When the letter comes, redirected to a box in the post-office of the latest town and then sneaked away in a bestiary so her parents wouldn't find it, Jessica Moore spends nearly two hours sitting on the bed and barely daring to even touch the envelope to see what's inside. It sounds silly and corny and she knows it, but she can't help the feeling that her whole future is on the balance. Jess can't stop the faint tremors in her hands as she finally brings herself to opening it, and reading what is inside.
She's been accepted in Stanford.
Stanford.
For a while she basks in the feeling of accomplishment, of hope, of having found her way out of her current life. The scholarship won't cover all of her expenses and maybe tomorrow she'll be able to fully comprehend the enormity of what this means, she'll realize that there are too many problems ahead and desist and stick to the family business like her Dad wants. But today, she'll let herself dream of a house with a white-picket fence, 2.5 children and a husband who will be able to tell them not to be afraid of the dark.
She tries to compromise, readies herself to keep on hunting on holidays and weekends if it is what it takes, prepares and rehearses for hours before finally going down to talk to her father.
But the discussion escalates, voices are raised, accusations are thrown and Jess closes this chapter of her life with an 'If you leave, don't ever come back' and the door slamming shut behind her.
Adjusting to normal is… hard. There are social niceties and rules and conventions she has never paid attention to before; she knows she has alienated more than a few of her classmates with the down-to-earth, no-nonsense attitude she developed as a child. She used to fantasize about nail painting and sleepovers and talking about boys, but to her dismay neither of those activities are even close to what she built them up to be, and she wonders if it is too late and she's just too broken to ever fit in.
Eventually, she rooms with a Rebecca Warren, from St. Louis, and the other blonde loves to ruthlessly pick romantic comedies apart with her, huffs and snaps at Michelle when she gets especially snobbish (Jess would have gone for a punch to the face, but this won't get her a reprimand) and Becky doesn't bat an eyelid when she carves protective sigils on the bed and draws a salt line on the windowsill so the former hunter takes the small mercies as they come and keeps going.
Maybe, she'll give normal another chance.
They are a several months into the school year when Becky all but drags her to an Easter party she doesn't really want to go to but Jess figures that she owes her roommate this so she swallows her uneasiness and tries to have a good time.
It's after midnight and Jess follows her friend's gaze to a couple of fellow freshmen, one tall and dark-haired and the other brunet and skinny, but both definitely handsome. The shorter guy must have noticed them looking, because he looks up and winks even as a cute blush flushes his cheeks, and the other snickers, shares a look with the former and after a moment of hesitation the guys begin maneuvering towards them.
The night is nice. They don't talk much, definitely not about anything personal, and she's sure that by the time she gets home she'll probably have forgotten their names, but there's a freedom in just saying whatever she feels like whenever she feels like instead of carefully measuring each word and directing the conversation to get what she wants. Back at their apartment, Becky will worry if she's made a fool of herself in front of them and it's in moments like this one when Jess doesn't doubt she made the right decision.
As it turns out, she doesn't get to forget the encounter, because the tall guy, Sam, shares some of her courses and after a questioning glance sits on her left the next morning. After a month, the seating arrangement still stands and he invites her to coffee for the first time.
They talk about a lot of things; she learns that he has a mom who could kick Chuck Norris' ass if she wanted (his words), a brother he kind of hero-worships (but don't tell him that) and a nephew he absolutely dotes on; he never lets her silence on the topic of family get too awkward though, and somehow he twist the conversation until they end up discussing the benefits of classic cars over the newer moderns, despite the fact that neither of them has any clue about car mechanics.
It is incredibly silly and corny, but for a few minutes, Jess' hopes for the future seem more in reach than they have ever been and if the children she envisions in her fantasy suddenly have hazel eyes or floppy, dark hair, well… Jess smiles and Sam beams in response.
Becky and Brady start going out. Becky and Brady break up.
Sam Winchester fits so perfectly into her daydreams, he's so normal and such a good-natured guy that she's half-convinced that he must be some kind of evil creature come to drag her back into the life, because someone that perfect should not exist. So, she invites herself over one Sunday afternoon with her gun hidden inside her waistband and a flimsy excuse of helping with some project or other and staying for dinner to use the kitchenette in his dorm.
