Chapter Text
When Sam was eleven, his fifth-grade teacher died in a car crash. It was the first time Sam had ever known someone who’d died from something normal. It had been strange, to hear on the intercom that Miss Warner had been killed like that. Until that point, Sam had always associated death with the supernatural. Cancer and drunk drivers seemed like things that only happened on TV, not in real life. It was terrifying, to think that something so banal could take Miss Warner and her warm smiles and colorful worksheets away, and Sam hadn't been able to get any seep that night, left with yet another thing to fear.
Miss Warner’s boyfriend had invited the entire class to her funeral. Sam had wanted to go, but there was a hunt in a suburb outside of Milwaukee that just couldn’t wait and John thought it was stupid for Sam to care about some woman who he’d only known for two months when he hadn’t even cried that November second.
He’d called Sam selfish and told him his priorities were out of whack and Sam had called him heartless and evil and refused to leave the motel room until John let him write a sympathy note to Miss Warner’s family. He’d been so furious it felt like it was bleeding out of him, but it didn’t even matter because when he’d finished the note Dad had just thrown the paper in the trash and Sam over his shoulder and hauled him to the car while Dean simply watched, silent and unhappy and reluctantly judgemental. On the drive to Milwaukee, he’d asked Sam why he had to get so angry over missing a funeral for a math teacher when there were people who actually needed their help and Sam had wanted to punch him in the face.
Dean had told him later at a rest stop that it would’ve made sense to be sad about Miss Warner. It was Sam's anger that was strange. He couldn't understand the point of Sam’s rage then and he kept on misunderstanding it up until the night Sam left, kept looking at it from all the wrong angles, kept calling it laziness and bitchiness and Jesus Christ, Sammy, grow a pair.
“I don’t get it,” he’d said around his gas station taco. “You’re not usually an angry kid. What gives?”
But Sam was an angry kid, even back then when Dean and John both thought he’d grow out of it. More fool them. He didn’t grow out of his anger, he grew into it, around it, letting it take root deep in the core of him, letting its branches spread and sprout out of his fingertips, blooming into something he might have called ambition and Jess might have called beauty.
He’s grateful for it now. Anger is easy. He’s unpracticed in grief. He couldn’t be sad about Miss Warner because he didn’t know how to be sad, not back when he was eleven and it was basically his baseline. Now, though, he’s tasted joy, grown full and sated on it, so it stands to reason that he should be able to grieve Jess properly, should be properly knocked down by it, should be absolutely crippled by his sorrow.
And he is. Of course he is. He’s so sad he’s can't feel anything anymore. He's gone numb. He misses her so much that he can’t wrap his head around it. It feels too big for him. He never knew grief could make someone feel clumsy, but Sam feels too tall for his skin, like he’s about to knock something over, a bull in a china shop, and all the tears he won’t (can’t) shed are stuck inside him, clogging his throat in a wet, tangled knot, stealing his voice. He could barely say Sophie’s name when she’d finally arrived at the apartment, a wild, haunted look in her eyes, had flinched violently when she opened her arms and gathered him close to her, shaking with heaving sobs that had made Sam feel useless and afraid and too heavy for his bones.
Dad taught Sam how to shoot a gun and how to fix an engine and how to cheat at pool and made him memorize his bestiary backwards and forwards, but he never taught Sam how to miss someone without hurting the people left behind, and that’s the last thing Sam wants, the last thing Jess’s family deserves. But he doesn’t know how he’s supposed to avoid it. He doesn’t know how to miss Jess without breaking something.
Sophie and her husband Ethan arrived an hour ago, having high-tailed it from Fresno. Joseph Moore is still three hours out from Ridgecrest. Sophie’s on the phone with him in the living room, keeping him company as he drives, and the sound of her broken voice makes Sam want to throw up.
“Hey, Sam?” Ethan asks from behind him, cell phone in hand, and Sam very carefully doesn’t jump at the sudden sound, turning around from the kitchen counter to face him. Ethan’s eyes are red and he gives Sam a helpless, awful sort of half-smile. “I’m sorry to bother you, but I just got that florist you found on the phone and I was going to go make Sophie some tea, but—”
“I’m on it,” Sam assures him, his voice rough as it works around the knot in his throat. “Don’t worry about it. Let me know what they say?”
“You got it,” Ethan promises softly before lifting his cell phone back up to his ear. “Sorry, I’m back. Could you walk me through the package options again?”
As Ethan walks back out to the living room, Sam busies himself with heating up some water and rifling through Professor Claytor’s tea collection. It was nice of him to offer Sam his apartment for the evening. He’d insisted, actually, booking a hotel for himself before he even finagled a yes out of Sam. It’s the least I can do, he’d told Sam, pale and miserable. He’d been crying a little, tears getting stuck in his beard and fogging up his wire-rimmed glasses. Sam hadn’t known what to do with that, so he’d just nodded and shaken his hand and hoped that Professor Claytor couldn’t feel how badly he was trembling. Jess was—this is the least I can do.
Dean’s out getting the groceries. Sam had given him a list, reminding him multiple times that Ethan and Sophie kept kosher. He hopes that Dean remembers to look for the hechshers. Dean hadn’t been pleased with his assignment, especially when it became a scavenger hunt, that much was obvious. But Sam can’t bring himself to look at his brother right now, not while standing in the ruins of the life he so carefully and happily built without him. He doesn’t blame Dean for Jess, not really, not anymore than he blames his dad for getting himself disappeared, but eventually Sam’s anger will return, and when it does, it will need a place to go. If Dean’s here when Sam remembers how to be furious he will punch him in the face, and Sam’s a lot more likely to win a fight with Dean now than he was when he was eleven. But Sophie and Ethan didn’t sign up for the Winchester Special, so Sam hopes that by the time Dean gets back from Safeway he’ll have a handle on himself again.
