Chapter Text
Jess was beginning to settle into the rhythm of her new life.
She and Sam had gone through the procedures to officially withdraw from college, finagled their way around their apartment lease, and otherwise dealt with the necessary protocols of leaving their old lives behind—including the painful half hour Jess had spent on the phone with her parents. She’d been on two hunts besides her first, and acquitted herself well on both. She’d managed to convince an unreasonably apologetic Sam that being forcibly kissed by a murderous ghost was in no way his fault and did not constitute infidelity, no matter what said ghost seemed to think (if ghosts could be said to think at all). She’d gotten used to sleeping with salt around her bed. She’d become a much lighter sleeper.
It was the last that was bothering her at the moment.
She was lying in bed, staring at the wall and listening to Sam’s steady breathing. It was around three in the morning. Jess didn’t know what had woken her up, but it could have been anything—someone walking down the hall, a neighbor’s creaky mattress, Sam shifting position.
It could have been anything .
Jess had to admit that it wasn’t much fun, thinking something was out to get you and knowing, in rather gruesome detail, exactly what it would do to you if it caught you, but not knowing what it was, or if it was even still around at all. Jess almost wished she knew for certain that something was after her. Then she’d be sure that she was right to be afraid, and could start looking into what it was. The not knowing was worse.
Jess sighed, sat up, and checked the salt line around the bed.
To check the salt line on Sam’s side, she had to lean over him, which resulted in him stirring. “Jess?” he said, suddenly wide awake. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing,” she said, scooting back over to her side of the bed.
Sam looked at her for a moment, then looked over the edge of the bed. “Salt line’s still good,” he said.
Jess smiled sheepishly.
“Hey,” said Sam. “Don’t worry about it. This job, it gets to you. Happens to everybody.”
“Do you ever get used to it?” asked Jess.
“Do you mean, does the fear go away, or do you mean, do you get used to being afraid?” asked Sam.
Jess gave him a look. “I guess you just answered my question.”
Sam nodded. “You gonna be good? And—no is an okay answer.”
“Yes,” she said. “I want to keep doing this. We’re saving lives. Lucas? The Collins family? That’s not something I want to stop.”
Sam looked at her. “You’re really serious about this, aren’t you?”
Jess nodded.
Sam sighed. “It’s just... I was hoping... I wanted a future with you, away from all this. Where we wouldn’t have to be afraid.”
“You know you can’t make monsters go away by ignoring them, right?” asked Jess. “They’d still be out there. We could never be safe.”
“We could be a whole lot safer,” said Sam, “if we didn’t run headlong into every dangerous thing we came across.”
“Then why did you want to be a lawyer, of all things?” asked Jess. “There are more monsters in most courtrooms than you guys seem to deal with in your daily lives.”
Sam gave her a gentle shove. Then he paused. “See?” said. “You knew there were monsters in the world, and you were fine with it. You just didn’t know about the nonhuman ones.”
“This is different,” said Jess. “Human monsters people know about. We can have a rough idea of what they do, how to protect ourselves—and when we can’t, we at least know what the risks are. Finding out that there’s a whole category of monsters I never knew about—that terrifies me.” She paused. “You know me. I need to know about things. If I don’t, they scare me. Knowledge is power. So I want to learn everything I can about these things. That’s the only way I’ll feel safe.”
“So, running headlong into danger makes you feel safer.”
“Maybe.” She stared straight into Sam’s eyes. “You weren’t going to tell me. You were going to let me live my entire life not knowing. You might have let me raise children not knowing.”
Sam shrank back slightly.
“And what if I’d found out too late? What if something had gotten to me because I didn’t know all this stuff? We know something might be after me, and I may not be ready—I may not ever be ready—but you can be damn sure I’m more ready now than I was a few weeks ago. How would you have felt then?”
“I...”
“Hey,” said Jess quietly. She reached out and put a hand on Sam’s arm. “It’s okay. I know you didn’t mean any harm. And I won’t make you stay after we’ve figured out this... whatever-it-is if you don’t want to. But I need this.”
“I thought it was about saving lives,” said Sam.
“It is,” said Jess. “Mostly. But I can have other reasons.”
“Okay,” said Sam. “I don’t get it, but... okay.”
“I love you,” said Jess.
“I love you too.”
They went back to sleep.
...
Jess woke again to a knock at the door.
“You two decent?” called Dean’s voice from the hallway.
“Yeah,” Sam called back as he got up to answer the door. “Just a second.”
“What time is it?” asked Jess sleepily, before checking her watch. “Five fifty-six.” She rolled out of bed and started getting dressed.
