Chapter Text
Sam realizes pretty soon into their relationship that Jess doesn't talk about her home life all that much. Oh, she'll tell stories upon stories of the various antics she got into as a kid, or the places she used to live, or the high expectations her parents had for her. But once he thinks about them a little deeper, the stories always seem to be missing just a few more details than they should be.
It actually makes him feel better about his own secrecy. He figures whatever aspect of her past she's not comfortable with sharing, it means she doesn't mind if he stays away from talking about his own. It makes him feel less like he's actively keeping a huge, life-changing secret from her and more like he’s not expected to share any childhood information in the first place. It's nice.
Other than that, she's just so normal, and that's nice too. It’s part of why he was drawn to her—the way she seemed to embody every popular, all-American girl he'd ever seen from afar at school. Everyone he'd been jealous of: how lucky they were, to be normal. To be safe.
And then he got to know her, all the small, unique things about her that just made his love for her more genuine—how she laughs so brightly at the littlest things, how she carries a sketchbook with her wherever she goes, how she has a new favorite color every week. And later in their relationship, the way she signs her notes with a little heart when she goes out, and plays songs for him she thinks he'd like, and makes him tea whenever she notices him starting to lash out because of stress.
He loves that she loves him without knowing anything about where he came from, the guns and motel rooms and harshly grieving fathers. He feels like it lets him be that person, the Sam she loves, and let go of the Sam he used to be—the one who knew Latin exorcisms better than the lyrics to popular songs on the radio and could reload a gun in his sleep. Like the small things that she loves about him are more important than anything else, including the Sam his family always tried to get him to be.
Except however hard he tries to be normal, and however much he might feel normal throughout these mundane days of classes and homework and spending time with his friends, sometimes instead of going to sleep at night he stares up at the ceiling with a sinking feeling in his stomach. It’s not so much about the whole huge secret thing, he thinks, because he used to get this feeling when he was younger, too: every time they saw Pastor Jim and he'd reassure Sam he was growing into a "good young man," every time Dad and Dean's conversations about their current hunt would start to sound like a couple of exterminators excited to annihilate the insects that had done nothing more than exist in an inconvenient place, every time he would get the strangest déjà vu as though he'd been through something before or perhaps dreamed it—and this is something he barely dares to admit to himself, but sometimes he'd realize he had dreamed it, just the week before. That feeling in the pit of his stomach has stuck around, coming back every now and again to make his anxiety peak, to take away his appetite, to make him want to get in the shower and scrub at his skin until he's washed away the unease and feels human again.
No. Until he feels normal. He's already human, he is, and this is about being a hunter, nothing more. And he doesn't have to worry about any of it, because Jess treats him like a normal person and that means he's not failing at being normal. Jess loves him. He's fine.
Jess has been looking at him strangely.
It started the night she stayed out later than she'd said she would, came home at five in the morning looking like death warmed over, told him to go back to sleep when he started to sit up and ask where she'd been. He trusts her, but he's also not used to her purposefully hiding things from him, and it’s set him on edge, just a little. Maybe that's why he keeps thinking he sees her staring at him out of the corner of his eye, that and the general feeling of background paranoia instilled in him growing up, except he's caught her at it more than once now and he's starting to feel like there's actually something going on.
He hasn’t asked her about it, because he’s not supposed to be listening to that paranoia anymore—he’s supposed to be normal, and that means not being paranoid, and anyway he can’t think of any logical reason why he shouldn’t trust that whatever’s going on is a non-issue. All the same, and however much he feels like an awful person for not just letting it go, he wishes he could talk to Brady about it. The whole situation is making him get tense with her whenever she comes home a bit too late or looks at him a bit too long, and he's starting to really hate himself for it.
But he hasn’t seen Brady in or outside of class for a while—since a little before that night, actually—and even though Jess said he probably just wasn’t feeling well, he hasn’t emailed Sam back and Sam’s starting to get worried. It isn’t exactly helping the tension that keeps stubbornly clinging to him, growing by the day.
Then one day, a few weeks later, he comes home from econ class only to immediately get slammed against the wall.