As the tea steeps, Sam closes his eyes. He can’t stop seeing Jess pinned to the ceiling. She’d been—she’d looked so afraid up there. So small. So familiar .
(He’d thought they were nightmares. That he was afraid of losing her, now that he’d decided he was going to marry her. That he was recreating Mary’s death with Jess playing the starring role because Jess was his home and the last time he’d had one of those he’d still had a mother. But he’d seen this, he’d fucking seen it, and he hadn’t done anything about it. He hadn’t put up salt lines or told her how to test for demons or that demons were even real. He hadn’t thought he’d needed to, not yet, not before he went down on one knee and promised her forever.
It’s just that he’d thought he was free. That he could leave all that behind him. That he could live without being afraid, just a little longer.
He should have known better.)
The tea finishes steeping just as Sophie bids her dad a shuddering goodbye and an order to please drive safe, Dad, and get here soon. He brings it out to her carefully, going over their to-do list in his head. It's not long. Sam’s already called a funeral home and they’re dealing with the—with the remains now. Campus administration sorted out the death certificate. They’ve got a casket ready and Ethan’s dealing with the flowers, and Professor Claytor is playing liaison with the university. Sam almost wants this all to be more complicated, if only to distract him from the absence of Jess's hand in his, but Jess laid out her wishes in excruciating detail in her living will. She’d had to, with her mom being who she was. No one wanted Evelyn Moore deciding anything about how Jess would be remembered, much less what would happen to her writing or her assets after her death. So the big decisions—where she wanted to be buried, what she wanted on her headstone, who would inherit what—were all more or less settled. She’d been clear that she’d wanted a secular service, but, in respect to Sophie, who’d converted to Judaism a year after meeting Ethan, she’d asked for the Mourner’s Kaddish to be recited at her gravesite and to be buried in a plain wooden casket. She’d also requested a closed-casket service and to be buried as close to Stanford as possible.
(Sam had laughed when she’d told him that, back when she was still working with her lawyer to get everything settled. “What,” he’d joked, “you think if you get buried near the Fairweather Courtyard you’ll become a stop on the tour?”
“Better than having to run the damned tours,” Jess had shot back, still stung from having lost out on the job in admissions she’d applied for their sophomore year. “God, just imagine having to explain the Exotic Erotic to a bunch of fifty-year-olds from the Midwest.”
“Better them than their fifteen-year-old sons,” Sam had pointed out playfully, nipping at her ear and grinning as she squirmed. “Though I’m sure the fifteen-year-olds wouldn’t mind.”)
Shaking away the memory, Sam hands Sophie the mug and gives her a weak smile. She smiles back, tremulous and brittle but still more than a little lovely, and Sam aches for her, for how the layperson would say she’s nothing like Jess, nothing like the beautiful golden child, but to him, who knew Jess down to the atoms of her and loved her all the more for the sharp and ugly things he found there, the Moore sisters could be twins. They are both so kind it bleeds out of them, and Sam doesn’t deserve a drop of it, he doesn’t, not after killing Jess, not after leaving Sophie without a baby sister.
“You’re thinking something awful,” Sophie sighs, taking a long swallow of tea and leaning over to eye his plans for the funeral with a keen eye. She presses her lips together as she looks over his scribbled notes, pausing at favorite flowers: blue aster, iris, goldenrod and tracing his handwriting with one manicured finger. She looks back up at him from under her lashes, looking equal parts stern and tender. With that look, Sam thinks wistfully that Jess was right. Sophie will make a fantastic mom. “You have that same face Jess has when she’s beating herself up for something that was never her fault. Stop it.”
“I should’ve—”
“Don’t,” Sophie snaps, meeting his eyes with a ferocity that belies the quiver in her voice. “Don’t you dare say something stupid like I should’ve been there or it should have been me. You’re alive, Sam, and thank God, do you understand? Thank God you’re alive, thank God. Jess—Jess would have died a thousand times if it meant you stayed alive. And I know, I know that knowing that is—it’s terrible, it’s terrible, and I am so sorry you have to carry it, Sam, I am, I know it has to be heavy, I know it just has to be. But I’m glad you’re here, okay? I’m glad, and I’m so grateful. And I need—I need you to be grateful, too.”
His hands are shaking a little, but it’s fine. He just tightens his grip on the pen with one hand and clenches the other into a fist in his lap. He hopes that will be the end of it, that he will be able to shut out everything Sophie just said and everything that it means about him and about her and about Jess, but she reaches over the table before he can fold in on himself entirely and carefully pries his hand off the pen, lacing their fingers together. Sam lets out a harsh, shuddering sigh and screws his eyes shut.
“I don’t want to,” Sam confesses lowly, swallowing, gripping Sophie's hand so hard his knuckles turn white. She doesn't flinch from the force of him, Moore girls never do, and he loves her for it. “God, Sophie, I don’t want to. Please don’t make me.”
He sounds small and weak and pathetic and he hates himself for it, hates himself for intruding on Sophie’s grief, for making her take care of him. He sounds like a child, like a little boy, not like a man who’s murdered the only person who ever delighted in every piece of him, from his cleverness and his ambition to his desperation and his spite. But Sophie puts down her mug and cradles his face in her hands like he is something precious and beloved, kissing his forehead firmly before encouraging him wordlessly to bury his nose into her shoulder, holding him there while he begs her over and over, please don’t make me do this Sophie, I don’t want to, please, Sophie, please don’t make me.
“I’m so sorry, Sam,” she says to him over and over, stroking his hair. They rock together, and for a moment, Sam allows himself to feel comforted. “Oh, Sam, I’m so sorry.”
He hides away in Sophie’s shoulder until her tea is cold. Finally, finally, he cries, and cries, and cries.