By this time, Sam had reached the door. He waited until Jess was fully clothed, looked through the peephole, and let Dean into the room. “What is it?” he asked. “I’m assuming it’s important?”
“Got a phone call from a Jerry Panowski,” said Dean as he made his way across the room. “Dad and I helped him with a poltergeist problem a couple years ago. Apparently, he’s having another, worse problem, and wants to talk in person.” Dean made a face. “Poltergeist was pretty nasty, too. If he’s saying it’s this much worse...”
“Where is he?” asked Sam.
“Kittanning, Pennsylvania.”
“Well, then,” said Jess, “let’s go.”
...
Some time later, they were screaming down the road to Indianapolis.
From Jess’s admittedly limited experience, it had been a fairly typical hunt so far—interviewing witnesses and the families of victims, impersonating Homeland Security to get into an evidence warehouse (which Sam had been adorably twitchy about), and, naturally, piles of research. Jess had rather liked the research part. It reminded her of curling up on the couch or bed with Sam while they each worked on a different project for school, each wrapped up in their own worlds but still aware of the other’s presence. Having Dean in the room killed the vibe a little, but it was still nice.
What they’d found in the course of their research, though, was about as far from nice as it was possible to get. And it certainly wasn’t typical .
Demonic possession.
Great .
Jess had learned that demons existed on the car ride to Jericho that first night she’d learned the truth, but abstractly knowing of their existence and being about to face one with plans to crash a plane full of people were two very different things. This might have been a typical hunt so far in terms of procedures, but the potential body count they were dealing with was way beyond the few hunts Jess had been on. There were going to be over a hundred people on that plane, all of whom would die if she screwed up. And how many more after that? There had been six crashes like this over the past decade.
To distract herself, Jess looked up. “So, how are we killing this thing?” she asked.
“We’re not,” said Sam. “You can’t kill a demon, at least as far as I know. We’re going to stop Amanda Walker from getting on that plane. We do that, the demon has no reason to crash the plane, no one dies tonight,” said Sam.
Jess reached forward and grabbed Sam’s shoulder. “No one dies tonight ,” she said. “Amanda Walker is a flight attendant . If she doesn’t fly tonight, she’ll fly tomorrow, or the day after. And what about the other survivors? I know none of them are planning to fly anytime soon, but we can’t stop them all flying forever. No,” Jess squeezed Sam’s shoulder a little tighter. “We have to get on that plane. We have to do something to stop that demon from hurting anyone ever again. Because if we don’t, this doesn’t stop.”
“Well... there is something we can do,” said Sam. “We can exorcise it. Send it back to Hell.”
“Can’t we do that on the ground?” asked Dean, gripping the wheel tightly.
Sam shook his head. “We won’t have time. We know the demon will be on that plane, but we don’t know which of the passengers it’ll be possessing. We won’t be able to sort through them all before the plane takes off.” He looked at Dean. “Problem?”
Dean grimaced. “It’s just... uh...”
“Dude. Are you okay?” asked Sam.
“Uh, no,” said Dean. “Not really.”
Which pretty much blew Jess out of the water. She hadn’t known Dean for very long, but she had the feeling that, if he’d just had his leg blown off and you ran up to him and asked if he was okay, he’d smile at you and say, “peachy.” So for him to admit that he wasn’t okay... it was pretty disturbing.
“What?” asked Sam, clearly just as astonished as she was. “What’s wrong?”
“Well, I kind of have this problem with, uh...”
“Flying?” said Sam.
“It’s never really been an issue until now,” Dean snapped.
“You’re joking, right?”
“Does it look like I’m joking? Why do you think I drive everywhere?”
“Because your weapons won’t make it through security?” Jess interjected.
Dean gave her a seriously? look. “Well, yeah,” he said, “but that’s not the main reason.”
Sam tilted his head slightly. Then he nodded. “All right. Jess and I can handle this one.”
“What?” exclaimed Dean. “You’re talking about going onto a plane that’s going to crash, to hunt a demon with a newbie as your only backup? What if she freaks out when shit goes down, huh?”
Jess glared at him. “You already know that isn’t going to happen,” she said. “Remember the wendigo’s lair? Or Constance Welch’s house? If I was going to ‘freak out’, I think I would have by now.”
“She’s right,” said Sam. “Like you said, it’s a demon. We’re new at this, too. Jess is an extra set of eyes and hands, and we know she won’t freak out. And—no offense—if you’re up there and you’re panicking because you’re afraid to fly, you’ll be wide open to demonic possession.”
“I won’t panic ,” said Dean. He tapped his finger on the wheel. There was a long pause. “You guys really think you got this?”
