Work Text:
What God Gives Back
Chuck left a note.
That was the part Sam kept getting stuck on. Not the miracle itself, not the warm body, the heartbeat, the breath that shouldn't exist, but the fact that God, capital G, had apparently decided the appropriate delivery method for resurrecting his dead girlfriend was a yellow Post-it stuck to the bunker's war room table.
She asked for you. Seemed fair. — Chuck
Dean had found it first. He'd come to get Sam with the careful face he used for things he didn't know how to say, the one that made him look fifteen years older and vaguely nauseous, and he'd just handed Sam the note and said, "She's in the library. I think she's... she seems okay. She seems real."
Sam had read the note twice. Then a third time.
Sam stood in the doorway of the library and looked at her.
She was sitting at the far end of the table with a book open in front of her that she clearly wasn't reading, her fingers spread flat on the pages like she needed to feel something solid under her hands. She hadn't heard him yet. He used the extra seconds the way he'd learned to use them, cataloguing details, running them against what he knew, what he'd seen, what things could do when they wanted you to let your guard down.
She hadn't heard him yet. He used the extra seconds the way he'd learned to use them, cataloguing details, running them against what he knew, what he'd seen, what things could do when they wanted you to drop your guard. Her face was right. The set of her shoulders was right. The way she held herself, a little hunched, like she was perpetually cold, had always been a Jess thing.
None of that meant anything. He'd been fooled by worse.
He was doing it again, he realized. Building the case against hoping. It was a habit now, the way some people reached for their keys before they left a room.
She looked up.
Her eyes found him and her expression shifted, something moving through it fast. She took him in the way you take in something you weren't sure you'd ever see again, like she was checking him against a memory. Then she said, quietly: "Sam?"
Her voice landed in his chest like a key turning in a lock he hadn't known was there. He didn't move.
"Yeah," he said.
"You look..." She stopped. Started again. "Your hair is different. You look older."
He almost said so do you, but she didn't. That was the thing. She looked exactly the same, down to the small scar through her left eyebrow from a bike accident when she was nine, something she'd told him about once on a Tuesday night when neither of them could sleep. He'd thought about that scar more times than he could count in the years since.
He hadn't let himself think about why.
"It's been a while," he said.
She waited, reading his face the way she always had, and something shifted in her expression. "Sam?"
"How did you get in here," he said. It came out flat. Controlled. The voice he used on things he wasn't sure about yet.
She blinked. "I don't know. I just... I was somewhere else and then I was here. There was a note."
"What did the note say?"
"That Sam would come, and I should wait." She pushed back from the table slightly, just a few inches, instinctive. "You're scaring me a little."
He was already moving, not toward her, but to the shelves along the east wall where they kept the field kit. He pulled it down and unzipped it on the table.
"Sam, what are you…"
"Just stay there." He found the flask of holy water. Set it down. Found the silver knife. Set that down too. Pulled out his phone and opened the camera, then crossed the room and held it up, angled so he could see her in the screen.
She appeared in it exactly as she appeared in the room. He lowered the phone.
She was staring at him. Her eyes had gone wide and a little wet and she'd pulled her knees up to her chest without seeming to realize she'd done it, making herself smaller in the chair. "What is happening right now?" she said. "What are you doing?"
"I need you to drink something."
"What? Why?"
"Please." He uncapped the flask and slid it across the table toward her. "It's water. It's just water, I promise. I just need you to drink it."
She looked at the flask. Looked at him. Her she was breathing a little faster than she should have been and she looked, he realized with a hollow feeling, genuinely frightened. Not of the situation. Of him.
Slowly, she reached out and picked up the flask and took a small sip. Nothing happened.
He let out a breath he'd been holding for longer than he knew.
"Okay," he said. He picked up the silver knife and held the flat of the blade toward her. "This is going to sound insane."
"It already sounds insane."
"I need to touch this to your arm. Just for a second."
"Why?"
He didn't have a version of the answer that wouldn't sound like exactly what it was. "Because some things look like people I know, and aren't."
She stared at him for a long moment. He watched her work through it, the absurdity of it, the fear of it, the fact that he was completely serious. Then she pushed her sleeve up and held out her arm without a word, chin up, jaw set, the way she'd always looked when she was doing something that scared her and doing it anyway.
He pressed the flat of the blade to her forearm. Her skin didn't smoke. Didn't blister. It didn't do anything except be warm and real.
Sam set the knife down on the table.
He stood there looking at her, at the red mark the cold steel had left, at her face, at the way she was watching him with wide eyes and her sleeve still pushed up to her elbow. His chest felt strange. Too full and too hollow at the same time, like something had been removed and the space it left didn't know what to do with itself.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sorry, I had to."
"Are you done?" she asked. Her voice was thin. "Are there more tests or…"
He crossed the room and pulled her into his arms.
She made a startled sound, halfway between a gasp and something that wasn't quite a word, and then her arms came up around him and she held on, and for a while neither of them said anything at all.
When he finally stepped back he kept his hands on her shoulders, like he needed the contact, like letting go entirely wasn't an option yet. His eyes were wet, and her tears actually fell.
"Jessica Moore," he said.
"Yeah." She laughed, shaky. "Still me."
"Your hair's longer."
