a thin line, her eyes flicking between Sam and Jessica, she took a deep breath through her nose and looked Sam dead in the eyes, “Dean went on a hunting trip, and I haven’t heard from him in a few days.”

And just like that Sam could feel the nice normal life he’d spent the last two years building fall apart. His friends instead of just Dean, his classes instead of learning to assemble and disassemble firearms, the apartment with Jess instead of a different motel room every week. Cause suddenly he was nine years old again, sitting on a motel bed while Dad and Dean where hunting monsters, and he would keep telling himself that nothing bad was going to happen, that they were going to come back.

And now this girl, his niece apparently, was telling him his childhood nightmare had come true, that the monsters had gotten his big brother.

“Jess, can you excuse us for a moment.”

“Um, no.”

Sam snapped his head around to his girlfriend, she looked back at him with a raised eyebrow.

“Sorry but I’m thinking I’d rather keep my eye on the young lady who broke into and vandalised my house. No offense.”

Not waiting for Sam to respond, Jess stepped out of his arms and began ushering Emma into the kitchen.

Sam began to follow after her, but his foot came into contact with the metal flask the girl had dropped, picking it up he examined the thing, it was old and beat up, like the one he still kept in his emergency kit, the one Bobby had given him for his sixteenth birthday. Scratched into the leather band was the initials E.W.

In the kitchen Emma was barely sat at the small kitchen table, having pushed her chair out so that her back was against the wall. Sam set the flask down on the table in front of her with a little more force than necessary before sitting down across from her. The two sat in awkward silence while Jessica moved about the kitchen, making some kind of hot drink to soothe the tension, the spirit of hospitality.

Sam takes the time to look her over, looking for some family resemblance. He starts with trying to spot eye colour, if she has freckles, but the thing that grabs his attention is the jacket she’s wearing. It dwarfs her frame and for a moment he’s taken back to own childhood, looking at his brother wearing John’s jacket.

“Where did you get that?” Sam asks. Emma visibly startles, whipping her head to look at him turning around from where she was warily watching Jess.

She clutched the lapels of the jacket protectively, pulling it in close to her “Dean gave it to me.”

And then all of a sudden Sam was angry. That’s his father’s jacket, his brothers, it doesn’t belong to this girl he’s never met. “Dean loved that jacket, wore it everywhere. He wouldn’t just give it away.”

He wasn’t sure what kind of reaction he had expected but it wasn’t for her to hiss and bear her teeth at him. “Dean is my dad. He didn’t just give it away; he gave it to me. And what would you know about what Dean would do? You said yourself, you haven’t spoken to him in years. You left.”

Thankfully for Sam, Jess entered the conversation at that moment, setting three steaming mugs down on the table and sitting between the two of them.

“Okay,” She said to the both of them, “let’s all take a breath and then we can start from the beginning.”

 More than Sam doesn’t trust this girl, he doesn’t know what she might say, so before Emma can open her mouth, he’s making one last desperate attempt to keep his normal life separated from his old one.

“Jess,” He puts a hand on her leg and catches her eyes, “I really think Emma and I should speak alone for a minute. We have some… family business that needs discussing.”

He knew it was a mistake the minute he said, because Jessica just cut him a glare that, if looks could kill, would have had him six feet under.

She pushed his hand of her leg and stabbed him in the chest with her pointer finger. “I am family, Samuel Winchester and if you think for a moment that I am going to leave a scared girl alone with a man she doesn’t know because you have some weird complex about your family you have another thing coming.”

A chuckle pulls his gaze away from Jess he catches a glance at Emma’s face. She doesn’t even have the decency to hide how much she’s enjoying watching Jess tear him a new one. And the smug look along with the green eyes and the leather jacket makes her look so much like Dean that Sam can’t breathe for a minute.

 He doesn’t know how this happened, where this girl came from, how his 26-year-old brother could have a teenage daughter, but she is Deans that much is clear. He never thought he’d be an uncle, recently he’d begun to doubt he’d ever see his brother again. Thought he was done with the whole of it, but here’s this girl and she’s scared and she’s young and she says Dean needs his help.

He sighs. “OK Emma, tell us what happened.”

“Dean and I were in Colorado, we were… going to go camping.” Emma’s eyes kept flicking between Jessica’s open, encouraging expression and Sam’s pensive face.

“But we ran into this girl named Haley, said her brother had gone camping in the mountains and she thought something had happened to him. She wanted to go looking for him but she had a little brother that she couldn’t leave by himself, so Dean offered to go into the mountains with her while I stayed with her brother. They were supposed to call the house every night, but it’s been two days and we haven’t heard from either of them.”

“Well, they are in the mountains, can’t be the best reception.” Sam said.

Emma shook her head, “No, they had one of those, satellite phones.”

“Well honey,” Jess leaned forward, placing a hand on top of Emma’s, “I’m sure there are mountain guides and rangers, we can get one of them- “

“No!” Emma slammed her hands down on the table, sending the mugs tumbling, and jumped to her feet. “It’s been days! And he’s out there with something- “

“Something?” Jess asked, as she desperately tried to mop up that was now pooling on the table and dripping on the floor.

“Yeah-yeah, up in the mountains there’s like, uh, bears.” Sam stuttered out. Jess arched an eyebrow at him.

“Look,” Emma walked around the table and came to stand directly in front of Sam, “Dean told me that if anything ever happened to him, I was supposed to come find you, he told me that you’d help me.”

Sam took a deep breath, and massaged his temples, “There has to be somebody who you’d be better off asking, like Bobby or Dad?”

“Bobby and John don’t know about me.” Emma blurted out, clenching her fists.

Sam startled at that, the idea that Dean would be able to hide anything from Bobby was already farfetched, but based on his memories of all the years Dean had spent trying to be their fathers good little soldier, that John Winchester wouldn’t know about Dean having a child, was impossible in Sam’s mind.

“Our dad- “

“My dad is in trouble! Are you going to help me or not?”

Emma was getting visibly distressed now, the skin around her eyes seemed to be a little red, had she been crying?

“Okay.” Sam said, “Okay let’s go.” Because what else could he say? Dean needed him.

“From here to Colorado? That’s going to be a long drive.” Jessica dumped he untouched mugs into the sink along with the soaked dish towel. “Plenty of time to get to know each other.”

Sam opened his mouth to tell Jess she didn’t have to come, that for some reason she should stay at home and not get involved with his family. But she just shot him a look that said don’t even think about it.

Half an hour later, Sam and Jessica were dressed and packing their overnight bags into the trunk of Jess’s car. Sam and Jess agreed to drive in shifts so that they could go straight to Colorado. Eventually they made a quick pitstop for gas, and once Jess was out of the car to go into the store, Sam was twisting around in his seat to look at Emma, who was rooting around in her backpack.

“Okay, so what were you and Dean really doing in Colorado?”

Emma pulled a decomposition notebook with a faded cartoon of Wonder Woman on the cover, out of her bag and opened it to a page that had newspaper clippings alongside shorthand notes. “This April two hikers went missing, no remains found.”

Sam reached to get a better look at the note book but Emma held tight to it. So he settled for moving the clippings out of the way to get a better look at what she’d written, absently he thought that her handwriting could use some work.

“Anything before that?” He asked.

“Back in the 80’s, eight people disappeared, all without a trace, all in the same year. Official word is that it was a grizzly attack.”

“And again in 1953 and in 1936.” Sam read. “Every twenty-three years.”

“Like clockwork.”

“Dean have any theories on what it might be?”

Emma pursed her lips; she pulled her note book out of Sam’s reach and slumped back into her seat. “Before we met Haley and her family, we talked to this guy named Shaw, he was a kid, whatever this is, broke into his family cabin and killed his parents. Thing that haunts his nightmares though is that it didn’t break a window or bust down the door, it undid the lock.”

“So not a ghost or a demon, they would just go through the walls. It’s something corporeal.”

“Dad thought it might be a Skinwalker, or a Black Dog.” Emma explained, stuffing the book back into her bag.

Leaning towards the window, Sam caught sight of Jess inside the gas and sip, browsing the snack racks. She was doing that thing she did whenever she was trying to pick between two options, where she rubbed a lock of hair between her thumb and index finger, the sight made Sam smile.

“She really doesn’t know anything?”

Sam twisted his head around to see Emma watching him watch Jess.

“No. And it’s going to stay that way.” Sam told her in a tone that didn’t leave room for argument.

Emma made room for argument, “She’s coming on a monster hunting trip into the Colorado mountains, you don’t think she should know what she’s walking into?”

“She’s not walking into anything.”

Emma just rolled her eyes at him.

Jess got back into the car a minute later, she came with a plastic bag of sun lotion, bug spray, mini flashlights and other miscellaneous hiking related objects that you could get at a Gas n’ Sip, she offered out snacks to everyone but Emma only chewed half-heartedly on a granola bar and Sam popped the occasional blueberry into his mouth while he was driving. They’d been sitting in silence for about twenty minutes.

“So,” Jess began, looking back at Emma, “do you and your dad go camping a lot?”

“We travel around a lot.” Emma responded, running her thumb up and down the teeth of zipper on Dean’s jacket.

“So, road trips? Is that you guys’ thing?” God bless her, Jess had been trying to get a conversation going since they’d left Stanford. “I get it, when I was your age, my dad used to take me on these fishing trips. We hardly ever caught anything, but I loved spending time on that boat with him.”

Emma didn’t say anything in response, but she did smile for the first time since she’d broken into their apartment.

“What about school?” Sam asked pointedly.

Emma glared at him in the rear-view mirror, “Home school mostly.”

“Mostly? Let me guess you get to spend a week or two in a real school when Dean parks the Impala long enough?”

“Sam.” Jess chided from the passenger seat.

“I prefer the way we do things.” Emma didn’t need to explain what ‘we’ she was referring to.

“But you know that’s normal right?” Sam prodded, “Going to a public school, being around kids your age, staying one place longer than a month?”

“Normal isn’t exactly an option for me.” Emma responded flatly.

They drove in silence for the rest of the way.

When they finally got to Black Water ridge, Emma began giving them directions towards the house where Emma had been staying with Hayley’s brother. But once they were on the right street, there was no missing the Impala. This past day had contained more nostalgia than Sam had ever expected or wanted to feel, but once again he felt that strange swelling in his chest. He half expected to see Dean’s head pop out the window.

Once they parked the car, Sam got out and made his way to the Impala without a word, placing his hands on the roof of the car, he leaned down to look through backseat window. It was still there, the little green army man he’d jammed into the ashtray as a kid.

“I’m going to do you a favour,” Sam said to Emma without looking away from the Impala. “And not tell Dean you abandoned his baby.”

“Oh, I made sure to stress to Ben what the consequences would be if the car wasn’t in the same condition, I left it in.”

After Emma explained to Ben that Jess and Sam were here to help, he let them into the house. He pulled out a map Haley had marked for him, there was a circle drawn in black marker to show which area she and Dean had headed off to investigate. Emma had wanted to take the map and head off instantly, but Jess had insisted that it was already evening and they would all be better off getting some rest and heading off in the morning. Emma had fought her on that until both Jess and Sam promised her, they’d leave first thing in the morning.

Ben had offered them a chance to freshen up in the bathroom, and while Jess was taking a shower, Sam and Emma cracked open the trunk of the Impala.

It was almost exactly what he’d expected. Guns, ammo boxes, tubs of salt, all the expected stuff. But there were also knives, hunting ones and more antique looking ones, and-

“Is that a crossbow?” Sam asked.

Emma just shrugged, as she easily skimmed her hands along the weapons, “I don’t like guns.”

The knives seemed to mostly be hers, she picked up a larger one in a leather case and attached it to her belt, then she went for the cluster of charms that were hanging from the corner of the hatch.

“Protection charms?”

“Never hurt.” Emma answered briskly, slipping one around her neck.

“And that little… splash and slash test back at the apartment? Holy water and a silver knife, right?”

“It’s a standard test.”

“Best offence is a good defence, right?”

Emma lifted her eyes up to meet his and they shared an unspoken moment, understanding that they’d been taught those words by the same person. He was hoping for a smile or some kind of sign that they’d just had a bonding moment. But she just nodded her head and went back to rummaging through the arsenal.

Sam was debating whether now was a good time to start questioning her, when his eyes caught on something blue, half hidden under a duffel bag.

“So,” Sam said, catching Emma’s attention. “Charms, salt, iron, all the basics. But tell me,” And he lifted up the worn-out stuffed toy from under the bag, it was Stich, from that Disney movie. "What does this protect against?"

Emma didn’t say anything in response, just froze up like a deer in headlights. Then in more unnaturally quick movements, she ripped the toy out of his hands and threw it across the house’s front yard.

“I don’t know where that came from!” She spat out, with a forced neutral expression on her face.

Sam held in a chuckle. He closed the trunk, locked the car and told Emma that they should get some rest for the early start in the morning. She agreed but didn’t follow him back into the house, instead she watched him go inside, waited a minute, and then dashed across the yard, scooped up Stich and pressed her face into the worn velvet of its head.

