Chapter Text
Jess wakes up into darkness. Alone, she thinks, if the stale quiet- broken up only by the off-beat croaking of the ceiling fan- is any indication.
Or at least the first one to claw her way back to consciousness. She doubts that she would have woken up in the same place she’d passed out if she’d come in second- if she’d been allowed to wake up at all.
The first numb moments of wakefulness wear off, and the brand in her chest begins to demand notice. It sends hot tremors of pain through her stumbling, born-again nerves- it doesn’t matter. She’s stayed still too long already. She can feel the blood loss rising up, fog-like, in her mind. If she doesn’t move now, she’s never going to move again.
Sitting up is worse. Her head is pounding, not helped by the stench of copper and sweat mixing with the old cigarette smoke leaking from the walls. Her hand, when she brings one up to her forehead in a vain attempt to push back the drums beating behind her eyes, is sticky, and as it travels down her face it leaves a warm trail across the bridge of her nose.
It’s twelve steps from the edge of the bed to the door, Jess discovers, and she manages to make it without tripping over the broad lump on the floor, dimly haloed by the light of the full moon sneaking in through the shades. The knob turns easily under her hand- unlocked, and the realization that she is no longer caged in like an animal settles over her like the first cool shock of jumping into a lake in summer.
She thinks that she could make a new religion out of the feeling of stepping out into the parking lot on her own two legs, the night air breathing goosebumps across her bare skin.
It’s the work of a few moments to smash the window of one of the few cars parked outside the by-the-hour motel, and she can’t quite stop herself from grinning at the way the glass digs into the knuckles of her fist, blood dripping down to fit the grooves of the windowsill. The car itself is a dirty bile green, squat and sturdy, with a front end that reminds her of a bulldog’s face. There is no alarm that blares as she slides into the front seat and fits the soles of her naked feet to the pedals.
Jess fumbles the wires under the steering wheel, her fingers not yet again used to taking her orders. It takes her three, four, five tries for them to spark, for the engine to hum to life beneath her. And then she is peeling out beneath the flickering VACANCY sign, the teeth of her tires catching against the gravel.
There is only one thought that rings through her head, clear as a bell: go west.
The first time she comes back, Dean Winchester greets her with a bullet in the head.
It's not a clean shot- it gets stuck before it breaks through the back of her skull, somewhere behind her teeth, and she tastes iron. And the thing inside her- curled up against her ligaments, brushing up against the pulse of her bloodstream- twists her face into something that is decidedly not a smile. "Is that all you've got for me?" it makes her ask, so sweetly.
"If you were really her, that bullet would have killed you," says a different voice. The eyes that used to be hers snap up to him instantly, but it takes her longer to push back at the fog that seems constant these days, threatening to overwhelm her, to make out the shape of him. Standing there, in the shadows, too far from the low-burning candles for light to reach him, too far from the five-point shape they're trapped inside for the thing inside her to reach him. His hands wrapped protectively around an old book, pages dry and curled up from sun or use or both, but he doesn't even look at it because his eyes- and how sunken in they look, how bruised they are around the edges- his eyes are locked onto her as he says, "She's dead. You're just the thing wearing her corpse."
Jessica Moore is not dead.
Well, she was dead, once, and she thinks she might be a little dead still. But she is definitely not as dead as the man in front of her- the one who used to be her boyfriend, before their relationship went up in (quite literal) flames- seems to think.
It forces her throat into something that is not a laugh, is just a guttural scraping of flesh. "Don't you wish that were true?" it croons in her voice. "I can see you trying so hard to believe it. You should know better than anyone, Winchesters- what's dead never stays dead."
When Dean buries the knife into her chest, she welcomes it. She embraces the burn, and the scream it rips from her lungs is entirely her own.
She cleans the dried blood off herself in the bathroom behind a gas station. The paper towels are rough against her skin, the soap dispensers are all empty or broken (or both), and the water from the sink is so murky that she's probably ending up with more dirt on her than when she started. But when Jess accidentally catches sight of her own face in the mirror, she has to admit that she at least looks less like a Final Girl. (Not that she meets the requirements for being one in the first place. She died first, after all. Take that, God!) (Or whoever might be listening in on her thoughts right about now.)
Now, she muses, poking at a dark bruise blooming underneath her eye, she just looks like she’s crawled out of a ditch on the side of the road.
There's a stolen sewing kit sitting on the edge of the sink in front of her, so dirty at this point that she feels no guilt about bundling it up and tossing it into the trash can.