Jess is wearing a light blue shirt, her favorite color of the week. She's also got a knife to his throat.
"Who are you?"
Sam blinks his eyes open slowly. Did she—she'd knocked him out, hadn't she. With the butt of her knife. The realization makes him try to jolt upwards on instinct but he's—
He's tied to a fucking chair.
"What the fuck, Jess," he gasps. His head is pounding. His wrists hurt, too. Thick rope and tight knots and where the hell did Jess learn how to tie someone up this well.
"Tell me who you are," she spits.
Sam warily takes a moment to look around. They're still in the front room of the apartment. The knife has been set on top of the small bookshelf near the door, within Jess's reach. He starts to look back at her and then realizes there's a small stack of books next to the knife that he hasn't seen before.
Except some of them he has. Not from their apartment, though. He can read two of the titles from here and they're both copies of common demonology books, ones he's picked up at the library several times in the past to help his dad figure out a case. He can feel his heart rate pick up and he automatically tugs at the ropes. The total lack of control he has is already disconcerting, and the fact that this is Jess—
"I know you're not Sam," she continues, a bite to her voice that he can’t remember ever hearing before, "so you better start fucking talking or—"
"Jess, it's me, I'm Sam, what are you saying?" Sam looks at her with desperately wide eyes. There were lessons, when he was younger, about what to do when you get kidnapped, when a monster decides it wants to hold you hostage, there are methods to keep yourself calm and evaluate the situation and get out of whatever’s holding you down and kill whatever took you but it’s Jess and his head is still aching from the butt of the knife and he can barely gather his thoughts.
"Yeah, sure, except for the fact that Sam isn't a demon," she snaps.
"I'm not a…" Okay, okay. So Jess is, what? A hunter? God. Jess might be a hunter. He can't even process that right now. But if she knows about demons, she has to know he’s not one. "Do the tests. Splash holy water on me, try exorcizing me. Hell, I'll recite the exorcism myself if that'll help."
"Oh, I already know the standard stuff won't work on you," she says. She's starting to circle him now. Her movements are almost predatory, and Sam remembers seeing Dean move the same way for the first time on a hunt and wondering, in a little, haunted place in the back of his mind, what their father was turning his brother into. He feels sick.
"It won't work because I'm not a demon!"
"That's not what your friend said." She says the word “friend” like whoever they are, they're her worst enemy. She's behind him now. He can practically feel her breath on the back of his neck.
"Who are you talking about?" he asks cautiously.
She barks out a laugh. It's the opposite of her usual bright one. It's angry and harsh and sends a chill down his spine. "The one possessing Tyson Brady? The one that nearly killed him, my best friend? Ring any bells?"
Sam feels, as a shudder of shock runs through him, like he's been plunged very suddenly into water cold as ice. He can't keep the fear out of his voice, because not Brady, please not Brady, Sam was supposed to be out and out means safe and safe means no one gets killed—"What are you saying?"
"Yeah, I found your buddy out a few weeks ago," she says, and he can tell she's working hard to keep her voice at a normal level right now. Jess always gets loud when she gets angry. It's one of the many facts about her he knows well, tucked away in the part of his brain that's dedicated solely to her, the mental file labeled Jessica Moore. Except he apparently doesn't know her that well after all.
She's still talking. "Managed to get some answers out of it before it smoked out. Said it was here for you, said you were special. It talked about you like the fucking demonic messiah."
"I don't know what you're talking about," Sam says. He can hear his own voice starting to get frantic, as though he’s outside his own body listening to its rising panic. "Whatever you heard, I swear it wasn't about me, but I can help you figure it out. Just listen to me, Jess."
She doesn't respond, just stalks over to the bookshelf and flips open one of the demonology books. When she starts reading, he can tell it's an exorcism, but it sounds more complex than the variations he's heard and used before. Her voice is low and furious.
"I'm not a demon," he starts over the sound of the Latin being spoken jarringly in his girlfriend's familiar cadence, but she just picks up the volume.