“I’m sorry.” She whispered.

Chapter Text

They all piled into the Impala a little after sunrise. Before they set out for Blackridge, they dropped Ben off at a friend’s house. The drive to the mountains took a little over an hour. Jess had borrowed a pair of hiking boots from Haley’s room, she’d suggested they make a stop in town to buy Sam and Emma a pair, but both were too anxious to get to the mountains.

They had grabbed maps and as much information about the trail and the location of the campsite from Ben and the Ranger’s station Emma and Dean had stopped into when they first came to the town. Jess had done some nature trails with her girl friends in nursing school, but the terrain of California was a completely different animal compared to where they were now. The ground was so carpeted with twigs and leaves that after they’d come across a sprung bear trap, she’d started paying extra attention to where she stepped.

“Have you ever been hiking before?” Jess called out.

While Sam was taking care to stay near Jess, Emma was far ahead of them. She wasn’t tall for her age, but the girl had an impressive stride, she hadn’t so much as slowed her pace since they began their trek.

“Not really.” Emma called back, without looking back at them.

“I don’t think she’s even broken a sweat.” Jess said to Sam, wiping her forearm across her brow. “I know kids have a lot of energy, but what the hell.”

“My question exactly.” Sam muttered.

“What is your problem with her?” Jess asked, the tiredness adding to her exasperation with her boyfriend’s attitude.

“Nothing!” Sam insisted, but his insistence wilted under Jessica’s scrutinizing glare. “I just- Something about this whole situation doesn’t feel right.”

“We’re hiking through the Colorado wilderness, two days before your law school interview, with your estranged brother’s daughter, to find out if said estranged brother got lost in the woods.” Jess responded, “I would hope this doesn’t feel right.”

“I just can’t imagine Dean doing something this stupid.” Sam said, half to himself.

“What? Getting lost in the woods?”

“No, I can totally see him doing that. I mean- “

I mean having a kid when you’re a hunter, I mean raising that kid in the life when he knows the kind shit that brings down on your childhood.

But Sam didn’t say any of that, instead he just swallowed and muttered an “I don’t know.”

“Well, if it makes you feel any better, you’re not the only feeling disconcerted.”

“What do you mean?”

Jess rolled her eyes. “Let’s just say this is not how I pictured meeting your family Sam.”

Sam bit his tongue, unable to think of anyway to respond to that, thankfully he didn’t have to respond to that, as Jess then pointed up to the upper parts of the tree trunks.

“Are those claw marks?”

XXX

The sun was a few hours from setting when Emma finally spotted the campsite.

The structure of the tents was still barely standing, the fabric that hadn’t been completely slashed to ribbons was splattered with blood. The remains of sleeping bags were lying overturned and mangled on the dirt. Sam and Emma succumbed to their mounting senses of panic, scouring the area for any sign that Dean and Haley had made it this far, they found one, but it didn’t make either of them feel better. A circle of symbols drawn into the dirt in a circle around the campsite.

Emma recognized them as Anasazi protection symbols. And when Jess pointed out that the campsite was missing all the backpacks and other belongings that a grizzly bear wouldn’t have bothered touching. Those two things added together in Sam’s mind with the claw marks and their current surroundings, and Sam ground his teeth together when the answer formulated in his head, and the answer was so much worse than a Skinwalker or a Black Dog.

A Wendigo.

Which meant that the guns he’d brought were useless. So were the charms and salt Emma had. Sam grabbed Jess by the arm and said that they had to get out of there now.

But Emma refused to go. Screamed at Sam that her father and Haley were out here and she wasn’t going to leave them.

And Jess wasn’t going to leave a young girl in the woods by herself at night. So now they were sitting around a hastily made campfire, with nothing but symbols in the soil to protect them.

It was two hours after the sun went down when they heard the first signs of movement out in the dark.

Sam and Emma were on their feet instantly. “What is that?” Jess asked, “A bear?”

“Worse.” Sam hissed.

“Way worse.” Emma added.

After a tense few heartbeats the rustling stopped, and then came the voice.

“He-e-e-e-l-l-p!”

“Som-e-e-e-b-o-o-d-d-y-y!”

“Oh my god!” Jess gasped, her nurse instincts kicking in, she ran towards the edge of the circle, but Sam managed to grab her by the back of her hoodie and yank her back before she could cross the boundary.

“Sam what the hell!” Jess yelled as she wrestled his arm away from her, “They could be hurt!”

“That’s not a person. It’s a trap.” Sam whispered to her, reaching for the gun tucked into his waistband, even though he knew it would be worthless.

 Before Jess could tell him how insane that sounded, the rustling started again, closer this time, much closer. The Wendigo was circling them.

Emma found this much less concerning than Sam apparently, because she strode towards the edge of the barrier, flinging her arm out to reveal the knife she now gripped in her hand.

It was antique looking, Sam thought absently, a little shorter than her fore arm, and its bronze-coloured metal glinted in the fire light.

“Can’t get any closer, can you?!” Emma yelled out in the direction she could hear the Wendigo. “What’s the matter? Big strong monster can’t cross the protection circle? C’mon you bastard! You want us, come get us!”

If Emma’s mission was to piss off the Wendigo, she more than succeeded, out of the trees came a roar that couldn’t possibly belong to any natural animal.

Jess, who had been struggling against Sam, went deadly still at the sound of it. Sam pulled his girlfriend tight into his side, hoping she didn’t feel the tremor in his hands. Sam hissed at Emma to come back to them, to step away from the edge, but she just stood there, her back to him, her whole-body tense, like she was ready for a fight. Sam let go of Jess long enough to stride forward and grab Emma by the arm, meaning to drag her back to the campfire, but when she whirled around to face him, he froze in his tracks.

The sclera of her eyes and the skin around them had turned a blood red, and her irises were no longer the green that had reminded Sam of his brother, but solid yellow. Something in the back of Sam’s mind whispered to him about yellow eyes, but his heart was beating too hard for him to hear it.

Sam jumped back, pulling out his gun and pointing straight at her. Emma closed her eyes and shook her head slightly, the red receded from her skin and when she opened her eyes again, she was back to normal, you’d be forgiven for thinking she was human.

“It’s not what you think.” Emma said.

“Oh yeah?” Sam spat out, throwing his free arm behind him, to feel that Jess was safe behind him. “Cause what I’m thinking is that some monster has duped me into being Wendigo food.”

“Wendigo’s hunt alone, you know that.” Emma responded in a measured tone, holding her hands out in a passive gesture.

“What are you?”

“I’m your niece.”

“Don’t give me that- “

“It’s true! But… I’m also an Amazon.”

Sam cycled through all the monster lore in his mind, but he’d never heard anything about Amazons. Though he could clearly picture Dean making a crack about Wonder Woman.

“What the fuck Sam!” Jess cried out.

Sam, without lowering his gun, turned to his girlfriend, and found her eyes wide and face devoid of colour.

“What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fuck!?”

“Jess, look just-“

“Don’t you fucking tell me to calm down! We are in the woods in the middle of the night, inside a dirt circle that is supposed to keep us safe from- from whatever is in the bushes! Chasing your estranged brother, on the behest of his daughter, who is apparently fucking Wonder Woman!”

Sam fully turned away from Emma, who was looking at Jess with a slightly shocked expression. He dropped his gun arm to his side and took a deep breath.

 “I know this is crazy, okay? I know that this is crazy and dangerous and a completely unreasonable situation to be in, and it’s exactly why I’m estranged from my brother and my dad, it’s why I have scars from when I was sixteen, it’s why for the first month we lived together I lined the windows with salt. Because this is the family business! This was my life before I met you”

Throughout the entire length of their relationship, Sam had never blown up like this, had hardly ever raised his voice, with the exception of being frustrated with school work. It was such a surprising event that even the woods had fallen quiet, as if in shock. The wendigo had apparently retreated to its lair.

Sam barely noticed, too busy trying to control his nerves as he waited for Jess to respond. And Jess just stared at him, her expression unreadable, until finally she straightened out her posture and looked her boyfriend dead in the eye.

“Sam.” She said calmly.

“Jess?”

“Explain. Everything now.”

And so he did. Sam and Jess sat down on one side of the fire, Emma on the other. And Sam told the story of the Winchester family business, starting with the tragedy that began in a nursery in Kansas and ended with a father-son screaming match on a random back road. It took a good few hours to explain all the gory details, learning how to handle fire arms before he learned how to ride a bike, his father getting black out drunk, monster blood still splattered on his shirt, Dean doing the best he could to look after Sam when they’d been abandoned for weeks at a time.

But Jess had asked him to explain everything. So he also told her about the rare bright spots. The times John had left them at Bobby’s house instead of motels, of the handful of visits to the roadhouse he could remember, Ellen’s unflinching nature and Jo’s comradery. Dean doing everything within a twelve-year-olds power to make sure Sam had a nice Christmas.

By the time he was done, the sun was coming up. And Jess wasn’t speaking, wasn’t moving, she just stared at Sam.

Emma was in a similar state, except she was sitting with her back to the two of them, whether to give them privacy or to hide her own expressions, Sam wasn’t sure.

“So…” Sam spoke just to fill up the silence, but had no idea what was the right thing to say. “That’s all of it, no more secrets.”

Jess stared at him for a while longer, huffed out a breath, got to her feet and walked over to Emma.

“Is it out there?” Jess asked, looking out into the tree line.

“No,” Emma responded, “hasn’t been for a while, must have gone back to its lair.”

Jess leaned down and patted Emma on the back. “Let’s go find your dad.”

The three of them picked up their bags and left the safety of the circle. Emma found signs of the wendigo and tracked it further into the wild, and then Sam found signs of Dean in a trail of M&M’s that lead them to an abandoned mine system.

If there was such thing as a perfect monster lair, abandoned mine shaft in the woods was probably a close second to haunted house on the edge of town.

Sam looked to Emma, she examined all the various ‘Danger!’ and ‘Warning!’ signs, when she looked back at him they shared a wordless exchange that only hunters could really understand.

As Emma pulled out her knife, bracing herself to venture into the dark, Sam pulled Jess to the side and prepared to argue with her about asking her to stay outside.

“Don’t even say it.” Jess ground out.

“If something goes wrong in there, I need you-“

“To sit out here and just wait for the whatever-it-is to come get me too?”

“To be backup.” Sam insisted. Pulling the gun from his waist band, Jess, who had never held a gun in her life, gave him an ‘are you serious?’ look.

“It won’t be supper effective against a Wendigo, but aim for the feet or the face and you should be able to slow it down enough to get back inside the protective circle.”

“And if nothing goes wrong?” Jess asked, a bit of nervousness creeping into her voice.

“Then Dean and Haley are going to be in bad shape, and we’ll need all the help we can get to get them down the mountain.” Sam prayed that his voice was as hard and confident as he needed it to be.

Jess clearly didn’t like any of this, he could see it in her eyes how much she wanted to tell him to not go into the mine, to leave this place right now, to just scream that this whole thing was crazy. But her breath didn’t so much as hitch, as she carefully took the gun from his hands. Of all the people Sam had known in his life, Jess had quickly become the one he would want by his side in a crisis situation, her ability to swallow discomfort and get through the worst of things was going to serve her well in the E.R.

Sam wanted to kiss Jess before he went in. Wanted to hug her, touch her, but he knew any of those actions would be as good as admitting he wasn’t coming out. So he instructed her on how to remove the safety and she handed him two of the mini flashlights she’d bought back on the road.

When Sam turned around, he saw that Emma was watching them with an expression he couldn’t read. She fished something out of her pocket and tossed it to Jess, a metal lighter.

When Jess looked at it questioningly, Emma simply said “When in doubt, use fire.”

And then Sam Winchester and his niece went into the dark.

XXX

The inside of the mines was as dank and unpleasant as you would expect. Sam and Emma moved through the tunnels slowly, keeping their senses open for any incoming threat. Sam walked on the left side, Emma on the right, though he made sure to walk ahead of her.

“Just so there’s no misunderstanding,” Sam whispered, “we are not done discussing your little display by the campsite.”

“Didn’t think we were.” Emma grunted in reply.

They kept moving deeper and deeper into the tunnels, Sam could feel the sweat dripping down his back, not from the temperature but the horrible anticipation of waiting for a growl to echo from around them, or for something to jump out at them from the shadows. What happened instead was that the ground suddenly gave out underneath Emma’s feet.

The girl gave a brief scream of surprise as she felt herself falling, Sam lunged forward to pull her to safety, but he reached to far and all he succeeded in was grasping her by the arm and managing to pull her close enough that he took the brunt of the damage when they hit the ground.

Sam squeezed his eyes shut against the pain the rattled through his body, and it wasn’t until he heard groans that weren’t coming from him or Emma that he opened his eyes and looked across the space they had landed in, and he saw to people hung up from the ceiling by chains.

One was a dark-haired woman that he assumed was Haley. And the other was Dean.

Brash, brave, would never admit to his pain or fear, Dean. He was sickly pale, there was a dried trickle of blood running out from under his hairline and down the side of his face.