Her clothes, she decides, are unsalvageable. And good riddance to them- they're far from the type of thing she would've picked out for herself, white and matronly, the conservative cut undermined by the weeks-old rips and stains. There's nothing she can wear in the car she stole, but luckily, there's some cash stuffed into the passenger seat's compartment.
The gas station itself has a small collection of novelty t-shirts and cargo shorts. She chooses the least offensive to her eyes (sandals, camo cargo shorts, a blue t-shirt with a graphic of a black and white terrier telling her "You're Purrfect!"), then gets stuck on the gum aisle on her way up to the register. BBQ, Cotton Candy, Oreo- she is struck with the thought that the rest of humanity must've had entirely too much time on their hands while she was gone. Jess can't remember there being this many gum flavors before she died. (The first time.)
She plays it safe and chooses Watermelon.
The girl at the counter is young, likely not out of high school yet, with bleach-blond tips and so many piercings in her ears that they jangle against each other as she ducks her head to scan the price tags.
Jess catches the girl looking up at her one too many times, her mouth pinched with some type of concern, and says, vaguely, "My cousin a couple of counties over just got married. You know how weddings can be." She slides two $20 bills across the counter.
"Right, of course," the girl says, nodding quickly and sliding the bag with her purchases back to her. Jess leaves before she can count out her change.
She changes in the backseat, then pulls out the map she grabbed from a rack by the gas station's door.
Heaven, it turns out, sucks.
She’d never really put much stock into the whole afterlife thing- the only higher power her parents taught her to have any faith in was the kind you rolled up and smoked on a Friday evening- but, if there did have to be anything besides the great vast nothingness she'd been mostly expecting, it seems as though there should have been more than… this.
Her days (not that there are really days here, but it helps, at least, to try to divide the time into smaller, more comprehensible parts) consist of: She answers questions in a lecture hall. The classroom morphs around her, becomes middle school, high school, elementary, and the subjects all run together. She gets them right, every time. It's Christmas, and she opens presents with her sister, their parents in their bathrobes standing over them. It's college, and she's lying in bed with Sam, just on the edge of sleep, the light of the television washing over them (trying not to look at the ceiling).
Mostly, heaven is depressing. Jess walks through the same few memories, and after a while, all she can think is this is it? This is… everything? This is the sum total of her life, extraordinary only in its brevity. It takes her less than a month to learn it by heart.
It's Christmas time again, and her sister shakes a box covered in Lord of the Rings wrapping paper. There's a spot on it where Legolas's anime face is scratched almost beyond recognition. "It's a helicopter," Jess guesses. "A pony. An ancient curse that makes you eat virgins every new moon."
"Nope," her mother says, smiling around a cup of coffee. "Keep guessing."
"Fine. It's a yellow DS with cartridges for Pokemon and Mario Kart.”
"You're not gonna get it," her father tells her.
"Wanna bet?" Jess mutters under her breath.
"I'm not sure why you're so keen on guessing anyways. It's not even your present!" He leans over to ruffle her hair.
She can't remember why she did it as a kid, beyond some vague sense of childish excitement, but now- "Maybe 'cause there's fuck all else to do here." Her sister opens the box and unearths the yellow DS.
"Lucky guess?" a voice asks her as the memory dissolves into laughter and sun and the smell of fresh-cut grass. There's a picnic blanket underneath her thighs, and just a few feet away, a man in a red polo shirt and a strap-on visor sits on a matching one. "Or maybe not so lucky."
"I've lived through that memory probably a hundred times by now," she tells him, twisting her fingers into the grass. Across the park, a man throws a frisbee with his dog. She wants to snatch it out of his hands, and wonders if they would keep on playing anyway, passing nothing back and forth. The sun shines warmly down on her skin and there's an ant picking its way slowly up her ankle and she has never felt more dead.
"Must have made some impression on you then." Jess doesn't think so. Her life has been an endless merry-go-round of dull. Her greatest memories are maybe a little less dull, but that doesn't sound like anything worth getting impressed about. "What's this one?" He gestures around at the park, at the spread of food next to her, at the fifteen-year-old boy chattering inanely next to her.
"Date with a high school boyfriend, I think. I haven't been to this one yet." Jess grabs an orange. It comes apart easily in her hands, and each slice is firm and sweet. But- dulled. The memory isn't there. She must not have eaten it when she first lived through this.
The man leans over and lays a palm flat against her cheek. His other hand comes up to press two fingers against her temple. "What was that for?" she asks when he draws them away.
"Eat," he tells her, so she does. When she puts the orange slice in her mouth this time, it tastes real.