“Absolutely,” said Jess, hoping the quaver in her voice wasn’t too obvious.
“Definitely,” said Sam. He sounded so confident. Jess wished she felt the way Sam sounded.
“Okay,” said Sam, “We’re going to need a way to exorcise this thing.” Sam grabbed a flashlight, opened his father’s journal and started flipping through. After a while, he looked up.
“I found something in here that should work.” Sam held up the journal. “It’s called the Rituale Romanum. It has two parts. The first part expels the demon from the victim’s body and makes it manifest, which actually makes it more powerful—it doesn’t need to possess someone anymore, it can just wreak havoc on its own. But the second part sends the bastard back to Hell once and for all.”
“Sounds good to me,” said Jess. “So what do we do?”
“It’s a Latin text,” said Sam. “All we need to do is say the words.”
Jess leaned over to get a look at the page. “Should we memorize it? We have three hours until we get there.”
“Sounds good to me,” said Sam. “You want to look at it first, or should I?”
“You first,” said Jess, “and I’ll quiz you.”
...
By the time they arrived at the airport, both Jess and Sam had memorized the exorcism backwards and forwards, spent a good amount of time discussing the pronunciation differences between classical and church Latin, and thoroughly annoyed Dean, who wished aloud that the two of them would stop being such nerds already and focus on the job. Sam had replied that they were focusing on the job, and Dean had told him to shut up. Jess had tried to get Dean to memorize the exorcism too, just in case he ever needed it, by reading it out loud to him line-by-line, but he’d complained about it being too long and said he needed to concentrate on the road. Which made sense, given that he was driving fast enough to violate not only the laws of the land but quite possibly those of physics.
When they arrived, Sam and Jess headed inside and looked at the departures board.
“They’re boarding in thirty minutes,” said Sam. “That should give us enough time.”
They got their tickets, poured holy water into three-ounce containers to take through security, and arrived at the gate as boarding was in full swing.
Jess looked around at the assembled passengers. “You said demons possess people with some kind of weakness,” she said. “Would whoever it is seem nervous?”
“Not necessarily,” said Sam, likewise scanning the crowd. “If the demon’s already in them—which is my bet—it’ll be in total control. Might want to look as ordinary as possible, might seem smug, might be acting nervous just so nobody notices a difference. We have no way to know.”
“Great,” said Jess. “And it might not even be a passenger. Could be crew.”
“If that’s the case,” Sam replied, “we won’t be able to tell anything until we’re on board.”
“So we wait?” Jess asked.
“We wait.”
...
When the airplane’s wheels went up, Jess checked her watch. 8:06. “We have until eight forty-six,” she whispered to Sam, “or maybe a little less, depending on how long it takes to crash a plane.”
“Let’s get this over with as fast as we can,” Sam replied. “I grabbed the EMF meter—I’ll start checking the passengers as soon as we can get up. You go talk to Amanda Walker. It’s her first flight after the crash—if I were her, I’d be pretty messed up.”
“Works for me,” said Jess. “Is there a subtle way to splash holy water on someone?”
“No, no, I think we can go more subtle than that,” said Sam. “If she’s possessed, she’ll flinch at the name of God.”
Jess smiled slightly. “God has a lot of names.”
“Well, in Latin, it’s ‘Christo’.”
Jess gave him an odd look, then giggled. “Um, no, it isn’t.”
Sam blinked. “What?”
Jess sighed. “Hello? High school Latin champion speaking? ‘Christo’ doesn’t mean ‘God’, it means ‘Christ’. Some would argue that Christ is God, but it doesn’t really feel like the time for theological speculation. And don’t get me started on the case. ‘Christo’—I’m going to assume there’s a long mark over the ‘o’, because if there isn’t it’s just incoherent—is either dative or ablative. That means, roughly, ‘to or for Christ’, as in, ‘I gave this book to Christ’, or Christ with a preposition, like by, with, or from, as in, ‘I’m sitting with Christ’. What you want is the nominative, ‘Christus’, if you’re just saying the name, or the vocative, ‘Christe’, if you’re addressing Him directly.”
Sam gave her a look. “Okay,” he said. “But I found a couple of sources that said it worked...”
“Maybe it did,” said Jess. “Because if I’m a demon, and I hear someone say something that sounds holy, at all, I’m not going to like it. But please don’t call it ‘the name of God’. And besides,” she said, “I thought of something even more subtle.”
Jess took out one of the three-ounce holy water bottles and mimed splashing a little on her hand and rubbing her hands together. “Nobody suspects a handshake, right?”
Sam smiled. “That should work.”