If this coincidental, yet painful, turn of events is leading you to think that god has a sick sense of humour, I won’t tell you you’re wrong.

As soon as Emma saw her father she was wriggling out of Sam’s arms. “Dad!” She called out.

Sam quickly followed behind her, checking his brother for injuries. Satisfied that there was nothing life threatening, he was about to move over to Haley, when he heard a faint voice.

“…Sammy?” Dean croaked.

His eyes were bleary and glazed over, but as far as Sam was concerned any signs of consciousness were worthy of song and dance.

Emma apparently felt the same way because she was instantly shaking her father, “Dad, dad- are you okay? Do you think you can walk?”

“Emma? No, no, no,” Dean muttered, “what are you doing here?”

Sam wrapped an arm around Deans middle and lifted him enough to allow some give in the chains around Dean’s wrists.

“Haley.” Dean choked out.

“I got her, I got her.” Sam assured as he finally got his brother free of restraints. Emma took her fathers weight from Sam and lowered him to the ground as Sam moved onto Haley.

As he worked on her chains, Sam heard a soft sobbing coming from the dark-haired woman.

“Haley? Hey, it’s okay, we’re going to get you out of here.” Sam whispered to her.

“Tommy.” She sobbed, staring at a pile of something unrecognizable. Sam swallowed and side stepped, so he was blocking her view of what remained of her brother.

Once both Haley and Dean were free, Sam slung Haley’s arm around his shoulders and Emma did her best to support Dean despite their hight difference. Luckily both of them were able to walk, so the four of them made their way back towards the exit at a shambling pace.

They managed to find their way back up from where they’d fallen through the floor, but they were moving at such a slow pace Sam swore it felt like the tunnels were stretching out in front of him.

And then he heard a growl.

“Shit.” He hissed. The growl echoed, bouncing off the tunnel walls with no indication of where it was coming from.

Neither Dean or Haley was strong enough to move on their own, and even if Emma had more strength than a human should have, he couldn’t ask her to carry both of them. So that left one option.

“Run!” Sam barked to Emma, and the two of them made off as quickly as two people could whilst half carrying two semi-conscious people on their backs.

The further they ran, the more Sam recognized the way they came in, they were getting close to the exit, Sam was about to say as much to Emma when she screamed at him to duck, and without thinking he threw himself and Haley to the ground, narrowly avoiding the swipe of claws that would have cleaved his head open.

Emma tried pivoting into a fighting stance, but the weight of her father ended up tipping her over.

And so two hunters, an Amazon, and a poor, poor woman found themselves on the floor of a cave, looking up at the hungry face of a monster. Were they any other group of people, this would have been the end.  But fate isn’t going to let go of the Winchesters that easily.

And so, a blast of flames fires out and sets the Wendigo alight. The monster howls and flails in pain, until Emma raises her legs enough to kick it backwards, and it hits the ground, and it screams until it dies.

When the fire stopped, he twisted his head around saw Jess standing there, arms raised like she was brandishing weapons, Emma’s lighter in one hand, and a can of bug spray in the other. In the dim light of the mine, he could just make out the look of horror on her face. When she finally looked away from the smoking corpse, she made eye contact with her boyfriend.

“Don’t tell me to wait outside.” Was all she said.

XXX

There were drugs in Dean’s system. There was a certain type of fogginess that covered the mind that only came from anaesthesia or very strong painkillers. Cracking his eyes open, he instantly winced at the brightness. Once his eyes adjusted, he looked around, trying to work out where he was, his vision was almost a foggy as his mind but between the pale walls and the white sheets, he figured he was in a hospital. Suppressing a groan, Dean turned his head to the side and saw a head of blonde hair.

“Emma?”

The woman turned around and Dean saw that it wasn’t his daughter. She was an adult, with a round face, a smattering of freckles, and her hair was all beach waves. She was wearing a doctors coat, but looked distinctly uncomfortable wearing it.

“Not exactly.” She said in a clipped tone.

“What the-“

“Look, I don’t mean to be rude,” The woman said, leaning down to remove the IV from his arm, “but this is my first time sneaking out of a hospital, so if you could just do me a favour and hold all questions till the end of the breakout.”

Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, Dean did as she and said nothing as she unhooked him from various monitors, loaded him into a wheelchair, hastily pushed him through the hospital hallways, taking care to avoid eye contact with anyone, once they were out the door the Impala roared into place in front of them, the passenger door and back door flung open to reveal Sam in the driver’s seat and Emma in the back.

The woman pushing his wheelchair began moving faster, practically tipping him into the back seat of his own car, Emma pulled him all the way in as the not-doctor jumped into the passenger seat.

“Go, go, go!” She urged Sam, and obligingly hit the gas.

Slumped in the back of his own car, which was being driven by the brother he thought he would never see again, who was sitting next to a woman he didn’t know, and feeling the tight grip of his daughters’ hands on his arms, Dean let out a sigh.

“I sense a long conversation is on the horizon, but can we please wait till the pain killers ware off?”

Chapter Text

After fleeing the hospital, Sam drove the car until they were two towns away from anyone connected to the Wendigo incident. After finding the cleanest motel with a desk clerk that wasn’t likely to ask questions, they tucked a half-conscious Dean into the bed, Jess doing her best to check his vitals and offer what ministrations she could with the Impala’s first aid kit. Once she was happy with Dean’s condition, she patted Emma’s shoulder, gave Dean a smile and told Sam she was going out side for some air. She then went out round the back of the motel and called her parents, she did her best not to let her voice shake, to not let on how desperately she just needed to hear their voices.

Sam collapsed into one of the chairs around the obligatory table in the corner. He watched Emma crawl onto the bed and tuck herself into her fathers side, as Dean woozily brought his arm up in an attempt at a comforting embrace.

“I’m okay kiddo.” Dean muttered, struggling to stay awake, “I’m here.”

xxXxx

Dean Winchester was in his prime at 25 and on his own in the big city. He was in the big city to figure out what big-nasty was murdering dudes, but hey, it’s all about phrasing. He had gone on his first solo hunt when he was seventeen, but going in alone was still something of a new experience.

He was investigating a string of murders, all men of a similar age, all killed in their homes, all with the same symbol carved into their chest. Oh, and their hands and feet were cut off. Dean had sent a picture of the symbol over to Bobby and was just waiting to her back, and so while waiting for some new leads he figured he might as well find some company for the night.

 And that was when he saw her, strawberry blonde hair, classy dress, a smile that could slice you open. He sat down and introduced himself with a fake name, she told him she was Lydia, they talked, they drank, and Dean was done for.

xxXxx

Emma Winchester was feeling anxious, and when she got anxious, she got fidgety. She was pacing around the living area of the motel room; her dad was still asleep in the other room and she wasn’t sure if Sam was asleep too or if he was just wanted to avoid talking to her. She wasn’t eager to get into anything with him either so as far as she was concerned, he could pretend to sleep all day.

Emma moved aimlessly around the space, flicking through the out-dated TV guide, opening and closing all the cabinets and the empty fridge. Any thing that could distract her from the fact that she didn’t know what was going to happen next.

Both she and her dad had gotten hurt on hunts before, that was just the way of the job, the life. But it had never gotten this bad before, she had never come this close to losing him.

Her dad had always made sure she knew the back up plans. That if Emma and Dean ever got separated, if Dean was in danger and she couldn’t help him she was supposed to go to Sam Winchester, drop the word ‘Poughkeepsie’ like it was a password, and he would help her.

Okay, technically her dad had said that Sam would ‘keep he safe’, but if her dad thought she would ever just sit back while he was in trouble, that was on him.

But now Sam Winchester was here. Sam and his surprisingly badass girlfriend. And Emma didn’t know what was going to happen when her dad woke up, when he was back on his feet. Normally they’d hang around long enough to get in a late lunch and then get back in the Impala and back onto the road.

But would that stay the same now that Sam was here? Her dad had told her a lot of stories about the family members she’d never met, and most of those stories were about ‘Sammy’. Was he going to come with them? Was he going back to college? Was he going to follow through on his threat to find out more about her non-human side?

Before Emma could spiral any further, the door opened and Jess entered the room, she had clearly been crying, she was wiping at her eyes and taking deep breaths as she entered, but still, when she saw Emma she smiled, radiated a comforting energy.

“Hey Emma.”

“Hi.” Emma mumbled in response. “You doing, okay?”

A look flashed across Jess’ face that suggested the answer was either ‘No’ or ‘I have no idea’. But she smiled again, stuffing her hands into her pockets. “Considering I just survived an encounter with Big-Foots uglier, more pissed off brother, I can’t really complain.”

“Big-foot actually is a myth.” Emma supplied.

Jess cocked her head, “Really?”

Emma shrugged, “I mean my dad holds out hope, but… I’m not convinced.”

Then the awkward silence descended upon the room. Neither sure what to say to the other. When you’re a teenage Amazon and she’s an nursing student who’s world view has just imploded, what is there to talk about.

“By the way,” Emma said suddenly “you didn’t just survive the Wendigo, you were the one that saved us.”

And for the first time since she entered the room, Jessica Moore smiled genuinely. Before any other attempts at small talk could be made, they heard voices coming from the bedroom. Jess opened the door and leaned through the door frame, Emma peaked around her and saw that her father was now sitting up in bed and Sam had pulled his chair over to Dean’s bedside.

“How’s the patient?” Jess asked, moving into the room and coming to stand on the other side of the bed, she leaned down to check Dean over.

In a very Dean Winchester move, he waved his hand, saying “Nothing I can’t handle. Now correct me if I’m wrong but aren’t you the nice doctor that broke me out of the ICU?”

There was still a bit of drowsiness clinging to his voice.

Jess gave him a look, not expecting the level of cavalierness from a man who had recently almost been eaten. She would get used to it.

“Not a doctor, but I did ‘break you out’ I guess.” Jess held her hand out to Dean, “I’m Jess by the way. Sam’s girlfriend.”

“Now that can’t be right, you are way out of my brother’s league.”  He slurred.

Instead of responding to Dean, Jess shared a look with her boyfriend. She also seemed to notice something about his posture, the way he was slouching in his chair.

“Actually, it’s great that your awake, because Emma and I- “Jess gestured to where Emma was still hovering in the doorway, “were going to head out to get some lunch.”

“Lunch?” Sam asked questioningly. Both because he couldn’t think of anywhere in the immediate area that could qualify as a restaurant, and because he was expecting a lot more eagerness from Jess to start heading home.

While Sam was questioning his girlfriend, Dean sent his daughter a look that all hunters understood, Are you ok? Is this alright?

Emma cast a glance to Jessica Moore and nodded to her father. She would be alright with Jess.

“We passed a Gas-N-Sip, on the way here. At the very least they should have some sandwich’s, and while were gone, you two can catch up.” Jess said very pointedly.

Without waiting for Sam or Dean to respond she quickly swept Emma out of the doorway, grabbed her the keys to the Impala swiftly exited the motel.

“Is it a good idea to just leave?” Emma asked as Jess slid into the driver’s seat.

“I can’t speak for your dad but the only way to get Sam to talk about uncomfortable subjects is to give him a push. And whatever is between those two needs to be hashed out.”

Emma situated herself in the passenger seat as Jess turned on the engine, to distracted by the unfamiliar structure of the Impala to notice how uneasy Emma seemed at the idea of her father and her uncle ‘hashing things out’.

XXX

Something wasn’t sitting right with Dean. He’d just left Lydia’s house after retrieving the watch he’d accidentally left there last night. And as cute as Emma was, there was something not right about the kid, and it wasn’t just that he definitely heard her talking while he was in the other room, it was that, as distracted as he’d been by certain activities the night before, he was certain he’d seen no signs of children in the house. No play pens, no toys, no baby monitor on the night stand.

He should be focusing on the case, he knew that. But when the feeling came over Dean Winchester, it was hard to shake.

The feeling got harder to ignore when the coroner told him that all the victims had been known to visit The Cobalt Room, the bar where he’d met Lydia. And when Booby finally called him back and gave him the low down on how the symbol from the crime scene was related to a race of monsters called the Amazons, his stomach had dropped so hard it was currently five feet underground. And when Booby mentioned the little titbit about the Amazons having an annual mating ritual and offspring that aged on fast-forward, he was already in the car and trying not to race back to Lydia’s house.

XXX

 After Jess and Emma had left the motel, Sam and Dean sat in a silence so awkward they could hear the Impala engine coming to life outside and the crunch of the gravel under its tires as the girls drove away.

“So,” Dean said eventually, “What’s California like this time of year?”

Sam let out a bitter chuckle, “Seriously?”

Dean shrugged, leaning back further into his pillows, “There’s no such thing as a good ice breaker man, I don’t know what to tell you.”

“You don’t know what to tell me? How about sorry for being stupid enough to go hunting a Wendigo by yourself? How about a thank you for coming to save your ass even though I’ve spent the last two years building a life for myself at Stanford and I actually have an interview next week that is basically my whole future on a plate, how about some condolences that the woman I love is probably going to run as far away from me as she can now, and I don’t blame her.”

