AN: This, like everything I write these days, started on Tumblr with a conversation about Punk Tessa. There are so far 3 different versions of this character. This chapter is a Jessa one though the next 3 are a AH multi-chapter Will/Tessa story so I have the story tagged as Wessa.

Hitchhiker

Canonverse AU - Modern - Jessa

"Pull over. I can drive for awhile," she said.

Jem looked over at her in the dark of the car and she was looking right back at him. She was a strange and fearless creature he had picked up just off the edge of the highway as he crossed into Indiana. Black jeans, a leather jacket two sizes too big, hair streaked through with some bright colour it was hard to pick out in the dark, piercings that glittered down the edge of her ear and one in her lip. Pretty in spite of it all. She didn't seem like someone who would take pretty as a compliment but there it was. She was pretty.

She had put on lip stick in the little mirror on the sun visor before they'd set out again, pressing her lips together in a way that had caught his attention in all the wrong ways or maybe in all the ways she intended it to.

James Carstairs was running from his life and had found a girl who might have been running as well or maybe she just enjoyed hitch hiking. It seemed like a terrifying thing to do. To hitchhike across a country like this that was so huge and had so much empty space. She was going to get herself killed but at least for this leg of her journey, she would survive. Jem wasn't going to let anything happen to her as long as she stayed along with him. The protective feeling had come on fast.

"I'm fine, I like driving," he said.

That wasn't a lie. He also wasn't sure he trusted the nameless girl in the leather jacket to drive his car. He didn't own much. Everything had been sold for this last ditch run across the American plains. But he did own the car and he loved it. Small and a little tattered but it ran perfectly. It was his and he wanted to be the one to drive it. She shrugged and fell back against the seat.

"Where are you going?" she asked.

"West," he said.

"Is a direction, not a destination," she said.

"What's your destination?" he asked.

"Right now?" she asked, "Not New York. I'll figure out where exactly once I see it. You?"

"I'm going to go find a warlock who lives in the middle of South Dakota and doesn't speak to anyone," he said. She turned and looked at him. In the flashes of street lights her eyes looked blue or gray or silver. She studied him as though he comment meant something to her. He had intended it as a joke. A sort of bold faced truth that any reasonable person would take as a lie. She was evidently not a reasonable person.

"What's this warlock going to do for you?" she asked.

"If I'm lucky? Save my life. More likely he'll slam the door in my face and it'll all be for nothing," he said.

"Terminal cancer?" she asked making it sound almost like a joke.

"Yin fen poisoning," he said.

She clicked the overhead light on and he almost swerved off the road in surprise. He did pull over, without crashing into the ditch. He put the car into park and turned to look at her. She was leaning across the center console to look at him in the dull light of the car's dome light. Her hair was streaked in pink and blue against that flat matte black that only came out of a bottle. Her eyes were gray. Natural gray, nothing shimmering or silver about them at all, it had been his addiction pressing out little reminders.

"I had thought you were blonde, in the dark, the silver is hard to see," she said touching his hair. He startled but didn't flinch away from the touch. He held her eyes, knowing that his were vivid and unnatural and probably reflecting the lights of oncoming cars like they were discs of metal. He wasn't dressed any more neatly than she was. Rumpled jeans, a black t-shirt, the unnatural eyes. He had been making his way across the country playing classic rock staples on a violin in dive bars. He did surprisingly well.

"They say it's incurable but there's a rumour of this warlock…" he trailed off.

"Winston Best," she said.

"How did you know that?" he asked.

She grinned and then her face wavered like it was a reflection in a pool and someone had thrown a pebble in. The image cleared and the dirty girl with the streaked hair had become a man with curling horns and then again and she was a blonde with movie star good looks and then she was herself again. Or at least the face she chose to wear.

"Start in Kansas City, Winston doesn't meet with just anyone, we're going to have to go through Lily and Delores and they're usually in Kansas," she said.

"What are you?" he asked.

"Warlock, a shifter," she said with a shrug, falling back against the window, "I'm 154 if it makes a difference and I've only met Winston once. He's got some unusual skills but he's a twat. You need an introduction. Lily likes me and Winston likes Delores and Delores does as Lily says. So get on the I70, we have to go to Kansas before we go north."

"And why would you help me?" he asked.

"You're pretty and I'm bored," she said, "Beside no one is on yin fen any more. You're like a throw back to 1875. That's interesting. You live long enough, interesting is worth something."

Then she clicked off the dome light and they were plunged into darkness again. Jem stared at her in the darkness and she stared back, the lights of the dashboard picking out just a few of her features.

"Is that offer to drive still available?" he asked.

"Yes," she said.

"Good, I need a minute to think," he said and he got up and walked around the car. She simply slid over the gear shift and dropped herself into his seat. He sat back down and looked at her as she adjusted the seat and the mirrors. It seemed like far too mundane an activity for someone who could change their face at will and was 154 years old but there she was fussing with the rear view while her earrings flashed in the headlights of oncoming traffic.

"Where to?" she asked and it was a loaded question. She was asking him if he trusted her.

"Kansas," he told her.

And she put his car into gear and took off down the near empty midnight highway, driving too fast and singing along to the radio while he tried to reassemble his thoughts. The highway rolled away below them and Jem let himself entertain a little bit of hope that maybe this was possible.