A/N: Early update, woop woop! Thank you once again for your continued reviews, hope you like this one.

Chapter Fourteen

"D-Dean?" Jess stammered down the phone at him, "Sam's been taken."

Dean growled, "What do you want me to do about it princess?" He spat, "He's the demon expert, not me."

"It wasn't demons that took him, it was your old gang buddies," she replied angrily.

Dean sighed heavily, "Why should I care?"

"What the hell? He's your brother, and let's not forget the fact that the whole reason that a gang is even after him is all your fault!"

"He's the reason my mom abandoned me! He's the reason my dad got drunk most nights. He's the reason I had to go to the neighbour's when my dad had to work late or we got into an argument! He's practically the reason I even joined the gang in the first place, technically it's all his fault."

"Wow, you are unbelievable-" Dean cut her off before she could launch into a rant and dropped the phone back on the bed beside him.

Seriously, he was starting to think that the universe really had something against him. Could he not endure one hangover in peace?

The phone rang again and even before he looked, he was willing to bet a small fortune that it was Jess calling back, again.

"You and your boyfriend are the bane of my existence," he growled into the phone.

"Dean, you didn't want to keep holding us hostage once you found out that we had nothing to do with any gang. You had a conscience then, are you really gonna tell me you don't have one now?" Jess' voice sounded a little desperate as it came through his phone.

Dean silently cursed himself and pounded the mattress with his fist before answering, "Fine! I'll help you get him back!" He then gruffly told Jess to meet him at the same bar he had landed in the previous evening and to bring breakfast. Then with a huge effort, he rolled himself off the bed.

Dean felt worse than crap, in fact he felt like a streak of diarrhoea that had come out of some terminally prolapsed hyena anus and left to bake in the sun for three days.

When he eventually found his baby waiting for him patiently, Jess was already there, breakfast in a bag complete with coffees. He was too hungover to care if he was rude when he snatched the bag of food from her hands and began devouring it like a rabid animal.

As he finished his food, he started to become aware of his surroundings again and noticed that Jess was getting impatient.

"Would you just calm down for a minute," he said exasperatedly as he turned towards her and noticed for the first time that she was wearing Sam's t-shirt.

He raised an eye and Jess flushed and shifted uncomfortably under his scrutiny. Oh this was too much.

"You guys did the dirty?" Jess' face turned an even deeper share of red at Dean's question. "Dude even gets the girl in the end. Life is so not fair." He muttered.

"Shut up." Jess replied with more venom in her voice than Dean was expecting.

"Hey, don't get your panties in a twist!"

"I don't know why I even called you. You're such a selfish jerk!" Jess yelled and stormed away.

"How can I be the selfish one when I'm trying to help you get him back?" Dean called after her, irritated that even after all he'd done, all he had given up in trying to keep them alive over the last couple of weeks, that even after all the crap that went down yesterday and dragging himself out of bed on no sleep and feeling like death, he was still being called selfish.

Jess whirled around in outrage, "All you think about is yourself! You can't even stop wallowing in your own self pity for two seconds to think about anyone else! So you had a rough childhood - get over it! You're not the only one. Did you even think about what it must have been like for Sam not even knowing who his dad was? You're so obsessed with the idea of him getting to go to college but you have no consideration for now hard he worked to get there! ...And you can't even consider how it feels to get woken up in the middle of the night and be able to do nothing while Sam was taken away." By the end of her speech Jess was nearly outright sobbing, and she had made her point with deadly accuracy.

Dean opened his mouth to argue but couldn't find anything to say, couldn't find an example he could hold up to show her as proof that he wasn't what she said she was. Couldn't find an instance he could point to and say look, I have empathy.

Shit. He hated moments like this, moments that were like they were straight out of some pansy chick flick. He was not some kind of prissy, romantic Prince Charming. He was Batman. And Batman didn't stand in front of sobbing girls struggling for words.

"See?" Jess continued, "You're too busy being jealous of everyone else to sort your own life out. That's not Sam's fault and it's not mine, it's yours. Just like it's your fault we're in this mess."

He searched for anything that he could absolve himself with, grasping desperately for any pathetic piece of reasoning he could think of. "He clearly had a better chance at life than I got. I could've got into college too but my dad didn't have the money. It's not like I wanted to be a criminal."

Jess huffed, "He got in on scholarship. His mother never had any money and neither did the family friend he went to live with. He earned his place at Stanford without relying on anyone else, without blaming anyone else when things didn't go his way."

Dean felt like Jess had slapped him across the face. She was really needling him where it hurt today. He looked away, like he would be able pull all of life's answers out of thin air.

Jess sniffed, "I know you've stuck your neck out for us - you could've just carted us off to see your boss without bothering to find out why, you could've even left us at that diner the first time the Flaming Arrows caught up to us... But Sam doesn't deserve what's happened. And right now we're the only ones who can help him."

Dean frowned. "Get in," he sighed defeatedly and nodded towards his baby. "You're right. What Kaiser's gonna do to him? No one deserves that - and right now we are the only ones who can help."

With only a little hesitation Jess complied. Dean settled himself in the leather seat and started her up, the gravel crunched satisfyingly as he rolled out of the car park and onto the road. "I have an idea where they'll take him, but there's gonna be a lot of Arrows there and, no offence, you're not exactly a regular gunslinger. We're gonna need some help."

"Who are we gonna call?" Jess asked.

"Well, I don't think the Ghostbusters are gonna be any help." Dean quipped.

Jess frowned, "Can you please take this seriously?"

Dean rolled his eyes, "Fine. The only person I can think to call is a guy called Dogma, he's in the Flaming Arrows but he's not heartless and he's done me favours before... But that's no guarantee that he would be able to help. And that's it. I don't have any other friends."