At some point Sam had gotten out of his chair, and was pacing around the room, there was pressure building up behind his eyes, that wouldn’t abate, no matter how much he rubbed at the bridge of his nose.

“Or, I don’t know,” And he flung his arm out towards the window, gesturing to where the car had been parked outside. “How about an explanation for how you have a kid?! A teenage kid? Who’s not human?”

At that Dean sat up straight in bed and fixed his brother with a stern look, “Okay, I’ll give you a pass, cause yeah, this is a confusing situation, but before we go any further, her name is Emma and she is my kid, no two ways about it, alright?”

Sam nodded, “Your thirteen-year-old kid who you didn’t have two years ago?”

Dean deflates a bit at that, “That is where the not-quite-human part comes in.”

Dean sighed, propping his elbow against his legs beneath the blanket, and resting his face in his hand.

Sam let out a sigh of his own and came to sit on the edge of the bed.

“It was a little after you left for Stanford, Dad and I had split up, he was following a lead and I wanted to cover a case in Seattle, string of ritual killings, heavy on the ritual. Turns out there’s this species of monsters called Amazons, all female race that made a deal with the gods back in the day, so that in order to keep themselves off the endangered species list, they pick up some unsuspecting saps, get pregnant that day, give birth that night, and the kids grow like weeds.”

Sam opened his mouth to say something, but ended up just gapping like a goldfish.

“So, you…” Sam finally manged to get out.

“Were one of the unsuspecting saps.” Dean confirmed.

“And… Emma is….”

“Technically two years old.”

Sam leaned forward, elbows resting on his thighs, “I can see why you didn’t tell Dad.”

XXX

Dean crouched in the alleyway, it had gotten dark a few hours ago and the women who he’d watched bring Emma (who had aged five years since this morning!) had brought another girl into the warehouse not too long ago, and he hadn’t seen anyone come or go since. He could see the lights on through the grime of the windows. Taking a deep breath, Dean sprinted across the alley, took a running jump at the wall and managed to wrap his hinds around the bars on the windows. His awkward position gave him just enough of a view inside to see two grown women standing in front of a line of little girls in white nightgowns, one of the women was carrying a tray and the other was speaking to the girls.

The grey-haired lecturer was watching the girls carefully, as they each lifted something from the tray, put it in their mouths and washed it down with a glass of milk.

“We hunt for her. We kill for her. And now we consume that kill as a symbol of unity with those who have completed their blood missions and furthered the life of the tribe.”

It was those words, and the red stains on the little girls fingers, that made Dean realise what they were eating. While he tried not to vomit, Dean noticed that one of the girls was still holding the little piece of flesh in her fingers, standing awkwardly amongst the others. And the grey-haired woman seemed to notice at the same time he did.

“Go on Emma, you need to eat.”

After a second, Emma put the piece of flesh in her mouth. Only Dean kept watching her after that, only Dean noticed that after the milk glasses were collected and the girls were being assigned cots to sleep in, Emma tried to wipe the red stains off her small fingers.

He dropped down from the wall, waited till the lights went off inside, picked the lock on the door and snuck inside. He got lucky, the older women seemed to have stepped out for the minute, he made his way through the warehouse, into the section where the girls were sleeping, Emma was easy to spot, she wasn’t sleeping, she was staring at the ceiling playing with her necklace. Another stroke of luck was that Emma didn’t spot him until he was pulling her from the cot, she was getting ready to scream, when he told her that her mother sent him, and her eyes lit up hopefully, she let him pick her up, run her out of the building and drive her away in the car.

It wasn’t until he was back at the motel, Emma sitting on the bed with her arms wrapped around her middle, her eyes following him around the room as he paced, as he grabbed a beer from the fridge and then didn’t drink it.

Dean figured that he didn’t have long until the Amazons realised, she was gone. He’d gotten her out of the building with promises of her mother, but he doubted Lydia was going to help the girl she’d handed over in the first place. The more his thoughts spun, and the more aware of Emma watching him he became, the more helpless Dean felt. He wanted to call Bobby, he wanted to call his dad even though he knew that was a bad idea.

Before his thoughts could spiral any further, Emma’s voice sounded from her place on the bed. “You’re my father, aren’t you?”

Dean turned to look at the little girl, who was looking at him with a look far more solemn than a child her age should have. With great reluctance he set down his beer and sat himself across from her.

“Yeah.” He said, he didn’t bother saying ‘probably’ or ‘I think’, there was no denying it at this point.

 “My mom didn’t really send you, did she?”

“No.”

“She told me you were a hunter.”

Figures, if they’d pegged him then an Amazon drive-by was inevitable. “She was right.”

“Does that mean you’re going to kill me?”

Dean was glad he’d set down his beer, because he absolutely would have dropped it, “What?” he gasped.

“You’re a hunter, you kill people like me. I’m an Amazon, when I’m old enough I’m supposed to kill you, to earn my place in the tribe.” She said all of this with a flat tone, her eyes never leaving his, “I kill you or you kill me, that’s what happens.”

“Okay, okay,” Dean waved his hands, “First off, no one here has to kill anyone. Secondly you might be an Amazon but you’re also a kid, and I don’t hunt kids.”

For the first time, Dean broke eye contact with her, and when he dropped his gaze, he saw Emma was digging her nails into her arms. He reached out to stop her, but even before his hand touched her, she flinched away from him.

Taking a steadying breath, Dean steeled himself and began speaking again.

“Look, if you really want me to, I’ll take you back to your… tribe.” God help him, when he had to figure out what to do about the Amazons if she did go back. “But that ritual you did tonight? You having to kill me to ‘earn your place’? If you say now that you don’t want to go back there, I can’t promise you an apple pie life, but I promise I will keep you safe from them.”

At this point Emma’s eyes were getting wet and her lips were wobbling. Dean wanted to hug her, put his hand on her shoulder, something, but based on her earlier flinch he didn’t figure that was a good idea.

“You say the word right now, and you can walk away.” Dean said, “Do you want to walk away?”

No five seconds in Dean Winchesters life had ever felt longer, than the ones between him asking that question and when Emma nodded her head.

Not giving either of them a chance to second guess their choices, Dean scrambled to grab all his belongings and herded Emma into the Impala. He kept his cool right until they got out of the city, at which point he hit the gas and didn’t let up until they were on open roads again. Dean’s thoughts were racing, he needed to tell Bobby to send some other hunters to take care of the Amazons, he needed to get Emma some new clothes (how quickly was she going to keep growing?), he needed to figure out where he was driving too…

Without realizing, he was already driving in the direction of Nebraska.

XXX

Jess covertly watched Emma out the corner of her eye as the girl played with a cluster of chains around her neck. She’d gotten Emma to start talking in the car by asking the girl to explain all of them to her on the drive over.

There was a rosary, which Jess recognized, the second chain featured a Hand of Hamsa, an evil eye, and a Buddha, the third chain featured a star of David, a seal of Solomon, and a seal of the seven archangels.

The teen had come out of her shell a bit, explaining the purposes of each charm, which lead to a tangent about what kind of protective items were strong against which monsters (Salt was more useful that Jess could have dreamed).

Chucking a bag of pretzels into her shopping basket, Jess saddled up next to Emma in front of the pastry case.

“Anything good?” She asked.

“They’re out of pie.” Emma said dejectedly.

Jess hummed, peering further into the case, “They have apple turnovers?”

“Not the same thing.” The teen said firmly.

Jess hummed, then she bumped her arm against Emma’s, “It’s a shame we’re not at home, I could whip up an apple pie on short notice.”

The words didn’t have the intended effect, but Emma did look up at Jess for the first time since entering the store.

“So you and Sam are going back to Stanford?”

The question shouldn’t have surprised Jess, but it did. “Uh, yeah, I guess.”

It almost seemed ridiculous, after everything she’d just been through, everything she’d seen and learned, to just go back to Stanford, to studying and parties and her one-bedroom apartment with Sam. But what else was there to do?

“I’m afraid that’s not an option.” Said a voice from the front of the store.

Jess twisted around, and her eyebrows rose into her hairline in surprise, “Brady?”

He was dishevelled and tired looking, there was a thick coating of dust on his shoes and the cuffs of his trousers, but what was most concerning was the dark red stain splattered across his shirt.

Brady chuckled, “You know you are a hard lady to find.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I think I should be asking that question,” As he spoke Brady casually wandered towards her, at her side, Emma had gone rigid. “I was hanging around your apartment like a jackass, took me a stupidly long time to realise you must have left with Sam. But in my defence, that wasn’t the plan.”

“Brady what are you talking about?”

“Aww, sweet Jess, always concerned about everyone. But I’d be a little more concerned about myself if I were you.”

Brady smiled, and Jess felt a battering ram slam into her, she went flying backwards, taking Emma with her, and smacked hard into the far wall of the store.

“I just want you to know this is nothing personal, but orders are orders, and when old yellow eyes say’s ‘burn that bitch’… well.”

And then Jess was flying again, and she found invisible hands pining her to the ceiling, she opened her mouth, to say something or to scream, but then the heat came on. Intense broiling heat from under her skin, so white hot it was like she was going to burst into flames. A pressure built up in her head, her vision went fuzzy.

She saw Brady smiling up at her, his eyes looked black.

She heard a scream, saw Emma tackling him.

They were grappling on the floor. Brady was clawing at his neck.

A stream of black smoke shooting out of Brady’s mouth.

And then the hands were gone, and Jess fell back to earth. Her body was still screaming in pain, but she managed to lift her head enough to see Emma detangle herself from Brady, she had each end of her chains fisted in each hand, she’d wrapped them around Brady’s neck.

Emma scrambled over to Jess, pulled her to her feet. She was saying something but the blood was still rushing in Jess’ ears, but as Emma dragged her out of the store, she caught a glimpse of flames licking the spot on the ceiling she’d been stuck to.

They got back to the car, Jess managed to fish the keys out of her pockets, and Emma did her best to drive them back to the motel. Back to Sam and Dean.

Chapter Text

The night was so dark, Dean could barely see anything beyond the stretch of the road illuminated by the headlights. Emma was in her usual place in the passenger seat, her focus was fully on whatever she was writing in her journal, Emma being quiet was one thing, being quiet while intensely journaling? That equaled her being mad at him.

Flicking his eyes to the rear-view mirror, Sam and Jess were seemingly asleep in the back seat, which was a relief to see. Since whatever the hell had happened back in California, Jess had been on high alert, and Sam had blatantly refused to let Jess out of his sight. But exhaustion catches up with everyone.

In the passenger seat, Emma flipped her journal shut and slotted it back into it’s place in her back pack. Dean waited for her to say something, but she only propped her elbow on the door panel and fixed her gaze on the blackness outside her window.

Holding in a sigh, Dean went through the laundry list of reasons for his daughter to be in a mood. There was him getting caught by a Wendigo after he’d left her to babysit a civilian and the car, there was the fact that they were on their way to Bobby Singer’s house right now, even though he’d told Emma it was too dangerous for her to meet Bobby because he didn’t want to run the risk that word of her would end up getting to his father when the man eventually called Bobby for help.

Eventually, everyone called Bobby Singer for help.

Case in point, they were making the long drive to Souix Falls now because some monster or witch or whatever had pinned Jess to the roof of a convenience and tried to set her on fire, and apparently this was on the orders of some bigger bad.

And neither Sam or Dean could think of a better place to go for protection.

But Dean supposed understanding a situation and being okay with it were two different things.

“Look,” Dean said, bringing his daughters attention back inside the car. “I know this whole situation has… spiraled, beyond what we’re used to but…”

The words died on Dean’s tongue when he saw the unimpressed look on Emma’s face.

“Okay, so this whole thing went from Home Alone to Die Hard real quick, but when we get Sam and Jess sorted out, and we get them back to their apple pie life, I promise I will never put you in this position again. Okay?”

“You always say people in our line of business shouldn’t make promises.” Emma responded.

“Yeah, but this is different.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m your father and I say so.”

Emma huffed out a laugh and rolled her eyes, but her expression softened.

Sullenness averted, Dean thought to himself.

Not wanting to sink back into silence for the rest of the drive, Dean turned on the radio, flicking through the stations until a familiar song came across the waves. And without missing a beat he started sing along with Don McLean.

“Did you write the Book of Love?
And do you have faith in God above?
If the Bible tells you so”

“Come on Emma.” Dean slapped his daughter on the arm, urging her to join in.

“Dad.” She hissed, flicking her eyes to the back seat.

“Okay, okay.” He sat back in his seat, focusing on the road. Only to suddenly belt out-

“Do you believe in rock 'n' roll?
Can music save your mortal soul?
And can you teach me how to dance real slow?”

Emma was trying to keep her ‘annoyed teenager face’ on, but Dean could see the twitch in her lips and giggles shaking her shoulders.

“Well I know that you're in love with him
'Cause I saw you dancing in the gym
You both kicked off your shoes
Then I dig those rhythm and blues”

Emma was fully laughing now, and it suddenly felt far too long since the last time he’d seen his daughter smile. So when the next verse came along, her let her sing it on her own, and he just enjoyed the sight of her being a kid.