They sat in silence until the plane leveled off, at which time they each got up to perform their appointed task. Sam began sweeping the aisles with Dean’s homemade EMF meter, while Jess, by talking to various flight attendants, found Amanda Walker at the back of the plane.
Shortly thereafter, they met back at their seats. “Well,” said Jess, “It’s definitely not in Amanda. And she’s not a likely target, either.”
“I couldn’t find an EMF spike around any of the passengers,” said Sam, “or the other flight attendants. I could be missing something, but...”
“Process of elimination,” said Jess. “Who does that leave?”
“Cockpit crew,” they said at the same time.
Just then, the copilot left the bathroom and walked by them. Sam held up the EMF meter, and it spiked.
“ Deus, ” whispered Jess, mostly to test her theory and only a little bit to be petty.
The copilot turned, and his eyes flashed black.
Then he resumed his journey to the front of the plane.
...
Amanda had taken some convincing, but she was on her way to retrieve the copilot, leaving Sam and Jess alone for a moment in the back of the plane.
“So, when he gets back,” Sam was saying, “I’ll take him down.”
“I’ll gag him,” said Jess, holding up a roll of duct tape. “And then, I’ll take his arms and you can take his legs?”
“Sure,” said Sam. “Do you wanna say the exorcism, or should I?”
“I’ll say it,” said Jess. “You can help me if I forget a word or anything.”
“You won’t,” said Sam. “Heads up.”
Amanda and the copilot were almost to the back of the plane. “Yeah,” said the copilot, “what’s the problem?”
Sam responded by punching him hard enough to knock him to the ground, over Amanda’s protests. Jess wasted no time in getting the duct tape over his mouth, sitting on his chest and using her knees to hold his arms to his sides and her feet to pin his hands. She then splashed a bottle of holy water over his face, which sizzled, to Amanda’s horror.
“Oh my God,” said Amanda, “what’s wrong with him?”
“Look,” said Sam. “We need you calm. We need you outside the curtain.”
Amanda sputtered.
“Don’t let anybody in, okay? Can you do that? Can you do that? Amanda?”
“Okay,” said Amanda, “okay.” she left.
Jess began the exorcism.
“Regna terrae,” she said. “ Cantate Deo, psallite Domino—”
The demon, which had been fighting her the whole time, managed to worm free of her grasp. It shoved her away, then ripped the tape off its mouth, grabbed her shoulders, and spoke.
“You’re gonna die screaming, girl,” it said with a grin. “Real soon. You’re gonna burn!”
Jess froze, stunned.
Sam moved around Jess and punched the demon in the face. “ Exorcizamus te, ” he said, continuing the exorcism, “ omnis immundus spiritus, omnis satanica potestas...”
Jess picked up and began speaking with him. As they spoke, they managed to get the demon pinned down. But just then, a cloud of black smoke billowed out from the copilot’s mouth and vanished into a vent.
“Where’d it go?” asked Sam.
“It’s in the plane,” said Jess. “We have to finish it. Omnis legio, omnis congregatio et secta diabolica...”
The plane bucked and heaved. The lights were out, and screams filled the air. Jess and Sam kept speaking.
Then, it was over.
...
Some time later, Jess and Sam had called Dean to let him know that they had successfully exorcised the demon and were safe, rented a motel room, and settled in in what Jess was discovering to be typical Winchester-fashion—ready to leave at a moment’s notice. It helped that Dean had their stuff, but still.
Now, it was time to talk.
“So,” said Jess, turning to face Sam from where she’d been sitting next to him on the bed, “when were you going to tell me you haven’t stopped having the dreams?”
Sam froze. “What?”
“On the plane. That demon said I was going to burn. Future tense. Meaning it’s still going to happen, meaning, if you really are psychic, the dreams probably haven’t gone away.”
Sam was quiet for a long moment. “I was hoping it was just stress dreams, like you said.”
“I said that before I knew about your mom,” said Jess, as gently as possible.
“Yeah, but maybe... they really were visions at first, and now I’m just still dreaming it because I’m worried about you? I mean, it’s past November second—”
“Do you really think something that wanted to kill me would stop just because the date isn’t right?”
“Well...”
“Hey,” said Jess. “I’m not mad at you. You just need to tell me these things. Because my knowing this could save my life.”
Sam winced.
“If you’re trying to spare me, it’s not working,” Jess continued. “I’ve been more afraid not knowing if something was really coming after me—and now I know. So, there’s that.”
Sam dipped his head, conceding the point. “Well,” he said, “we’ll stay on the move, try to stay one step ahead of whatever’s after you. We’ll find my dad and figure out what he knows—he must know something , he’s been after this thing forever. And, if it does show up?” Sam’s face set. “We’ll be ready.”