It's over in half a minute, but all Jess does is flip to a new page. The next one is more familiar, and it’s longer, too, and he closes his eyes and tilts his head back and mouths along with some of the words and waits for it to be over, because maybe then she'll believe he's Sam, just Sam, normal Sam, human Sam.
"There's got to be something that works on things like you," she mutters when she finishes, and she reaches for a new book from the stack. She's got pages bookmarked, he realizes. She was planning this. Here he thought he was finally living a normal life and instead he's his girlfriend's fucking hunt. He nearly laughs out loud but knows that won't do him any favors.
She gets through two more before he manages to get a word in. "Jess, please. I promise you it's me. I had no idea you were a hunter, I’m—”
She starts in loudly on a new chant. Her bottom lip is trembling slightly. He's starting to get through to her.
This exorcism takes no more than a minute. "See?" he cuts in, quickly, as soon as it's over. "Nothing's working. Jess, you gotta believe me.”
"Shut up," she gasps. Her eyes are wide and panicked. Sam realizes how awful this must be for her, convinced her partner is possessed without even knowing which exorcism will be able to save them. He keeps his mouth shut as she grabs the third book. Once this is over, and it will be over, when she's gone through the exorcisms she needs to to believe he's Sam, they can sit down and talk all this out, finally tell each other about the secrets they've obviously both been keeping, and figure out what's going on. He just has to wait. It’ll be over.
And then he's on fire.
Distantly, so very distantly, he's aware that there are no actual flames, but as Jess's voice picks up speed it's all he can do not to scream from the pain. Every nerve is alight, his skin is burning up, he's choking on the sensation of something lighting him up in agony from the inside out—
"Please," he gasps, "please, what are you doing to me oh God oh God Jess please please please it hurts what are you doing—" Tears are streaming down his cheeks and he can't stop babbling, begging her to stop, please, it hurts so bad.
Her voice breaks in the middle of a word from a language he doesn't recognize, and a few seconds later she's stumbling to a halt. As the pain begins to recede, he slowly lifts his head to see she's crying too. "Why do you sound like him? God, it's obviously working so just go back to hell already, why are you—" She's breaking down. His Jess.
It's all he can do to breathe through the echoes of the pain to say, voice hoarse and cracking, "I don't know, just please let me go, I'm Sam." Just Sam, normal Sam, human Sam.
"But you can't be," she says desperately, "you're lying to me, the exorcism was working."
"I don't know why that is but I'm human, swear to God." Sam strains his wrists against the ropes almost unconsciously, a reflex that does nothing for him but chafe his skin. In a way it’s almost grounding. Better to focus on the burn of the ropes than the words coming out of his own mouth, when he has a horrible feeling that he's trying to convince himself of them just as much as her (and if she doesn't believe him then how can he believe himself?).
"No. No." She's picking up the book again. "I can't do this."
"Please," he tries to say, but then she's reading again and he nearly bites his own tongue off when the fire starts. She's starting from the beginning again, that unfamiliar and surely ancient language flowing off her tongue, and he genuinely doesn't know if he can survive this. It's tearing him apart, it's reaching down into him to the source of that pit-in-his-stomach feeling he's had ever since he was a little kid, the feeling that makes him want to scrub off his own skin, and—
"Oh, God, Jess," he gasps, "what's in me." He can barely speak through the pain and the fact that he's crying again. "Something's in me, Jess, oh my God, what's wrong with me, what am I."
She suddenly breaks off again. She's kneeling in front of him, staring at him, and before he knows what's happening she's reaching forward to tilt his chin up, just like she did last week when he was sitting on the couch working on a political science essay and she was standing in front of him and wanted to give him a kiss.
"It said—" starts Jess, stuttering to a stop before picking her words back up with determination— "The thing in Brady, it told me I didn't know you. It told me I had no idea what you had running through your veins. It told me you weren't human—"
"I have no idea either," he tells her, voice still thick with agony. “Please help me. Make it stop. I can't be—I have to be human—please please please believe me."