She blinked. Reached up and touched it, like she'd forgotten. "Is it?" A pause. "I didn't know that was possible. I didn't think things like that..."
"Me neither." He let go of her shoulders and sat down heavily in the chair across from hers, suddenly aware that his legs had been holding a lot more tension than he'd realized. "I don't know how this works. A note showed up that said your name. Dean came to get me, and I didn't let myself think about it being real because if it wasn't…" He stopped.
She lowered herself back into her chair, tucking one leg underneath her. She glanced around the library, the shelves climbing toward the ceiling, the old overhead lights, the maps pinned to the wall, the general atmosphere of a place built by people who took the end of the world seriously.
"Okay," she said. "So. Where are we?"
"Kansas."
"We're underground."
"Yeah."
"In a bunker."
"It's called the Men of Letters bunker. It's... it's a long story."
She looked at the silver knife still sitting on the table between them. At the holy water flask beside it. At his phone face-down near his elbow. She looked at him, at the version of him that had grown up in the years she'd been gone, broader and quieter and carrying something behind his eyes that hadn't been there in the apartment on Kenilworth.
"I think I'm going to need the long story," she said.
"I think you probably are." He reached out and turned his hand palm-up on the table between them. Not a demand. Just an offer. "You want to start with the flask and the knife, or do you want to start at the beginning?"
She looked at his hand. Then she put hers in it.
"The beginning," she said. "I think."
* * *
Dean lasted forty minutes.
To his credit, he appeared in the doorway with two extra mugs and the expression of a man who had extensively coached himself on the walk from the kitchen, which Sam could tell because his face was doing the thing where it was trying very hard not to do anything.
"Coffee," Dean said. He set the mugs down at the end of the table, far enough away to be respectful, close enough that it was clearly an excuse. His eyes went to Jess with a look that was complicated in a way Sam recognized, relief and guilt mixed together in the particular ratio that Dean reserved for things that were his fault, or that he'd decided were his fault, which was most things.
"Hi, Dean," Jess said.
"Hey, Jess." A beat. "You look good. I mean..." He stopped. "You look..."
"Alive?"
"Yeah." He exhaled. "That."
She stood up and crossed the room and hugged him, which Dean clearly did not see coming because he went stiff for a full two seconds before his arms came up. He was careful about it, the way he was careful with things he was afraid of breaking.
"It's not your fault," Jess said into his shoulder.
"Jess…"
"I know you think it was. It wasn't." She stepped back and looked at him with the same directness she'd always had, steady and unhurried, the kind that didn't leave a lot of room for deflection. "Okay?"
Dean looked at Sam over her head with an expression that said where did you find her? and please keep he.r in approximately equal measure.
"Okay," he said, roughly.
He made an excuse about the car, something vague and implausible about checking the oil at nine in the morning, and he was gone in about ninety seconds, which was as close to graceful as Dean Winchester ever managed.
Jess came back to her chair with her coffee. She wrapped both hands around the mug and looked at Sam over the rim.
"He blames himself," she said. It wasn't a question.
"He blames himself for everything."
"Do you?"
Sam considered the question the way she'd always made him consider questions, seriously, without the reflexive deflection he used on everyone else. "I blamed myself for a long time," he said. "For bringing it near you. For not being there to protect you."
"And now?"
"Now I know enough about how this works to know that blaming yourself is mostly just a way to avoid grieving."
Jess raised her eyebrows slightly. "That's a very therapist thing to say."
"I've had a lot of time to think."
"Apparently." She looked at him over the coffee. "Are you grieving now?"
Sam looked at her, really looked, the way he'd been careful not to do too much of since he sat down, because every time he did he felt something in him go very still and very loud at the same time. "I don't know what I'm doing right now," he said. "I think I'm still waiting for the part where this stops being real."
Jess set down the mug. She reached across the table and put her hand against the side of his face, just her palm, warm and steady against his jaw, and she looked at him until he stopped bracing.
"Still real," she said.
He covered her hand with his. Held it there.
"Yeah," he said. "Okay."
* * *
Later, hours later, after the questions that needed asking and the silences that didn't, they ended up on the library couch with her feet in his lap and a book she'd actually chosen this time open on her knees and Sam's head tipped back against the cushion, not sleeping, just resting in a way he almost never let himself do.
"I want to know," she said, without looking up from the page. "Eventually. All of it. I want to know who you are now."
Sam opened his eyes and looked at the ceiling. "You might not like some of it."
"You might not like some of what I think about some of it."
He almost smiled. "That sounds familiar."
"I'm consistent." She turned a page. "I'm not asking tonight. I'm just saying, I'm not fragile, Sam. I don't need you to manage what I find out."
He thought about that. About all the things he'd managed, and hidden, and carried alone, and whether any of it had actually been for other people or whether it had just been easier than being known. "I know," he said.
"Do you?"
"I'm working on it."
She nudged him with her foot, a small, deliberate thing, the kind of contact that was more punctuation than affection. I hear you. I believe you. Keep going.
He put his hand over her ankle, gently, the way you hold something precious you're afraid might break.
Outside, somewhere above them, Dean was doing whatever Dean did when he was giving people space and pretending he wasn't. The bunker was quiet. The lights were low.
Jess turned another page.
Sam closed his eyes again and this time he actually slept.