He raises an eyebrow but doesn't comment when he has to step over the salt line on the threshold and she hand-waves it saying it must have spilled when she was getting everything ready, while breathing a sigh of relief that the first test has come back negative. Then she makes a great show of filling a pot with tap water, blesses it into holy water when he isn't looking and convincingly trips over the perfectly even tiles, getting him completely drenched and spluttering, but there is no other reaction on his part. No reaction on his part, because California is warm this time of the year so he's only wearing a button-up shirt that now leaves very little to the imagination and Jess' mental processes seem to have gotten stuck on 'guh'.
It is rather unlucky though that her reflexes haven't quite recovered by the time she decides to carry on, and so the silver knife doesn't so much graze Sam as embed itself about an inch into his arm. The fact that there's no steam takes a seat on the back-burner because there is a lot of blood; yet Sam, eyes scrunched up and face taunt with pain, still tries to reassure her claiming he's had worse playing in his Dad's workshop as a kid and Jess nearly slaps him because he has no business being so nice to her when she is acting like she is.
Sam leaves to get the first-aid kit, and when he comes back to an improvised devil's trap drawn on the floor with the syrup he's very clearly biting back an exasperated laugh. Jess is sure of two things: Sam is 100% human and he's never, ever letting her step into a kitchen again.
At the end of their sophomore year, Becky moves with her brother and one of his classmates to a shared flat. Jess is still reeling when it becomes obvious that her best friend is not about to leave her hanging, and without really knowing how she's looking for an apartment to share with Sam; a part of her argues that it is too soon for this, and another responds that it doesn't have to mean anything past the fact that the pre-law student is one of the few people that know her here; it's strangely disappointing.
Thanksgiving is a depressing date, though granted, no family-oriented holiday has ever been the greatest in Jess' books. But in college it means that nearly everyone is leaving for the week and though she knows that her friends would stay if she asked, it feels as if doing that would be acknowledging her father was right when he said she wouldn't make it alone.
Maybe one day, the petty part of her will realize that there's no room for pride anymore, that she doesn't need to keep fighting for every right and every opinion, but today is not yet that day. Today she plans to take half a dozen books from the library filled with the most technical, illegible vocabulary she can find and then to spend the break in a stupor that will, hopefully, at least be useful in helping her keep the modest scholarship she has been able to secure.
Sam has been reluctant to leave ever since he learnt of the plan, which is sweet of him, but Jess just can't allow him to go through with it. Last year they didn't know each other enough for him to witness first hand just how non-existent her relationship with the rest of her family was. Even now Jess knows that he can't quite wrap his head around the idea of being so completely removed from his roots.
Sam is permanently receiving updates from his mother every week, even more regular complaints from his nephew on everything from homework to his parents making out in the living room and he even gets the occasional rant whenever his brother gets a Mustang in his workshop and can't turn the client down because his wife thinks that's bad for business.
So she drives with her friends to the airport and waves goodbye as Becky and her brother board their plane, and in a fit of recklessness kisses Sam until they have to part for air when he's turning to her as his plane's finally announced as well.
The rest of the holiday is a blur after that, but one that leaves her feeling giddy instead of blue even if she barely finishes one chapter in her planned reading, and both Sam and Becky bring back enough food that neither of the three really need to cook for days.
Jess realizes with a jolt that she is happy.
For Christmas, however, Jess is not even given a choice. In hindsight, it shouldn't have taken her by surprise, especially considering what she already knew of Mary Winchester, who turns out to be every bit the force of nature her son claimed. It starts with a nonchalant, "can you take that, please", two weeks before the end of classes when his phone rings while he's in the other room (and, given what follows, she's pretty sure that was staged) and, by the time she hangs up, they already have their flight to Kansas booked.
Jess huffs and pretends to be annoyed. She's sure it isn't very convincing at all.
They arrive early on Christmas' Eve, and Jess is barely out of the rental car before she's engulfed on a bear hug and congratulated for "proving that Sammy isn't just a gigantic girl, I was beginning to wonder". That's Dean, who's even more handsome than in the pictures, even when he's immediately pulled into an incredibly childish argument that soon descends to name-calling and rough-housing around the freshly mowed lawn.