“I was a lonely teenage broncin' buck
With a pink carnation and a pickup truck
But I knew I was out of luck
The day the music died!”

Of course, at this point Sam was woken up, despite having been asleep for hours he didn’t feel anymore well rested than when they’d left California.

(Whether this is because a man of his size should not be delegated to the back seat, or just because of the general state of his life, I’ll leave up to you.)

The sound of his brother yell-singing along with the radio was a familiar sound, but at the moment wasn’t all too welcome.

“Dean.” He grumbled. But then he felt Jess squeeze his arm.

Looking down, he saw that his girlfriend was awake and watching his brother and Emma. She didn’t look back up at him, but she shook her head. Sam, who had grown up around so much horror and misery, couldn’t imagine where Jess’ head was right now. But if he had to guess, he’d say that watching a father and daughter sing along to the radio, after everything, was a small comfort.

So, he draw his brothers attention, just tightened his arms around her and settled back in for the rest of the night. They still had a long way to go, they should all rest while they can.

The Impala rambled along the back roads, the muffled sound of music leaking through the window. Dean and Emma singing with the kind of enthusiasm that only comes from people who think no one can hear them. It would be a while before the Winchester’s realized that someone was always watching them.

“I started singing bye-bye, Miss American Pie
Drove my Chevy to the levee
But the levee was dry
Them good old boys were drinking whiskey and rye
Singing, "This'll be the day that I die"
This will be the day that I die”

Chapter Text

Jess didn’t know it was possible to be this tired. She and her friends back at school had joked about how their teachers were constantly warning them about how sleep deprivation was an inevitable part of their future careers. But it had been two days of watching the landscape blur by through the car window, lying stiffly next to Sam in shabby motel beds, only two days and she felt like her bones were turning to clay.

Sam had woken up half an hour ago and gone out to get breakfast. After he’d left, she’d slipped through the door which joined their room to the one next door. Jess moved as quietly as she could, but as soon she stepped into the room, Dean jolted awake, his arm tightened in a way that told Jess he was clenching something in his hand, but once his eyes landed on her, he relaxed.

One look at her face to check her level of distress, then a glance to the alarm clock, and he flopped back onto the bed. Emma was still curled up under her own covers, her back to the both of them.

Jess sat herself at the table in the corner and powered up Sam’s laptop, for the next half hour she scrolled through various news sites, looking for articles about Stanford, about the town where her parents live, there was one article that mentioned Brady Johnson was now a ‘missing person’.

She hadn’t called any of her friends, she and Sam and called the administration department to say they would both be out of classes for a while because of a family emergency. And Jess had been allowed one phone call to her parents to let them know that she was okay, but would be out of touch for a while.

The quiet atmosphere was shattered when the door swung open, clattering against the wall, and a wild-eyed Sam rushed into the room, he only calmed down when his eyes landed on Jess.

“You weren’t in bed.” He panted.

“Couldn’t sleep.” Jess muttered in reply, instantly feeling guilty for worrying him.

They just stared at each other for a tense minute, until there was an unhappy groan from Dean as he sat up in bed. Emma uncurled and began rubbing at her eyes.

“What time is it anyway?” Dean asked blearily.

“Uh, about five forty-five.” Sam answered.

“In the morning?”

Sam nodded his head.

“Where does the day go.” Dean sighed, sitting up.

“What’s in the bag?” Emma asked, her voice flat, her face impassive as she looked at Sam.

In the two days since the Gas-N-Sip, the four of them had only stopped to gas up the car and sleep and Emma had made sure to keep her distance from Sam, never speaking to him more than she needed to.

Sam awkwardly held out the crumpled paper bag towards her. “Pastries?”

In response Emma flung the covers off her bed and marched into the bathroom. Sam remained, holding his arm out awkwardly, looking over to Dean with a pleading expression.

His other brother just sighed, reaching out to grab the pastry bag from Sam’s hand. “I wouldn’t worry about it, you know teenagers.”

In fact, Sam didn’t really ‘know teenagers’, but he was bordering on exhaustion lately and so just took a seat next to Jess.

Munching on his breakfast and seemingly not caring about the flakes that he was getting on the bed, Dean surveyed Jess and Sam, she could only imagine what she looked like.

“Either of you get any sleep last night?”

“Yeah, I got a few hours.” Sam said, before Jess could admit that she’d been struggling to sleep lately.

“Really? Cause I was up till three last night and I could still hear your TV through the wall.”

“That was me,” Jess spoke up, closing the laptop, “I’m not used to this kind of travelling, it’s kind of like adjusting to a new time zone.”

“You sure that’s all it is?” Dean slid his eyes to his brother, who pointedly was not looking back at him. “Your old nightmares aren’t coming back, are they?”

“Old nightmares?” Jess asked.

Sam was doing that thing where he squared out his shoulders when he was getting defensive. “Look I appreciate the concern- “

“It’s not concern. As far as we know there’s some kind of monster on you and Jess’ tail, so until we get to Sioux Falls, we need to be on our guards, and for that I need you sharp.”

Jess felt a small spike of annoyance, Dean was without a doubt talking to Sam at the moment, but this was a situation that affected the both of them, she was the one that had almost been burnt alive in a crappy convenience store.

Before any of this could turn into three sleep deprived people having an argument, Dean’s phone went off. While the eldest Winchester answered the call, Jess reached for one of the take-out cups that Sam had brought in with the pastry bag, even before she took a sip the feeling of the warmth of the coffee made her feel more awake.

As if she’d heard the cell phone, Emma stuck her head out the door of the bathroom, a toothbrush hanging from her mouth. Her father held his hand up in a gesture that seemed to mean something between the two of them, while he asked the person on the other end of the line if ‘it’ was back.

Emma ducked back into the bathroom and emerged a minute later, looking at her father expectantly. Once he hung up the phone, Dean shared a look with his daughter, before turning back to Sam and Jess.

“So… we need to make a pit stop.”

XXX

A few hours later Jess was in the back room of a random Copy Jack while a man she’d never met before took her photo. As the flash went off Jess made a silent vow to herself to never let her mother find out about this.

Dean was leaning against the wall, fishing money out of his wallet as the man who had been taking pictures of her moved away from the camera and towards an entire lab’s worth of computer and printing machinery that was set up at the other end of the room. The man, who Dean had clapped on the back and called Greg, was unremarkable looking; dark skin, shaved head, along with uniform shirt he was wearing faded jeans and well-worn sneakers. If Jess had come into this place for a normal reason, she probably wouldn’t have looked at him twice, wouldn’t have had any reason to think that when he went into the back room, he was printing off fake ID badges for monster hunters. Speaking of which-

“So, I can get your girl a driver’s license right now, but if you want cards, passports, socials, I’m going to have to fire it over to Frank.” Greg said.

“We’ll stick with a driver’s license for now, she’s not joining the hunt, no reason to call up Frank.” Dean said, handing Greg a small wad of bills.

“Who’s Frank?” Jess asked, trying not to stare at the computer screen as her picture was surrounded with a fake name and a fake birthday and a fake address.

“Frank Devereaux,” Dean responded, “depending on who you ask he’s either a paranoid hermit or a tech genius.”

“Hey man, don’t discriminate, he can be both.” Greg laughed, he spun around in his chair to face Jess and gave her a conspiratorial smile. “I mean sure, he lives in an RV because he thinks the government is trying to track him down, but he can also whip up an entire paper trail and internet existence for your fake identity in the time it would take you and I to heat up a pop tart.”

“Sounds like an… interesting person.” Jess said.

About ten more minutes of small talk between Dean and Greg and Jess doing her best to pretend she didn’t find all of this very weird, and then they were walking out of the of the Copy Jack, her with a fake driver’s license and Dean with two fake federal badges.

“You know in high school I was the one kid in my class who didn’t have a fake ID?” She told Dean, looking down at the laminated rectangle in her hands.

The elder Winchester chuckled, “Well, better late than never.”

Emma was leaning against the trunk of the Impala, watching the normal people make their way up and down the street, Sam was in the passenger seat, one of the doors flung open so he could stretch his legs out, hunched over his laptop.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Dean called out, grabbing their attention, before he gestured to Jess, “I would like to introduce you to Tish Bellomo.”

Emma let out a laugh, Sam just arched an eyebrow.

“Why do I feel like I’ve heard that name somewhere?” Jess asked.

Dean flashed a grin at her, “You’ll figure it out.”

After she buckled herself into the backseat, Emma beside her, the teen leaned over and whispered conspiratorially “It’s kind of a game for him.”

“So, what have you got?” Dean asked as Sam un-hunkered himself from his computer.

“Well, there’s definitely EVP on the recording.” Sam said, hitting a sequence of keys on the keyboard.

 A harsh screeching sound blasted from the laptop’s speakers, Jess winced as pitch went up and down, until there was the undeniable sound of a voice.

“No survivors!”

“No survivors? The hells that mean? There were seven survivors.” Dean said.

Sam shrugged, “There’s a long history of spirits latching themselves onto vessels like ships and planes, you know, phantom travellers?”

“So now what?” Emma asked.

“I guess the survivors are a good place to start. You got the list?” Dean asked

“Yeah,” Sam replied, “And I suggest we start with Max Jaffey, he’s most likely to have seen something.”

“What makes you say that?” Jess asked him.

An uncomfortable look flashed across her boyfriend’s face, “Well, I spoke to his mother.”

XXX

One trip to a mental hospital later and the Impala was pulling up outside a typical suburban house. While Max’s recount of the plane crash had confirmed that something unusual had definitely been going on, it hadn’t shed any light on the situation. As Dean had been grousing on the drive over even if the passenger Max had seen had been hopped up on the best steroids in the state, he shouldn’t have been able to open the plane door.

But the one part of that story that had been playing on repeat in Jess’ mind had been Max’s claim that the man who’d opened the door had black eyes.

Since the day it had happened, Jess had been doing her best to block out the memories of what had almost happened to her, and even when she did let the memories into the front of her mind, they were far from clear, blurred by heat, pain and fear. But Brady had looked up at her with Black eyes. She was sure of it.

No one had said anything about that though. Perhaps it was too much to admit there was even more they didn’t know.

“Here we are,” Dean announced as he killed the engine, “George Phelps, seat 20C.”

If there were pictures in the dictionary, the entry for ‘suburban’ would have had a picture of this house. White washed walls, manicured lawn, little box of flowers on the window sill.

“Yeah,” Emma drawled, “This place really screams evil lair.”

“Well looks can be deceiving.” Sam pointed out.

Dean fished the fact ID badges out of his suit pocket and handed one to Sam, “Okay, Sam and I will handle the questions, Emma, you know the drill?”

Emma nodded her head and unbuckled her seatbelt.

“And Jess…” Dean’s voice trailed off and Jess could see it in his eyes, the moment that he remembered that she was the only person in the car that hadn’t been raised on gun maintenance and how to lie to the cops.

She let him flounder for another minute before putting him out of his misery. “I can stay with the car.” She offered.

“Thank you.” Dean said sincerely, before exiting the car.

Jess slid out the door of the back seat and moved around to the driver’s seat, brushing her hand against Sam’s as he followed his brother up to the front door.

 “Can you move the car further down the road?” Emma asked.

Jess obliged, parking the car closer to the end of the street. “So, what’s ‘the drill’?”

“You’ll see.” Emma smiled, before vaulting from the car and diving behind the fence line separating two houses.

Jess gaped in surprise for a moment, before scrambling over the car seats to close the door, and then swinging her eyes around and hoping that no one noticed that.

Once she was content that the street was empty, she looked into the rear-view mirror just in time to see Emma climbing up the drain pipe of the Phelps house.

XXX

God bless the suburbs. Emma thought to herself as she reached the second floor of the house.

The houses always had either a trellis or a veranda, or in this case a sturdy drain pipe. And the windows were either left open or unlocked.

Once she pushed what turned out to be the bedroom window open, she swung herself through the frame and landed on the thankfully carpeted floor. She stood completely still for a few heartbeats, until she could hear her dads voice downstairs, and then the voice of the maybe-monsters wife.

She was in the clear, and so she began her search.

Nothing in the closet or the dressers, there weren’t even bloody clothes in the laundry basket. No hex bags under the bed, no demonic sigils hidden under the pictures on the wall, not even a shady looking dagger in the night stand. Holding in a frustrated groan, Emma pulled out her phone and texted her dad an all-clear message before making her way back out the window.

XXX

Later in the day, when they’d investigated all their leads, Jess and the Winchesters returned to the motel and entered what Dean referred to as ‘full research mode’. There were newspaper articles, pictures, and photocopied pages of various occult books were taped to the walls, in what Jess could only describe as a cross between a modern art collage and a conspiracy theorists pin board.

“So there really is a creature like this from every mythology?” Jess asked. She was sitting on the end of her bed, trying to absorb as much of the information as she could.