"You haven't asked me what I am," he says, as she eats and doesn't talk. "You haven't asked me what I'm doing here."
Jess drops the piece of the peel into her lap, strings clinging to the fabric of her bright green sundress. She wipes her fingers off on the grass. "It doesn't matter what you are. And I know what you're doing here." She flicks the ant off her leg. She can still feel it tracing a phantom path over the thin hairs that line her thigh. "You're going to get me out of here. You're going to want something from me for it- maybe something big, something so big I'm going to lie to myself about the fact that I might tell you no. But I'm going to tell you yes, no matter what it is, because people aren't meant- people aren't meant to be so dead and have to still feel so alive."
The man looks at her, considering. He brushes an invisible piece of dirt off his khakis. And then he holds out his hand to her and says, "It seems like we have a deal, Jessica Moore." His hand is cold and calloused against hers as she takes it, lets him move them up and down in a firm shake. "My name is Nick."
The restaurant is probably the brightest thing around for miles. Light bleeds from the windows and the neon sign proclaiming its name and its (likely self-appointed) status as the home of the best milkshakes in the state. Jess pushes open the door, and the tinny, pre-recorded sound of a bell rings out cheerily.
This late at night, there's almost no one inside. The tables are empty, except for one old man sitting in a booth near the back, four piles of shredded hash browns on his plate being steadily sorted by some unseen criteria. Two women, wearing red uniforms with skirts barely long enough to cover their thighs, seem to be the only staff, one wearing chunky headphones and scrubbing half-heartedly at an already clean table and the other, an older woman who looks far past the age of wearing short skirts at work, sits on top of the front counter, legs crossed at the ankles, a romance novel with half-naked stock photos on the cover in her hands. She squints down at it through slim reading glasses, only looking up at the sound of Jess's footsteps.
"Sit down anywhere you like," she says, her voice husky and dried out, then goes back to peering down at her book. Jess takes the invitation and chooses a spot at a booth, near the window facing out into the parking lot, which she finds herself scanning every few seconds.
"Can I get you anything?" the girl with the headphones asks, pulling out a menu.
Jess barely bothers to glance past the front page advert shouting, "24 HR BREAKFAST!" before she says, decisively, "Pancakes. Lots of butter."
"Coming right up," the girl says, shoving the menu back into her apron.
She moves away, towards the long stainless steel griddle that's been set up behind the counter. "Wait," Jess says, and the girl pauses to look back at her, one studded eyebrow raised in question. "Do you guys have a phone I could use?"
As it turns out, they do have a phone. And the phone in question looks as though its timely death came and passed it by a decade and a half ago, its soul having departed and left the rotting corpse behind to chug along in some queer form of mechanical necromancy. It's covered in dirt, every part of it is inescapably sticky, and putting in the numbers requires a not inconsiderable amount of physical violence.
It takes her two tries to get the number right, and then the phone starts to ring. The call gets picked up on the third.
"Hello?" says the voice on the other end, thick with sleep. She can almost imagine it- him stripped down to his t-shirt and boxers, on top of the covers of the motel bed, one large hand pawing over his eyes as he brings his cell up to his ear. Jess doesn't say anything, she just breathes. It isn't the same air, not even close, not even the same rhythm, but it still feels like something to hold onto. "Hello? Is anybody there?"
Anger washes over her, like the sharp crack of a whip. "If you come after me," she tells him, her voice low and serrated like the back end of a bowie knife, "if you follow me, if you try to hunt me down again. I swear I will hunt you back and I will gut you like an animal."
"Jess?" she hears him say, bewildered and maybe just a bit aching, just a single word, just her name.
"Fuck you," she snarls, her voice breaking, and hangs up on him.
And sets the phone gently back into its cradle. And wipes her sticky hands on her gas station cargo shorts.
When she leaves the back office and sits back down at her booth, her pancakes are ready and waiting, letting out hot breaths of steam into the chill diner air. (And the burning behind her eyes has mostly been willed and/or scrubbed away.) It's been forever (years, centuries) since she's had a hot meal, and she digs in ravenously, not bothering to care about slicing her food up into neat little pieces.
Sometime during the attack on her plate, her arm begins to bleed. Right on the back of it, where the meat connects to her shoulder blade. Where she'd placed six unsteady hot pink stitches, groping her way with her fingers where she couldn't twist far enough to see it in the gas station mirror. Where the knife that had aimed for her heart had missed.
The blood is bubbling up and dripping down her arm onto the plastic-covered seating. "Hey, do you have any wet wipes?" she asks the girl with the headphones. Jess is already trying to dab it up with the napkins left on the table, but they seem to be smearing the blood around more than actually cleaning it, and they're so cheap that they're falling apart in her hands.