Lisa sends her a long-suffering look and she gets the feeling that it won't be long before she's returning it with one of her own. Jess is soon introduced to the rest of the family, which includes Ben, Mary and Deanna, Sam and Dean's grandmother. Their father John died a few years ago, though not before passing all of his love of mechanics to his eldest and learning about his youngest son's acceptance in Stanford.
The day from morning to dinnertime passes in a flurry of activity where each member of the family seems to know exactly what to do and where to be at any given moment, like a well-rehearsed dance; and yet Jess is never allowed to feel out of place, because any time she starts to feel blue there's suddenly someone there, needing her help and easily engaging her in conversation.
"Sam, be a dear and go see if there's new bedding for you two upstairs," Deanna says after the younger set of parents have retired for the night and Sam huffs good-naturedly at the three of them.
"Ok, I can tell when I'm not wanted. Have fun."
Sam kisses Mary and Deanna on the cheek, squeezes Jess' hand and saunters off the room. his mother smiles, but when her expression turns to her it's so much more serious and foreboding that Jess worries the cheer has all been one-sided and she's going to get thrown out of the house for some horrible faux-pas.
"We need to talk."
That night, Jess tosses and turns but hard as she tries, she just can't fall sleep.
Mary and Deanna are hunters. Well, ex-hunters actually, and even as she's striven to become just that, Jess has never truly believed it was possible for a hunter to abandon the job without ending up in the asylum -or the morgue. But they recognized Jess' surname and apparently stories of her family's deals with one Bobby Singer, who she's rarely ever seen, have convinced them to give her a chance to be part of their family.
After having heard her story, she's told that Mary too never wanted that life, that she had planned to give the same ultimatum Jess had but she never got the chance. A particularly vicious wendigo killed Sam's grandfather just days before his father proposed to his mother, and Deanna followed her only daughter into early retirement soon after the birth of her first grandson.
In the end she decides that the revelation that Sam is, in fact, the grandson of one of the most infamous hunters in living memory and descended from a long line of hunters doesn't have to change anything for their relationship; though there is a terrible irony in there somewhere, that Jess has run so far away and still her past has caught up so neatly.
Yet, she thinks, maybe it's for the best. Sam and Dean have never known anything about the supernatural, other than the incredibly detailed horror stories Mary used to tell them on summer holidays and the weird habits they have picked up from Deanna. In a way, they are more protected than the average human, and the burden of what-ifs seems to lift a little knowing that it is possible to escape, that someone else already has the future she dreams of having one day. Besides, by this point, she simply can't imagine a life without the Winchesters in it.
Life goes on. Another year goes by, and Jess and Sam... settle. By that point, no one they know even doubts that they are a match made in Heaven. Soon, they are both finishing their undergraduates, and it seems like nothing will be able to stop them now. When the end of their lives as students comes near, Jess begins doing some work in the hospital closest to the campus, and Sam juggles his classes with a small internship that will hopefully open a few doors in their future.
Jo Harvelle is about to be tried for murder. It's the most ridiculous thing Jess has ever heard.
It can't be said that Jess and Jo were best friends; but they had been two girls in a man's world, growing up together by necessity rather than choice every time their parents got in over their heads and needed help, and that's something one can't live through without a throughout understanding of the other's character. Jess knows Jo and her mother Ellen, and she'd be hard pressed to think of any other hunter less likely to go around the bend and become a killer themselves. It only takes a little digging to discover that the 'victim' was, in fact, a shapeshifter that when caught between a rock and a hard place decided to off itself and take its pursuer with him.
The Harvelles, unlike so many other hunters, do have a steady income from the roadhouse Ellen bought after her husband's death; but it's not enough. The last human victim wasn't just your average Joe, the press has already gotten wind of the crime and there seems to be nothing that can save Jo from prison.