"What about your dad? He wouldn't really sit back and do nothing if one of his sons was kidnapped, would he?" Jess suggested tentatively.

Dean shrugged, "I don't know. But we'd have to get him to listen to us first, and after yesterday I doubt he's in a listening mood... What about you? Do you and Sam have any college friends that would be useful in a rescue attempt?"

Jess chewed her lip as she thought. "Well, Sam said his uncle Bobby is a hunter, he would probably help." She suggested.

"What's a hunter?" Asked Dean as Jess was awkwardly digging a phone out of her pocket.

"Apparently it's what people who hunt the supernatural are called." Jess muttered distractedly as she concentrated on navigating the phone in her hands.

Dean was about to open his mouth but Jess had already dialled and had put the phone on speaker, holding it up between them as it was ringing.

After a few rings the line clicked and a surly voice said, "I hope you have a really good reason for calling me this early in the morning."

"...Bobby?" Asked Jess hesitantly.

"Well you don't sound like Sam. Who are you and why do you have his phone?"

"My name is Jess-"

"Sam's Jess from Stanford?" Bobby interrupted.

"Yes."

"Hmm, I've heard a lot about you. I hear you got dragged into some trouble along with that idjit. Where is he? Why are you calling me from his phone?"

"Because the Flaming Arrows got him." Jess explained timidly, holding her breath as they waited for the stranger to answer.

"Balls! I swear that boy finds trouble like it's going out of fashion."

"Would you be able to help us out?" Interjected Dean.

"And who might you be?"

"My name's Dean. Turns out, I'm Sam's brother."

"Dean..." Muttered Bobby, probably more to himself than to anyone else, "Are you the one that got him the first time round?"

"Uh... yeah," Dean admitted reluctantly.

"You planning on staying in that gang?"

"No sir," Dean enthused.

"Well then, I guess we can work together." Bobby said, "How did Sam get on the wrong side of a gang anyway?"

"It's complicated," said Dean.

"When isn't it complicated when Sam's involved," retorted Bobby, "what I wanna know is how the hell I ended up talking to his idjit brother and his friend from college while he's god knows where at the mercy of some gang!"

Dean almost flinched from the rage in Bobby's voice. They were back at his dad's house now so he pulled over and turned the engine off. "It's a bit of a funny story," he said earning a raised eyebrow from Jess. "I royally screwed my last few jobs, didn't really fancy stealing medicine, and I pissed off the boss something fierce. And when the boss gets mad, he gets creative. Anyway, he found out I had a brother and sent me to get him, making out like Sam had crossed the gang in a big way... But I found out he was innocent and we've been running from them ever since."

"Then what happened?" Asked Bobby, his tone was still less than impressed, but at least he wasn't thundering down the phone at them again.

"Well... yesterday we were attacked by demons," said Jess. Although technically Dean knew what had happened and that this Bobby was well aware of how real demons actually were, it was still a bit weird hearing her say it aloud to someone else.

"I'm guessing that was right before Sam called me asking if there was a hunter's shop in Kansas?"

"Right," Jess confirmed, "Well, we um... We had to stay in a motel in the same town, Sam said he would rather get further away from where the demons had last seen us so he put stuff on the walls of our room for extra protection but it was the humans that found us. They broke down the door in the middle of the night and... th-they took him. He was still hurt from the demons a-and they caught us by surprise..."

There was a pause while Jess collected herself and then Bobby's voice came out of the phone softer than Dean was beginning to think was possible for the old man, "You and Sam, huh? Don't worry darling, that kid is tougher than anyone I know, we'll get him back. Now why don't you tell me where you are and where you're headed and we can meet somewhere in the middle."

Dean gave Bobby the information he had asked for and was relieved when Bobby said that he would be able to meet them the next evening with a guy called Rufus in tow.

Jess blew out a breath as she hung up the phone and looked over at Dean and the house behind him.

Dean shot a glance over his shoulder at his dad's house before he sighed and turned back to Jess saying, "Look, I have no idea if yesterday was just because he was just shocked or if he really meant what he said... But if you go at him the way you did me earlier, you might just have a chance at convincing him."

"Me?" Jess cried.

"Well he's not gonna listen to me!" Dean protested.

"And what makes you think he's going to listen to me?" Jess retorted.

"I don't. Not really anyway." Dean scratched his head as he struggled to put his thoughts into words, "he probably won't listen to you, but he definitely won't even give me a chance to speak before he slams the door in my face. Even a slim chance is better than no chance, right?"

Jess sighed and shot Dean a look heavy with derision and resignation before she climbed out of Dean's baby and pushed the door closed behind her with a bit too much force for Dean's liking. Dean followed her with his eyes as she strode towards the door and rapped on it with her knuckles, he saw his dad answer it after a few moments and immediately caught the look of extreme displeasure that overcame his face as soon as he saw Jess and which stayed there as he talked to her.

The conversation didn't last long before his dad shut the door and Jess retreated to the car. "We should go," she said quietly after she had settled into the passenger seat.

Dean nodded and started up the engine. It wasn't like he had expected anything from his dad - god knew he had given up on that long ago - but it was still sad to realise just how badly that bridge had been burnt.

As he started driving out of town, he noticed Jess staring silently at the window, not staring at the scenery, but focusing on her own translucent reflection. Her ghostly face staring calmly but sorrowfully back at her.

Dean had liked to think of himself as not a total asshole, he gave his hostages food and water and bathroom breaks, and he never went out of his way to hurt them more than he had to... But the rest of his old gang, they were total assholes. And it was a certainty that Kaiser had sent the biggest assholes of the lot after them, not that he would tell Jess that, she was upset enough as it was.