The girl's eyes widen comically at the sight of her. "Let me- let me get you some- some wet paper towels or something," she stammers out, and then rushes off to some room around a corner Jess can't see past.
Jess turns back to finish her pancakes while she's waiting.
When the girl gets back, the older woman is with her. The girl shoves the damp, slightly dripping paper towels into the older woman's hands and retreats back behind the counter. The older woman stays, peering down at her.
"Yes?" Jess asks her, licking the remaining syrup from her fork.
"I heard part of your phone call," the woman says, stony-faced.
Shit. Honestly, just… shit. Maybe she hadn't been so stupid as to mention the demonic possession part of the whole... situation with her ex-boyfriend, but it wasn't like Jess had been away from the human world long enough to forget that threatening to gut someone isn't the sort of thing that they tend to meet with chuckles. "Yeah?" Jess says, shifting subtly to angle herself towards the door in case she needs to make a break for it.
"You get out of a bad relationship recently?" the woman asks her.
"…You could say that," Jess tells her, and it's not even a lie.
The woman nods decisively. "Come on, then." She walks away, leaving Jess to sit there, whiplashed, her instincts totally confused on whether or not to make her great escape while she still can.
In the end, she follows. Of course she does. Although, when the woman leads her into a back room full of cardboard packages, she thinks that it's looking increasingly likely that she's about to be chopped up and sold for parts.
"Sit," the woman orders, pointing to one of the boxes. She holds up a first aid kit.
Jess sits.
When the woman asks her to pull off her shirt, she strips down to her bra without protest. There's a slight breeze, and it ruffles the soft hairs of her stomach.
Despite how large they are, the woman's hands are gentle as she uses the paper towels to dab at the wound. It takes Jess by surprise when she sprays the antiseptic, and she has to bite her tongue to hold back the hiss. "You know, my last girlfriend was the one who gave me this," the woman says, pointing to a mark just below her eye. When Jess looks closer, she can see it's in the crescent moon shape of a fingernail, as though someone dug a finger in and tried to gouge out the skin. "Still. The hardest part of it is convincing yourself not to go back."
"I am never going back," Jess vows as the woman pulls out a large spiderman band-aid. "Not in this lifetime, and not in any other."
"And on the east side, we'll be seeing thunderstorms from ten to four-" the radio babbles into the night-scented air. Jess sits with her arm hanging partway out the driver's side window, the other hand making marks to the map on her lap. It's dark on the side of the road, the only light coming from a pregnant moon that is only half full and the headlights of the lonely cars that whip past every once in a while.
And the flashlight in her hand, which she uses to trace along the bright red vein of the highway she's traveling down now.
She switches the channel, and some country song she doesn't recognize begins to blare. Or maybe it's just a really long ad for beer? She's not sure.
Jess leans back and clicks off her flashlight. In a moment, she will leave. In a moment, she will drive down the road to the old motel she's already picked out to spend the night and collapse into bed sheets that are older than her and most likely haven't been washed in just as long. In a moment.
But for right now, in the darkness and over the sound of the beer ad that has devolved into off-key guitar instrumentals, the present is melting away from her and the past is thrusting its way up to the surface moment by moment. Somewhere, in a far-off place that doesn't exist anymore, there is the faint sound of someone screaming.
The road is long and dark.
There are no streetlights, no buildings, just the wind-rippled rows of tall grass- with the pale light of the thumbnail moon reducing everything to shape, to gesture, the crossroad seems almost otherworldly. If someone had told Jess- if there had been another soul there to speak it- that she had in fact, somewhere on the drive, unnoticed beneath the whine and rattle of her stolen car's engine, slipped her way into the Twilight Zone, she would have believed them in an instant.
There is dirt underneath her fingernails. Everything else she'd scrounged for. Graveyard dirt was the easiest. The photo of herself, taken with a shoplifted InstaCam. The black cat bone, she didn't want to think about. All of it, stuffed inside an Altoid tin, sitting in the dirt next to her and waiting to be planted. But the shovel she'd forgotten.
It doesn't matter. So she is once again unclean. So the clay clumps, and, in the dim light, looks a deep and wet and glistening red. So, so, so. The tin is buried and she stands, brushes dirt off her jeans.
The air grows heavy, thick with something like static. She can't help herself, she checks the sky- but the stars are right where she left them, no blanket of storm clouds has rolled in to cover them. There's a pop, as though she has suddenly found herself miles above sea level and is still climbing. The wind is gone; the cicadas have stopped screaming.