“Christian, Hindu, Native American, you name it.” Sam answered from his seat in front of his computer.

“Yeah, but none of them are like this.” Dean said. He was leaning against the table, staring at the wall like he wanted to shake it down for the right information, Emma was sitting in the chair beside him, flicking through a leather filo-fax that Dean had pulled from his bag.

“What do you mean?” Jess asked.

“Okay so we assume we’re dealing with some kind of demonic possession? Demons are creatures of chaos, they don’t want anything, they come up here and cause death and destruction, just for fun. But this? It feels… planned.”

Dean let out a tired sigh, grabbing for the bear he’d been nursing since they got back. “Or maybe I’m just stumped because this is bigger than our usual gig. I don’t know, but it kind of makes me wish- “

He cut himself off sharply, squeezing the beer a little harder than before, and as good as he was trying to hide it, Jess could tell he was trying not to look at Emma.

“That dad was here?” Sam said. He was looking straight at his older brother, like he was waiting for Dean to respond, but Dean only flicked his eyes up to Sam before pinning them back to the wall.

Only Jess noticed the pained expression that flashed across Emma’s face.

Luckily at that moment Dean’s phone went off, after a short talk with Jerry, he told them that Chuck Lambert was dead.

“So that’s two plane crashes involving Chuck Lambert, maybe the demon was after him?” Sam theorized.

“Does that mean this is over then, if he’s dead?” Emma asked.

“Were it only that simple.” Dean answered. “Get this, Chuck’s plane went down forty minutes into the flight, same as flight 2485, and it crashed a few miles outside of Nazareth.”

Everyone in the room looked at Dean blankly for a minute. “I know.” Is all he said.

“Maybe there’s something to do with the numbers?” Sam asked, “Like biblical numerology?”

“At least six of the plane crashes you guys found out about went down after forty minutes.” Dean pointed out, moving closer to the wall.

“Yeah, but none of those crashes had any survivors.” Emma argued.

“No survivors.” Jess muttered to herself, as pieces came together in her mind.

“Maybe it’s a different demon?”

“Nazareth is sixty miles away, right? Let’s head over there and- “

“Oh my god!” Jess belted out, jumping to her feet, inadvertently causing Dean to flinch away from her in shock.

“What?” Sam asked, his voice full of concern.

“There were no survivors!” Jess all but shrieked, a strange kind of adrenaline flooding her system.

“I know it’s terrible- “Sam reached his hand out to try and comfort her, but she swatted him away, dashing to the wall to rip off the articles about the other crashes.

“No! The other crashes, no one survived, and that’s what the voice on the black box said, ‘no survivors. But there were seven survivors, Chuck Lambert survived and the first time he gets on a plane afterwards he crashes in the same way. But as far as we know he’s the first of the seven to get back on a plane, it’s not just about Chuck! It’s about all them! This demon, it- “

“It’s going after the other survivors.” Dean finished her ramble, a look of horror dawning on his face. “It’s trying to finish the job.”

XXX

A few hours later the group burst through the doors of the airport. On the drive over they’d gone through the list of survivors, most had been adamant that they’d never get on a plane again, but Amanda Walker had decided that today was the day she would resume her job as a flight attendant.

“Right there.” Sam pointed to the departure board, “They’re boarding in thirty minutes.”

“Okay, okay, we still have some cards to play.” Dean said, his eyes zeroing in on a curtesy phone.

The family crowded around Dean as he waited for the operator to connect him to Amanda, Emma was right at his side, staring at the receiver like she could will it to work faster. Sam was leaning against the pillar, rubbing at the lower half of his face, an old nervous habit. Jess, out of the four of them, was the most obvious with her distress, practically vibrating on the spot.

“This is Amanda Walker.” A voice sounded from the other end of the phone line.

“Miss Walker. Hi.” Dean swallowed, forcing himself to focus. “This is Dr. James Hettfield from St. Francis memorial hospital; we have a Karen Walker here?”

“Karen?”

“Yeah, it’s just a minor car accident, but- “

“Wait,” Amanda interrupted him, “that’s impossible, I was just on the phone with her five minutes ago.”

Dean heard a sound like a record scratch in his head, “You what?”

“Yeah, she was at home.”

“Well… clearly there’s been a mistake- “

“And how would you know I was here? Is this one of Vince’s friends?”

Dean made himself laugh, “Guilty.”

“Wow.” Amanda scoffed, “This is unbelievable.”

“Look, he’s really sorry.”

“Well, you tell him to mind his own business and stay out of my life, okay?” Amanda all but yelled, before the line went dead.

“Damn it!” Dean slammed the phone back into its cradle. “So close.”

The PA system went off at that moment, as if they weren’t already aware of the ticking clock.

“Well,” Sam said, “Plan B. We’re getting on that plane.”

He and Jess made to run towards the nearest service desk, but Dean remained rooted to the spot.

“Whoa, whoa, let’s wait a second.”

“Dean, the plane is taking off in less than half an hour, it’s got over a hundred people on board.”

“I know.”

“So, Jess and I will get the tickets, you two,” He waved his hand towards Dean and Emma, “go to the trunk, grab whatever will make it through security.”

But Dean just remained standing in place, his eyes wide and nervous.

“Are you okay?” Jess asked.

“No, not really.” Dean responded.

“Dad?” Emma looked up at her father, her brows knitted together.

Looking between his daughter and his brother, Dean shifted uncomfortably. “Well, I kind of have this problem with, uh…”

“Flying?” Sam said, baffled.

Dean threw his arms out, “It’s never really been an issue until now.”

Sam scoffed, “You’re kidding.”

“Do I look like I’m kidding? Why do you think I drive everywhere Sam?”

One brief argument about whether or not they would split up and suddenly Jess was no longer the most obviously nervous member of their little group.

XXX

By some miracle they had managed to get four tickets at the last minute, less miraculously, they were on almost opposite ends of the plane. Jess leaned over the arm of her chair, sticking her head out into the aisle, she could see the top of Sam’s head and Dean’s arm gripping the arm of his seat.

She hadn’t made any comment when the brothers had wordlessly moved to sit beside each other. It had been happening slowly over the days they’d been driving across country in the Impala, in the beginning it had been Sam and Jess, Dean and Emma, in the front and back of the car, on opposite sides of the table at the dinner. But old patterns that Jess hadn’t been apart of, that were probably part of the boys muscle memory, were coming back to life. But Jess wasn’t anything close to unhappy about it, she couldn’t be. In all their time together at Stanford, as surrounded by friends as they’d been, even when Sam had finally met her parents, there had been a loneliness to the man she loved that he’d never been able to hide from her, and  she used to think that it was because he was estranged from his family, but then he’d sat down in the woods that night and told her the whole truth of his life, and now she realised it wasn’t that he was without a family, it was that he missed them.

In contrast to her father, Emma was sitting rather comfortably in her seat beside Jess, looking around with an inquisitive air. You could almost forget the plane was at risk of crashing.

“So, how’s your first plane ride?” Jess asked.

“It smells weird in here.” Was all she said, a small scrunch in the bridge of her nose.

“That’ll be the recycled air.” Jess told her, wondering how that could stand out to her after being raised in a muscle car.

Dean eventually came down and crouched in the aisle next to their seats, he had checked that Amanda wasn’t possessed, which meant the demon was inside someone else, he passed them a hastily written copy of what was apparently an exorcism chant and told them to memorise it and be ready, as he flashed them the EMF reader in his inner pocket.

Jess focused on the task at hand, Emma guided her through the pronunciations (the girl had a gift for languages). Every now and again Jess would look up and seek out Dean’s face, trying to gauge his expression to see if he’d found anything.

Then he came back and told her the demon was in the co-pilot.

Shit.

“She’s not going to believe this.” Dean groused as he Jess and Sam moved to the back of the plane, Emma had been left to watch the doors.

“Twelve minutes dude.” Sam insisted.

“Yeah, twelve minutes to give her the whole truth is out there speech.”

A light bulb went off in Jess’ head, “Maybe we don’t have to.” She said, shoving her hands into the pockets of Sam’s jacket until she found the fake badge, then she pushed her way in front of Dean, “Follow my lead she told them.”

At the back of the plane, Amanda was fussing over the drinks cart, no idea how close she was to dying.

“Oh hi, flight’s not to bumpy for you I hope.” She said with a smile.

“Actually, that’s what we need to talk to you about.” Dean said apologetically.

Confusion creased Amanda’s face. Jess cleared her throat and prepared to commit what she was pretty sure was a felony.

“Miss Walker, my name is agent Bellomo, you’ve already met my partner.” As she spoke, she flashed the badge she’d grabbed from Sam, her fingers carefully covering his picture. “We’re with homeland security.”

“Wh-what’s happening?” Amanda stuttered.

Jess waited a beat for Sam or Dean to jump in, but they were both staring at her with similar expressions of disbelief on their face.

“We, know you were a survivor of flight 2485. I’m sorry to in form you that the co-pilot of this flight is, um, a suspect in our investigation and we currently believe him to be a- a threat to this plane.”

How do government agents speak?!  Jess shrieked in her head, as she tried her best to sound professional, Is this working? What am I doing? One of you say something!

As if he’d heard her, Sam suddenly spoke up. “I know this sounds strange, but ma’am, the people on this plane need you.”

Jess resisted the urge to throw a look at her boyfriend for the use of the word ‘ma’am’, and kept her focus on Amanda.

“I don’t understand, what does the co-pilot have to do with- with 2485?”

“We don’t have time to explain right now, but we need you get him back here.” Dean told her.

“So, we can talk to him.” Jess lied, just for good measure.

“We’re in the middle of a flight, how am I supposed to get him to leave the cockpit?”

“Tell him something back here is broken, anything you can think of alright.” Sam insisted. Irritation creeping into his voice.

Amanda looked between the three of them, she still wasn’t convinced, Jess wondered if she should flash the badge again.

“Amanda,” Dean caught her eyes, his voice full of sincerity. “I promise you, we wouldn’t be asking you to do this if it wasn’t serious, but the people on this plane are in serious danger.”

Amanda slowly began to nod her head, “Okay.”

Jess watched Amanda make her way towards the cockpit, she was doing a good job keeping her composure. Dean gave Emma a wordless signal and the girl was out of her seat and in the back with them so quickly it was like she’d been waiting the whole flight for the signal.

When the co-pilot finally parted the curtains, Dean grabbed him by the shirt and dragged him all the way into the back before punching him in the face, Jess slipped out the curtains just in time to stop Amanda from coming in.

“I need you to wait out here, don’t let anyone else come in here, okay?” Jess said hurriedly.

“I thought you were just going to talk to him?”

“We are.” Jess said, just in time for the sound of muffled screaming to come from behind the curtain. “Seriously, stay out here.”

Jess ducked back inside the curtain to find the co-pilot on the floor, a gag in his mouth, Emma pinning him by the arms, Dean dousing him in what looked like water but was causing his skin to sizzle, and Sam reading the chant.

“Help me hold him!” Emma spat.

Jess hurried to grab the demon’s kicking legs, but soon found that while Emma had the strength in her arms Jess had to throw her whole body weight onto the demon to pin his legs. Even that was barely enough, she was definitely going to have bruises on her torso after this.

Jess decided that the harsher the demon bucked must mean that the exorcism was working, but then it spat the gag from its mouth.

“You think saving your girlfriend means anything?!” It growled.

Jess looked up to see the demon, with its black eyes and blistering face, grinning manically at her boyfriend.

“You think you can get away from us? You know what’s coming Sam; you think you can stop it? It’s already happening!” Another laugh that turned to a wet, blood splattering cough, “We wouldn’t let you even if you could, we’ve been waiting for this, we’ve been waiting so, so long.”

“Sam!” Dean barked at his brother, who had broken off his chanting, to sit in shock looking at the demon.

Sam finished the chant, and the same black smoke that Jess had seen expel itself from Brady, shot from the co-pilot’s mouth, and flew into the vent.

The plane began to jerk and shudder the lights flicking on and off, as Jess clung to the walls, hearing the screams of the other passengers, her thoughts surprisingly weren’t the fearful oh gods or the panicked Am I going to die’s of the other passengers, instead she clenched her teeth and grimly thought to herself that if she made it out of this alive she would join Dean in his car only travel policy.

XXX

Back on the ground, surrounded by people who had no idea who had saved them, and real government agents, Jess caught Amanda’s eye as she made her way towards the Winchesters.

Amanda didn’t come over to her to ask questions or accuse her of lying about the whole homeland security thing, instead she just mouthed ‘thank you’. And something warmed in Jess’ chest.

That warmth died when Sam came up to her, she wrapped her arms around herself and looked him in the face.

Sam, seeing her expression, froze a few feet away from her, “Are you okay?”

“What did the demon mean Sam? When it said ‘you know what’s coming’?”

Sam gaped, floundering for an answer, “Jess, you remember what Dean said about demons? They do things for no reason, they lie, you can’t trust anything you hear from them.”

“So, you honestly have no idea what it was talking about?” She asked bluntly.