A law student still in Uni who has just gotten an internship at a firm, and has done little else that organize paperwork and bring coffee from the Starbucks across the street shouldn't have even been a consideration for her defense. But since the case is a lost cause from the beginning and his boss is a firm believer of the motto, 'there's no such thing as bad publicity, as long as it doesn't reflect directly on me', Sam eventually manages to become Jo's attorney under supervision.
As far as he knows, Jo is a friend of Jess and, through a freak coincidence, Ellen's father was an old friend of Deanna; that's all he needs to throw himself into the fight for the not-guilty verdict. The press has a field day. Some reporter who thinks he's being witty regularly refers to it as the 'kindergarten trial'. In the end, the fact that both Sam and Jo are barely in their twenties works in their favor, as the jury can't help but feel sympathetic for them.
Of course, it isn't that easy. Sam eats little and sleeps less, and Jess knows that this is the end of his blissful ignorance of the way the world truly works. If he's going to succeed, if they are to have any chance of remaining a couple after this mess, she's going to have to tell him everything.
One day she sits him down on their couch, pulls out the silver bullets and the curved knife hidden in the false bottom of the cupboard and explains about the creatures that go bump in the night, and about the whole community of people who live on the fringes of the law, like Jo, like herself... she doesn't have the heart to spill Mary's secret, but when she tells him the effects of salt, silver and some easy exorcisms... she sees the very moment he makes the connection and she doesn't ever want to see that expression on his face again.
Jo is eventually acquainted. Once he knew what to look for, Sam was able to get enough of the evidence dismissed but even as Ellen thanks him profusely Jess can't help but feel that this was not, in any way, a victory.
Unlike the time Jess learned about the Campbells, a lot of things change in the days following the case. Sam has been raised a civilian for most of his life, and they have to set new boundaries now that she can be truly herself, not the image she had projected these last years. Dean and Lisa seem puzzled at first by the distance that seems to have grown between the younger brother and the elder members of their family, and they work restlessly, even when they don't know why, until the cracks in their family bonds are eventually smoothed out, and stronger than ever.
Time does as time is wont to do though, and so Jess and Sam adjust to their new definition of normal. The time for graduation is upon them, and Sam breezes through the bar exam just as Jess knows he would. Though it isn't the usual, not yet, a handful of hunters get Sam's legal aid, enough that his name starts getting a modest amount of recognition in the right circles.
One day, it's not just hunters anymore.
Lenore is a strange creature, unlike any Jess had ever known before. She's a vampire who doesn't kill, more human than many hunters the blonde has known throughout her life and though she could have just as easily fled the moment her fingerprints appeared at a crime scene, she's there pleading her case to Sam, looking for a defense against human rules that she doesn't need. Jess knows he will accept; he may be a part of the hunter community now, but he wasn't raised in the life, has never fought directly against the monsters in the dark and without any of her ingrained instincts, he has never fully differentiated creature from human – only murderer from innocent.
It's a grueling case, maybe even more than Jo's, with Sam having to both prove her innocence and protect the secret of her nature. In the end he manages to get the vampire free, and though there hasn't been anything glamorous on the court case and, in fact, a few voices condemn him for his methods, the look of respect in Lenore's eyes as she goes back to her coven is rewarding in its own way.
Jess never really understands why the Trickster comes to the firm a few months after Lenore's case, given that he doesn't have a set identity and he's quite obviously pleased with his nature. He specifically requests the younger Winchester too and somehow Sam's boss gets involved in a scandal that costs him his job after he snaps at the creature to get a real attorney and not a wet-behind-the-ears newbie.
Sam investigates the counts of aggravated battery and a handful of other minor crimes, and refuses to defend the demi-god when it becomes obvious he's indeed guilty. However when she sees the hefty paycheck left in their bank account within hours of Loki's departure, she wonders if it wasn't a test.
That notion seems proven when a few weeks after Loki it's a recently-turned werewolf coming to Sam and then a rugaru that hasn't fully turned yet, all of them asking for him instead of one of the older lawyers and though not quite enough to be called a steady trend, there's certainly enough of them to not be an sporadic coincidence anymore. The ones to come are generally clinging to their humanity even after it has been taken from them and the blonde wonders for the first time how many of them are out there, just trying to live without being allowed to do it.