He bleeds into existence in front of her. The parts of him ooze together, in streams, in clumps, as though he is a sore being forced to clot over. The first thing Jess notices about him is his clothes. He is well-dressed, all sharp corners and no wrinkles, in a navy blue suit with a black fabric square poking out of his pocket, like a businessman whose all-consuming secret is a taste for human flesh instead of the fact that he does cocaine in the company bathrooms. His smile, cut from his face at knifepoint, shows off a set of straight, too-white teeth. His eyes are black.
"Jessica Moore," he calls out. "A pleasure to meet you. I've heard so much about you." His voice is… wrong. Almost British, but flat, somehow, as if the attempt at the accent had been ruined by the vessel's own American muscle memory. Because of course she is not really talking to a man, but to the parasite puppeteer pulling his strings. She had been trying to put that particular detail out of her mind. (Because she was, before anything else, a hypocrite and a coward of convenience)
"All good things, I hope," Jess mutters. She shoves her hands into the soft pockets of her fleece-lined jacket (stolen from a clothes donation bin located just outside a Salvation Army) and looks up to watch a wispy cloud pass over the moon, filtering the light into dapples. When she looks back, the demon is right there, its face barely two feet away from hers- pressed up against the edge of the Devil's Trap she had spray-painted onto the dirt road, so close to the line that she can see the very tip of its nose scrunched up, as though an actual piece of glass is there for it to press up against.
"Not for you," the thing says, its tone almost bored. "Actually, you're really quite dull on your own. But you have the fingerprints of other, more interesting people all over you. Plus the way you've proven so easy to manipulate." It shrugs in a slow, proud way that makes the movement seem more like a threat, similar to the way a lion stretches.
"Is that what you came here for? To try to manipulate me again?"
"I came because you summoned me."
"So you just want to make a deal, huh? Not planning on trying to drag me back to our mutual friend?" Jess is startled by the barking laugh the demon lets out.
"'Our mutual friend?' Please. I've never even met the man." The demon shakes its head. "And I promise, nobody wants you back."
"I'm leverage."
"You're used goods," the demon counters. "You're a pawn that's run out of moves, and now it's time for you to do us all a favor and take yourself off the board."
"Fine," Jess spits. "I guess that means I don't need you, then."
"Is that why you're here?" It smirks. "You heard that we were getting busy again and you thought, what, that we're planning on getting back at you for your daring escape? It's coincidence, love. We don't care about you anymore.
"Though I suppose it is very refreshing," the thing drawls. "You're not even bothering to hide it under the heroism or the altruism or all the other boring-as-hell-isms. You don't care about the damage we're going to cause. This is all about saving your own skin."
"I'm taking care of me," Jess tells it, pulling the old key hung about her neck by a silver chain out of her shirt. "And this is gonna take care of you."
"I'm terrified, really," the demon says flatly. "What are you planning on doing with that? Locking me away to rot? Sweetheart, it's already all mold and five-month-old pumpkin juice inside me. Wherever you're thinking of putting me in time-out to "cool my heels", as it were, has nothing on 200 years in hell. And besides, little old me is the least of your problems." It looks her up and down, flint-sharp eyes catching on all the awkward angles of her and chipping against all her rough edges. Its gaze measures her, and when it looks up to meet her eyes again, she can tell by the haughty look of disgust on its face that she has been found wanting.
"Let me be clear: when I said that you were used, perhaps I should have said that you've been used up. Your soul is practically in tatters, and what is this, your sixth time back from beyond the grave? Seventh? I've lost count. Someone up there really has a taste for seeing you play the martyr. Or down there, I suppose." It shakes its head in mock pity. "Tragic, really. And now I'm your only hope for coming out the other end of this with your… everything intact. There's no doctor in the world that can cure what you've got."
"Fine. Say I believe you-"
"It's the truth, love." The demon snorts. "Why else do you think that last passenger of yours jumped ship quite so easily?"
"Say I believe you. What's stopping me from killing you here and finding someone else to fix me?"
"Who else is there? It's a big, bad world full of frauds and faith healers out there." It ticked a finger up. "There's no way in hell an angel would do anything for you. After what you've done?" Another. "And finally, there's no other demon willing to give the kind of deal I've got for you. What's the point of fixing your soul if you get a ten-year expiration sticker slapped right onto it?" Three fingers held up, wriggling like worms, before it closes them into a fist.
"And you're not interested in that?"
The smile it gives her is more animal than man. "Oh, no. I've got much more imagination."