Sam had lied to Jess a number of times over their relationship, about how his mother had died, about his father and brother, about the things he’s endured in his childhood, about his dreams. So, it was disturbingly easy to lie to her now.

“I promise.” Sam said.

And Jess, who had no reason to think her boyfriend would lie to her, accepted this, let Sam put his arm around her shoulder, and guide her away from the crowds.

Chapter Text

Another day, another random gas station. Dean filled up the gas tank, and grabbed a road map from the news rack when he went inside to pay. There were undoubtably at least five lost somewhere in the glove box or under the seats but what when Emma was little she had copped with the boredom of long drives by playing connect the dot with the capital cities. Which made most of those maps illegible.

After a consulting the map and doing some travel math, meanwhile Sam played with his phone, Jess sipped at a cup of gas station coffee (read; terrible coffee), she offered Emma a sip, but the girl sniffed at the cup and scrunched her face in displeasure.

“Okay,” Dean announced once he had all the routes straight in his head, “I figure we hit Scottsbluff by lunch, then we head west and we’ll be in Omaha by midnight.”

“Okay.” Emma nodded.

“Sounds good to me.” Jess said, and then when Sam made no comment she raised her voice, “Doesn’t it, Sam?”

“I’m listening, just busy.” Sam replied, not looking up from the device in his hands.

“What are you even doing?” Jess asked, leaning around his seat, trying to get a look at what was apparently so important.

“Reading emails.”

“Who are you writing to out here?” Emma scoffed, “Better question, what could you possibly be writing about?”

“My friends from Stanford.” Sam responded, a touch defensively, “They tell me what’s going on back home and I… tell them I’m on a road trip with my brother.”

“Oh, so you lie to them.” Dean said.

“No! I just, don’t tell them everything.”

“That’s called lying Sam.” Jess said, leaning back against her seat, looking out the window. From the tone alone Dean could tell that if they weren’t all living out of his car, Sam would have been sleeping on the couch that night.

Sam, clearly feeling ganged up on, guffawed and turned his attention back to his phone, only for his face to pale.

“Oh god.” He gasped.

“What?”

“It’s this email, from one of my friends, her names Rebecca Warren.”

“I remember her,” Jess said, sitting up straighter, dumping the last of her coffee out the window. “Wasn’t she in your history class?”

“Yeah, and apparently her brother, Zach, has been accused of murdering his girlfriend.”

“What the hell kind of people do they let into Stanford these days?” Dean grumbled, leaning over to get a look at the screen.

“Well, she says there’s something wrong about this case, that Zach is missing. She doesn’t think it could have been him.”

“Dude, of course she going to say that, it’s her brother.”

“No, I know Zach and he’s no killer.” Sam insisted.

“Can you be sure of that?” Jess asked meekly, she began twisting a strand of hair tightly around her fingers.

“Jess? Come on, you’ve met Zach, you know he wouldn’t do something like this.”

“A month ago, I would have agreed with you, but that was before I lived in a world of Wendigo’s and demonic possessions.”

Sam snapped his fingers, “There you go, could be something supernatural involved.”

“That’s a bit of a leap.” Emma commented.

Sam ignored her comment, “They’re in St. Louis, we’re going.”

Dean sighed, “Look I’m sorry about your friends-“

“Exactly, they’re my friends. We’re going.”

“Sam, St. Louis is like 400 miles out of our way!” Dean protested. He had just plotted the course. He’d done math and everything!

Sam levelled a look at him.

XXX

Once they had made it to St. Louis, Sam had begun guiding Dean through the various streets and into the suburbs. Eventually Sam assured them that they were just two streets over from his friend’s house, but it was around that time that Dean spotted something in the neighbourhood that caught his attention.

“Uh, Dean, this isn’t Rebecca’s house.” Sam said as Dean pulled the car over to the side of the road.

“Yeah, but it is where a certain someone is getting out.” Dean answered, pointedly looking out the window. The other three people in the car followed his gaze and saw that he had parked them across the way from a local library. Emma let out a groan.

“What were you up to last week? Algebra?” Dean asked, as his daughter unbuckled herself and leaned forward to stick her head between the two front seats.

“But I thought we were only here to show Sam nothing’s going on?” Emma complained, steadfastly ignoring the annoyed noise her uncle let out.

“Yes, and while the adults will be determining whether or not nothing is going on, you will be catching up on the work you haven’t been doing for the last few days.” Dean replied casually.

“But-“

“Do not make me pull out the ‘young lady’ card.” Dean said quickly, before Emma could utter another argument. Apparently the ‘young lady card’ was a decisive argument ender, because Emma simply rolled her eyes and got out of the car, Dean popped open the trunk and Emma grabbed her backpack, slinging it over her shoulder with one hand and closing the trunk with the other. She turned and began walking towards the library without looking back at her family.

Dean stuck his head out the window, “You remember the drill?” He called out.

Emma still didn’t look back, but she waved her hand back at him as she called back, “You’ll call me in two hours.”

She said it with a slightly bored tone, like this was a regular routine between them and he didn’t need to remind her. Once Emma was through the door, Dean turned the engine back on and began pulling the Impala back onto the road.

“So, this is what? Homeschooling?” Sam asked flippantly. Remembering the many days in libraries and clown themed family restaurants, trying to keep up with where the other kids his age were at in school.

“Well, it’s a progressive world out there Sammy.” Dean replied with a saccharine smile. “We got all kinds of tools to help the working single father.”

XXX

Being inside Rebecca’s house was a surreal experience, and it wasn’t because of the pictures on the fridge, or Jess’ on memories of running into Rebecca on campus. It was watching her talk to Sam, or rather, it was watching Sam talk to her. Watching how easily he lied to Rebecca, how quickly he thought of reasons for Dean to be there, for how okay it would be for them to investigate the crime scene, for Rebeca to leave the room so the three of them could talk about supernatural things.

It was surreal because Jess just couldn’t stop thinking about how that had been her a few weeks ago.

The kitchen counter was littered with casserole dishes and other tin foil wrapped meals. Most of them had some kind of note attached to them, all of them promising Rebecca that ‘you’re in our thoughts’ or ‘if there’s anything you need.’

“People have just been so thoughtful.” Rebecca said, when she noticed Jess taking in the notes. “Ever since the news about Zach, everyone we know has been reaching out to me, making sure I’m okay.”

Jess offered a sympathetic smile, but couldn’t help but find something odd about Rebecca’s expression when she spoke, there was almost a repressed… cheeriness to her voice. But that couldn’t be right.

“So, would you mind telling us exactly what happened with Zach?” Dean asked.

Rebecca blanched and wrapped her arms around herself, “Erm, well, Zach and Emily’s neighbour heard some kind of scuffle coming from their building, so he got the landlord to go check it out, they found Emily tied to a chair, all bloody and beat up, she wasn’t breathing. There were no signs of a break in, and the security cameras across the street don’t show anyone other than Zach and Emily entering or leaving the apartment. But the cameras from across the street don’t show Zach getting home till 10:30, and the police said Emily had been dead for at least an hour before that.”

“So, he would have had to be in two places at once.” Dean mused.

“Do you think we could see the crime scene?” Sam asked.

“Um, I-I guess, but I don’t know what you could do.” Rebecca sputtered.

“Oh, well me not much, but Dean’s a cop.” Sam told her.

To his credit, Dean only shot a Sam a brief look before rolling with it and telling Rebecca that he was in fact a detective from Bisbee Arizona. Only a touch more convincing and Rebecca was out the door and looking for her keys.

Sam turned to face Dean, ready to either fight him that this was obviously their kind of problem, or gloat that he had been right to keep reading his emails. But as he turned, he caught a look a Jess’ face, he couldn’t name the expression on her face, but he had never seen her look at him like that before.

“What is it?” Sam asked.

But she just gave a minute shake of her head and muttered, “Nothing.”

XXX

The scene inside the house was as horrible as Jess had expected. Between the heat of the weather and the passage of time, the pools of blood on the floor and the splatters on the wall had turned to a hardened and dried out into dark brown. Rebecca was right, no obvious signs of a break in, but Dean noticed that the bedroom window had been left open, which was an odd thing to do for people who lived so close to down town. Aside from that the only thing that stood out to Jess was the dog that freaked out as the group was leaving the house. Well, that wasn’t true, Jess also noticed how much Rebecca was leaning on Sam as they walk back to their cars, she had been upset, being inside the house, Jess could understand that. But she also just couldn’t stop herself from thinking there was something a little performative about her worried swooning.

Back at the house, Rebecca let them watch a copy of the security footage that her family’s lawyer had managed to get for her. They sat for about ten minutes, watching just what Rebecca had told them would be on the tape, only Zach and Emily coming and going.

But suddenly Jess felt Sam go tense next to her. “Hey Bec, can we get those beers now?”

“Sure.” Rebecca smiled, heading downstairs.

Dean rubbed at his eyes with the palms of his hands, “Dude, I’m all for a beer break, but-“

“No, no, no.” Sam interrupted, kneeling in front of the monitor, to fiddle with the speed of the video. “Check this out.”

Sam rewound the video to the last time Emily would enter the house before her death, but Sam paused it at the split second that she turned her face towards the camera. Her eyes looked silver.

“Is that, like, some kind of camera flare?” Jess said.

“Not like any kind of camera flare I’ve ever seen.” Sam said.

XXX

After Sam had noticed the strange eyes on what had since been dubbed “not-emily”, a little more detective work had also shown them that while Zach had entered the house before the police arrived, there was no footage of him leaving, which Dean deduced, most likely meant he escaped through the back window. After Dean made his check-in phone call with Emma in which he explained that yes, it turned out there was a case to be solved, and no she was not allowed to stop her school work to come solve it with them, the three decided to split up. Or more accurately, Dean said he wanted to go back to Zach and Emily’s house and Jess said she would go with him while Sam stayed with Rebecca (“Since she seemed so safe with you”).

Jess and Dean were walking from the Impala, down towards the back of Zach and Emily’s house. Jess doing her best to keep her eyes peeled. Though she wasn’t sure what for.

“Y’know,” Dean said suddenly, “I generally try to avoid hearing about other people’s relationship troubles, at all costs, but since we’re all destined to share the same car for at least another couple hundred miles, maybe it’s best you tell what exactly has gone funky between you and my brother?”

Jess did her best not to splutter in response, she very nearly succeeded.

“There- there is nothing ‘funky’ between Sam and I, things just- we’re just…” Jess cut herself off with a groan, for one of the first times in her life she was struggling to articulate her feelings.

“Look, I get that you and I aren’t exactly best friends, but do you now what it’s like when a group of people with a lot of stuff their not saying to each other share space? Cause I do, and I’m not offering to play Dr Phil here, but unless you prefer to scream into a pillow, now’s a pretty good time to get it off your chest.”

Jess sighed, pressing the palms of her hands against her eyelids, suddenly feeling very tired. “I get why he didn’t tell me about any of this, I do. Telling someone the supernatural is real and you were essentially raised to hunt them isn’t exactly third date conversation. Or any date conversation.”

“If you get that then what’s the problem?”

“The problem is we weren’t just dating; we were living together! We were making plans together about what to do with our lives after school, like, spending those lives together kind of plans. And was he ever going to tell me the truth? Or was he just going to cut out you and this whole side of his life to pretend with me? Because I’m starting to worry some of it at least was pretending, I see him talking to Rebecca, coming up with stories and excuses so easily and I just… I didn’t know he could be like that, and that makes me wonder how well do I really know him?”

Jess took a deep breath, a little surprised at herself, at the words she’s let escape her mouth. After moments silence, she looked over at Dean, but he looked away. Guess he really wasn’t going to play Dr Phil.

“So what are we looking for?” Jess asked, mostly to change the subject, “Wouldn’t the police have been through here already?”

“Yeah, except the police think this is a very normal case of guy goes crazy and kills his girlfriend, which means they wouldn’t know to look for the kind of trail we’re looking for.”

As Dean spoke, he came upon the wooden beam of a powerline, and when Jess followed to stand beside him, she saw a smear of what looked like blood in a vaguely hand shaped print.

“Okay,” Jess said, “We have our trail, and I’m guessing the police would have gone either downtown or into the back alleys. Which means instead we should look… up?”

Even as she said it Jess tried not to shudder at the thought of a winged serial killer.

“Or, down.” Dean told her, as he squatted down next to a manhole cover.

XXX

Jess gasped for air as shoved the manhole cover out of the way and clawed her way back above ground. She barely had enough time to fully scrabble her way out of the sewer before she felt Dean shoving her out of the way so he could drag a dirty, injured, severely dehydrated Zach onto the street with them. Jess hadn’t expected to find anything good when Dean told her they were going to investigate the sewers, but a shapeshifters den, complete with sludgy piles of ‘shed skin’ and the clothes of other people it had murdered, but when they found Zach bound and gagged… well, it said something about the current trajectory of her life that it was the best thing she’d seen all day.