"I believe you're Sam," she says slowly, and the look on her face is so broken, like she doesn’t want to believe it, and wouldn’t it all be easier if she didn’t have to. "But you—Brady almost died because a demon wanted to get close to you, and the exorcism was working, and your eyes—you’re not—”
"What? Jess—” Sam takes a second to cough, ragged and painful. “What are you talking about?"
"When I started that exorcism, your eyes went yellow,” she spits, and he can hear hurt and confusion and fear past the bite of her voice. “So there's no way you can just be sitting there knowing nothing—”
Sam feels like his entire world is breaking apart, starting with himself. He feels like he's shattering into broken pieces of glass and if his dad were here John’d be picking up one of those shards and cutting his throat with it. Yellow eyes. Yellow eyes. "No. No. I can't be—whatever that demon was saying I am, I'm human, my family is human, they hunt the things that aren't." Too late he realizes he had said "they" instead of "we." Jess is looking at him with something close to pity and closer to horror.
There is a moment of silence. The silence feels sharp. Like all the unsaid words are digging into his skin.
"Okay," she finally says. "I'm going to untie you and then you're going to do some fucking explaining, whatever you can. Don't you dare you murder me, and you better be telling the truth or—" She holds the book up threateningly. He nods slowly, and even that feels like it takes all the energy he has. He almost wishes she would just shoot him already. He can't even think properly right now, can't focus on anything but the remnants of pain lingering around his lungs, can't process why he's in pain in the first place and certainly doesn't want to.
As soon as he's untied he starts to slip off the chair, and Jess barely catches him in time to lower them both to the floor. Her knife has found its way back into one of her hands, the book open on the floor next to her.
"When I was little," he says suddenly, leaning a little too heavily against Jess’s warm arm and not entirely sure why he’s started saying this at all, "my dad—he was teaching me how to shoot. He took me out into the woods." The words nearly take the rest of his breath out of him. He doesn’t know how to stop them from pouring out of his mouth, jagged like glass scraping up against his throat on the way out. "And there was a moment when he was quiet for a few seconds, so I turned around to look at him, and he was—I thought for a moment that he was pointing his gun at me." He's too tired to keep his eyes open, which is a good thing, because he really doesn't want to see Jess's face right now. He lets his head rest against the edge of the chair. It's painful. Nowhere near how bad the exorcism was. He leaves it there. "But then he wasn't, and why would he have been, anyway, so I didn't really think about it. I mean, every once in a while I would, I’d think back and wonder, about it, the, um, the woods, and—but I had to have been imagining things, why the fuck would my own dad be—but. Jess. He had his finger on the trigger."
This time the silence buries itself deep, deep under his skin, fractured pieces of deathly quiet that feel pointed enough to make him bleed. Say something, he thinks at Jess. And, Don’t say anything. Get away. And also: I loved you with more purity than I had ever felt before.
"Sam, what are you?" she whispers.
This apartment, their apartment, they'd cleaned it together yesterday. Jess had put on one of her favorite CDs and turned it up loud, and they'd both sang along horribly while they swept the floors and dusted the windowsills. For only a second, the sun had come through the window at just the right angle to make Jess's hair glow, and Sam had gazed at her and thought about how grateful he was to be here, after years of trying to escape a life of fear and pain and death: how lucky he was, to be normal. To be safe.
He's sitting on the floor of this apartment, their apartment, in the middle of a devil's trap she'd drawn because of what she thought he was. He's breaking apart like shattering glass. He's imagining scrubbing off his own skin. He's drowning in terror of his own inhuman eyes, of whatever is running through his veins. In his mind's eye he can see his father's finger on the trigger.
"I don't know," he breathes. "Jess. I don't know."
She's silent for another long, long moment. The silence takes this opportunity to reach and pierce his heart, his lungs.
“Sam,” Jess says, and he opens his eyes to look at her and she is looking at him like he’s something easily broken but also something that might poison her if she pricks her finger on it and her shirt is the prettiest shade of blue and inside he thinks he is broken already and poisonous too.
“I think,” says Jess, his Jess, Jess in blue who doesn’t talk about her home life all that much and laughs so brightly at the littlest things, “that it’s time I make a trip back home. And I think you had better come with me.”