Sam uses Loki's deposit to set out on his own, with a modest office right in the downtown and their future changes once more. Times are hard. True to word, Sam takes the case of every single supernatural, hunter and being, that gets sent in his direction; some cases he wins, some cases he loses. Often they have to tweak or destroy some evidence to get the innocent verdict, and Jess knows it destroys Sam a little bit inside every time he's forced to break the law, how fast his dream would crash and burn if they are ever found out. On top of that, hunting is not a paying job, and though he tries to lower the prices until he's practically representing them for free, money soon gets tight for the couple.
There are other problems that hit closer to home; the werewolf's transformations are more violent than the woman inside can handle, and Madison will try to overdose on sleeping pills after a particularly awful one when she very nearly escapes the basement where she locks herself every full moon. The rugaru flees the States with his wife and newborn baby after having already relocated three times, and they will never know if someone finally caught up to him or worse, if he stayed in control for the rest of his life.
It takes a while before Jess discovers that the only reason hunters trust them and haven't yet tried to do anything about the creatures they help, is because Deanna has been throwing her name around. She begins to dread the moment being a Campbell won't be enough to protect Sam.
A month later, the office goes up in flames. Sam gets rushed to ICU on a ventilator and crashes twice on the ambulance; when Jess arrives at the hospital she and Dean sit through three hours of agony before a doctor comes bearing news.
Sam won't be waking up.
The doctor recites all the usual platitudes and medical jargon, but what it boils down to is that the firemen were too late getting him out, that he inhaled too much smoke and his brain function are too damaged; nothing sort of a miracle will save him now.
Jess blacks out.
"..."
Jess blacks out for a whole day, but when she looks back on this time her first real memory is that they did get their miracle, because Sam is awake and there's no sign of brain or tissue damage. The healing has been almost... supernatural.
She should be glad, she is glad, and it's time that the universe paid them back a little for all they have sacrificed to get here. If some nice Samaritan decided to help Sam when he most needed it, Jess shouldn't question it, because if she has learnt anything these last few years is that even amongst monsters there can sometimes be goodness and even amongst humans there can be evil.
But the feeling of premonition catches her breath, and her skin feels like a prison, and even as she holds Sam's hand her eyes stray to the clock hung on the opposite wall, and each tic sounds like a death toll in her mind.
They never find out who was responsible for the fire. The police eventually declares it an accident due to faulty wiring, which is the usual outcome when the supernatural is involved but also an outcome that any hunter worth their salt can fake.
Jess convinces Sam to lay low for a while and they take an extended vacation out of the States; once they are back, she sets new rules and protections that she had neglected before and they are much more strict about which cases get accepted.
The months pass, but there's never another incident like the first. The voices against them have become eerily quiet, but that's fine. They have a life now that they can finally start to live.
"..."
Joan Winchester is born five years later, in January; she has her mother's curly blonde hair, and her father's eyes. Sam and Jess ask for a loan and move into a three-bedroom house, in the same neighborhood as Dean and Lisa and their three years old daughter, who's already promising to be even more of a troublemaker than her father ever was.
As it turns out, Joan is barely walking and talking by the time the two sets of parents discover that together, the cousins can put anything their dad and uncle did to shame. Whenever he's back from college, Ben has taken over the job of spoiling them silly. Mary can't stop laughing at each new anecdote, and after Deanna's passing, eventually moves to Dean's house since it's where she spends most of her time anyway.
When the second Winchester-Moore comes, Jess doesn't hesitate to name her after said grandmother, that has long since become more the blonde's family than her own ever was.
Maria is healthy and hits all the right milestones in the following months, but her mother still worries. There's something about her, something that Jess should know, and sometimes it's difficult to even let her baby out of her sight. Joan has taken to copying her mother and watches her sister like a hawk; it gets to the point where Sam has to sit Jess down and point out that their children will be fine, that they are together and the house is as protected as two humans can make it.
Still, she worries.
Her world ends nearly twenty years after that evening she slammed the door of her parents' house shut for the last time. Her world ends with fire.
"Take Maria outside and go! Now, Joan, leave!"
Even at the end, she has no regrets.