They’d tried to ask Zach about what had happened to him, but the poor man was in such a state, when he realised they were rescuing him he began crying so hard his words became incomprehensible. The most they were able to get out of him was that a monster wearing his girlfriends face had killed his girlfriend, and when he’d tried to run it had dragged him down to it’s lair.

“A-and it kept touching me!” Zach cried, his voice rough. “And the more it touched me the more it started to- to look like me! And it knew things like it was reading my mind!”

Jess did her best not to cringe when Zach pitched forward, like he was about to throw up, just kept holding him upright as she and Dean lead him to the car.

“And then a few days ago I woke up and Rebecca was there with me,” he started sobbing again, “I thought she was there to save me, but it was that thing!”

Dean, who had been marching ahead of them, eager to get out of the street, suddenly jerked to a stop and spun around. “What did he just say?”

XXX

Sam sat on the couch next to Rebecca, who stared into the flames of the fireplace. She had been quiet for a few minutes, but Sam supposed that was to be expected, dealing with your brother being missing and a murder suspect was bad enough, and here Sam was adding shapeshifters into the mix.

“So you’re saying this… thing, made itself look like my brother?” She asked in a tight voice.

“A Shapeshifter.” Sam said, “And look, I know it sounds crazy, but you said yourself, Zach was in two places at once, can you think of a less crazy explanation?”

Rebecca just hummed, her posture was taught like a guitar string, her hands gripping her knees.

“And you think it killed Zach.” She whispered.

“We think it’s what killed Emily, we still don’t know what happened to Zach.” Sam was quick to tell her.

Sam slid closer to Rebecca, tentatively placing a hand on top of hers. “He could still be out there.”

Rebecca turned her to look at Sam then, her face surprisingly blank, but her eyes were moving across Sams face, almost studying. Suddenly Rebecca was smiling, she flipped her hand around so that their fingers were interlocked and she gripped his hand tightly.

“Did I thank you for coming all this way? For being here with me?” She asked sweetly.

“Oh, you don’t have to thank me.” Sam chuckled, wondering how rude it would be if he tried to wriggle his hand free from her grip.

“I actually have a good idea what you’re going through. The feeling that whole world has changed, the questions, wondering why this happened to you.”

“Actually I think I can imagine why this happened…” Rebecca said quietly, turning back to look at the fireplace.

“You called it a shapeshifter, well what if it doesn’t just look like you, what if it becomes you? What if it saw Emily, so happy and loved and… just wanted to be her? I mean, if you could choose, wouldn’t you rather be normal? Instead of some genetic freak?”

Sam swallowed, gave up on trying to free his hand and began thinking of what he might be able to grab with his free hand that he could use as a weapon. And it wasn’t because of the way Rebecca was squeezing his hand tighter and tighter, it was because of the way her eyes were glinting silver in the firelight.

Unfortunately for Sam, Rebecca seemed to see this revelation on his face, she yanked hard on his hand with surprising strength. Sam found himself thudding to the floor, before he could suck the air back into his lungs, the Shapeshifter was suddenly straddling him, its hands wrapped around his neck, its inhuman eyes on full display.

“I’m sorry it turned out like this Sam.” It grunted, trying to press down on him with all the weight of Rebecca’s body, “I actually liked you.”

 In response to that Sam rolled his body onto the side, grabbed the shapeshifter by the head and bashed it as hard as he could against the hearth of the fireplace. The blow was enough to get the monster to release his throat, but before he could land a harder blow the shapeshifter kicked its knee harshly between Sams legs. The pain only caused Sam to loosen his grip for a second, but a second was all the Shapeshifter needed, it scrambled out of Sams hold and into the darkness of the house.

Sam jumped to his feet, he grabbed a candlestick off the nearest table and moved slowly into the middle of the house. He listened for any movement, no sounds of windows or doors opening, it was still inside. At that moment the door flew open, Sam spun with his impromptu weapon raised, only to see Dean and Jess rushing inside.

“Rebecca!” Jessica gasped, “She’s-“

“The shapeshifter.” Sam cut her off, “Yeah, I figured that out.”

Dean already had a gun in his hands, but he pulled another from the holster under his jacket and handed it to Sam. The motion of taking the gun and turning off the safety were pure muscle memory. It was only once he had the proper grip on his firearm that he noticed that Jess was (very awkwardly) clutching a silver knife.

“It still in the house?” Dean asked, his voice low.

“I think so, probably hiding.” Sam replied at a similar volume.

“This place have an attic?”

“No. Basement.”

Dean nodded, “Okay, I’ll take the basement. You two scout out this floor, then move upstairs.”

“What are we supposed to do when we find it?” Jess asked, trying very hard to keep her fear out of her voice.

“Trust me, we find this thing it’s only going to give you one option.”

XXX

The basement was pitch black, Dean moved slowly, keeping his back to the wall and his ears open. If the shapeshifter was down here with him Dean didn’t want to tip it off by turning on the lights. A few more feet in and he felt a hard box shape poke him in the back, probably the light switch. He reached behind him, felt for the switch, then held his breath for a few seconds, really listening for another presence in the dark with him. And that’s when he heard it, faint and muffled but definitely there, some kind of panting. Dean took one more breath, got himself ready for a fight, and flicked the lights on.

In the same motion her turned on the lights he pointed his gun in the direction of the sound, and found himself pointing a gun at Rebecca. Except it seemed like this was the real Rebecca, hands tied up to pipes, duct tape over her mouth, and tear tracks running down her stained face. Dean realised the tears might have something to do with him pointing a gun at her, so he re-holstered the gun and made his way to untie her. Once her hands were free and he ripped the gag off her mouth, Rebecca immediately tried to squirm away from him.

“Please don’t hurt me, please don’t hurt me.” She babbled.

Dean backed up, throwing up his hands to show he wasn’t a threat. “Hey, hey I’m not going to hurt you, I promise I’m here to help. The thing that did this to you? I’m here to stop it.”

Thankfully she seemed to believe him; after getting to her feet, she followed Dean back upstairs, though she kept just enough distance between them as they moved. Honestly, Dean respected the instinct.

As they approached the front door, Dean didn’t hear any signs of the shapeshifter or Sam and Jess. Rebecca made to grab for the door handle, but Dean blocked her hand.

“Listen, I need to find my brother, he’s somewhere in here, so I need you to stay by the door and if you see the- the thing that put you in the basement, just scream and we’ll both come running. Okay?”

Rebecca was already shaking her head before he could finish speaking, she opened her mouth, probably to argue with him. But that’s when they heard screaming.

It was coming from the back of the house, two voices, sounded like a fight. Dean pushed Rebecca behind him and reached for his gun again. He made it about five feet towards the kitchen when a shape came flying through the door and landed with a crash on the living room floor. Dean ran forward, ready to deliver a final blow if needs be, but instead he was greeted by the sight of Jessica Moore lying motionless on the ground, with a knife sticking out of her chest.

XXX

Sam kept half his senses open to signs of the shapeshifter, and the other half to keeping track of Jess behind him. Her nervous breathing was the only thing he could hear, the was no movement in the shadows that he could see. But there was something else, some feeling of wrongness that was gliding along his skin, pricking at his temples like an invisible needle, the more he tried to ignore it the more intense it got. Perhaps if he had done a better job of blocking that feeling out he would have sensed the danger coming from behind them.

But instead, all he heard was Jess suddenly screaming, when he spun around, he saw Jess wrestling with… herself. Two heads of curly blonde hair, two sets of narrow arms, it was too dark and they were moving too fast for Sam to make out their clothes. They were grabbing and scratching, kicking and trying to buck the other away, and then Sam saw why, they were wrestling for the knife.

“Sam!” One of the yelled, “Help!”

“No!” The other shouted, that one was grabbing the other Jess’ wrist in one had and was using the other to try and angle the knife towards her chest.

“Shoot her!”

“Don’t listen to her! She’s the shapeshifter!”

Sam stood frozen, even if he knew which Jess was real, they were so close together he doubted he’d be able to get a clear shot at either of them. He stood there with his mind racing, should he call for Dean? Should he try to subdue both of them? Was there something he could say to reveal the real Jess?

But then one of the Jess’ made a gasping noise, the two of them stumbled into one of the beams of light that was coming in through the kitchen windows and Sam saw a thin bloody line running jaggedly down the side of Jess’ neck and down towards her collar bone. And once he’d seen that, Sam didn’t think anything, he just felt. And what he felt was strong enough to wake up something he’d been trying to shut away since he was a little kid.

As if grabbed by invisible hands, the two Jess’ were suddenly yanked apart and thrown violently away from Sam. One went flying through the doorway into the living room, the other missed the doorway and crashed into the kitchen wall. When Sam approached her, he saw that it was the one with a bloody cut on her neck. Sam felt suddenly unsteady, there was a tremor in his hands that was threatening to spread through out the rest of his body, even when Jess groaned and started moving to sit up right against the wall, Sam didn’t try to go to her, he was suddenly very afraid of what might happen if he moved.

“Sammy!” He heard Dean call from the living room.

The most Sam dared to do was shuffle to the side so he was visible through the doorway. Dean was kneeling over the body of Jess. No the shapeshifter, it had to be the shapeshifter. It had to be because the Jess Dean was kneeling over was lying still with the knife sticking out of her chest.

Dean looked up and saw Sam standing there with god only knows what kind of look on his face, and Sam saw a little of the blood leave Deans face.

“Is- is this?” Dean stuttered the question, pointing to the body next to him. Sam was as afraid to answer as Dean was to ask.

But at that moment the Jess in the kitchen with him struggled to her feet and leaned out of the doorway, one hand clutching the wall, the other clutching her neck. At the sight of her Dean grabbed to hilt of the knife and yanked it out of the body. And along with the knife came a long strip of skin caught on the handle. It ripped cleanly away from the rest of the skin like wet wrapping paper. For a moment all three of them just stared at it.

(Except Jess, she was staring at the image of herself, dead and bloody on the ground with a Winchester kneeling over her.)

“Good news,” Dean called out to hallway, “we killed the monster.”

Rebecca, who was still curled up against the door just started sobbing in response.

XXX

Emma Winchester sat on the curb in front of the library and waited for the familiar rumble of the Impala. After she had finished her homework, she had waited another two hours and then called her father to check in with what had turned out to be a legit case. (Which she was not at all pissed they had left her doing busy work to go solve.)

When she finally got through to her dad he had been out of breath as he explained the situation to her, well, less explained the situation and more explained what he needed her to do. It was a pretty simple plan all things considered, Emma snuck into the librarian’s office and used their phone to call the police and leave an anonymous tip that there was ‘suspicious activity’ happening in a warehouse downtown. Once the police got there, they would find Zach tied up and showing all the signs of someone who’d been held prisoner for a few days, then he would tell the police that he had been kidnapped by a threatening but nondescript individual who was the real killer of his girlfriend. Zach’s name would be cleared and he and his sister would be free to continue on with their lives. As best they could.

Emma spotted the Impala coming around the corner and rose to her feet, slinging her bag over her shoulder as she walked. The car came to a stop in the middle of the street and Emma went to take her spot in the passenger seat. Only to find it occupied by Jess, she sat with her arms crossed and a bandage on her neck looking straight ahead. Sam sat behind her, not looking at anything.

Emma caught her dads eye and arched an eyebrow, he just shook his head. Emma got the message and sat in the back, but as Dean set the car moving again she couldn’t help but ask,

“So, rough night?”

Sam didn’t seem to have heard the question, she could tell by the sudden tension in his shoulders that her father was suppressing a sigh, and Jess just stabbed at the radio until it started playing.

And they kept driving.

Chapter Text

15 November 2005

I think I learned more about my grandfather this afternoon than I have in my entire life.

I know my life hasn’t been that long, but still.

All day we’ve been walking around the town he used to live in, where my grandmother used to live, where my dad and his brother were born, and none of it quite felt real. Honestly my grandparents have never really felt real, even calling him ‘grandfather’ just feels weird, when I can’t help but think of him, he’s been dad’s dad, most of the time he’s just been that thing we both try not to think or talk about. Cause the one thing I did know about him before today was that he was a hunter, which means he’d probably kill me. But apparently, he also used to be a mechanic and a marine and a guy who loved his wife and kids.

Maybe I’ll just call him John?

Thinking about my grandmother is even weirder- Missouri says her name was Mary. She feels even less real than all this normality that my family apparently came from. Apparently John became a hunter because of her, because of what killed her, and it looks like what killed her is what tried to kill Jess, but dad never talks about her, even when Sam tries to talk to him about her it just makes dad angry, like, really angry. I wonder if this is how normal people feel about ghosts? She’s everywhere in this family but I don’t know a thing about her.

I think Jess is angry at Sam, could be because coming here was his idea instead of staying on the road, but I don’t know. I think dad must know something about it, cause the entire time we’ve been here he’s looked, I don’t know, kinda sick? I’ve never really seen him look like this.

If Jess is mad at Sam, I wouldn’t hold it against her. Last time was bad enough, and he got a pass on that because it turned out there were shapeshifters involved. But it feels like all the detours we’ve had lately are because of him in some way. Or maybe I just kind of want it to be his fault