Dean drove them the five miles back towards the interstate to get to the little motel he'd spied earlier. He pulled off into a tiny, dimly lit parking lot and parked at the furthest spot from the building he could find.

"Really, Dean?" Sam asked.

"Suck it up, Princess. It's only for one night. You'll be back to sleeping under your down comforter tomorrow."

Jess had her own misgivings. It was the sketchiest, kookiest place she had ever seen. The doors to the rooms had been painted to look like saloon doors and there was a neon cowboy lit in the front window of an office next to a vacancy sign. That all would have been fine, but even in the dark Jess could see that the windows were coated in a layer of grime and the paint was curling off the walls. The back corner of the building was completely unlit. Jess wouldn't have even gotten out of the car alone without at least a can of pepper spray and 911 pre-dialed on her phone.

"I'm with Sam on this one," she said. "Are you sure it's safe?"

"I've stayed in a hundred motels like this. It's safe." Dean said easily as he got out. The dim illumination from the motel sign overhead gave him an otherworldly cast, making his eyes look almost amber in the half light

"Dean's right," Sam added. "Most people at these places are more concerned with not getting the cops called. Besides, between the two of us we could handle any trouble. No one will bother us except the sentient mold."

"Again, that's not comforting."

Dean shrugged, obviously done arguing with them. He tossed the keys at Sam then stomped off to the main office. Sam turned in his seat to face her better. "Are you sure this is okay? Dean might moan, but we really can go somewhere else."

Jess shrugged. "It's fine. I'm exhausted. I just want a shower and a nap. As long as there's a bed, I'll just think of it as an adventure."

Sam sighed. "Sure. An adventure."

"What's wrong, Sam?"

"It's nothing," he said with a wave of his hand. "Places like this were half my childhood. When we weren't squatting in abandoned buildings we were staying in seedy motels. I can only remember a handful of times we stayed in an apartment or rented a house. I might get nostalgic for it, but I don't really miss it. The freshman dorms felt almost world class when I first got to school."

Jess reached forward to rub his shoulders. Sam's muscles felt like rocks under her hands. With some gentle work, she managed to ease a little of the tension out of his neck. "Sam, I don't care. I don't care if you ran naked in the streets until you turned eleven. We all came from somewhere. I never had any illusions that you were some spoiled, rich kid."

"Thanks," he said, his head falling back eyes half closed with pleasure.

She laughed. "It's what I'm here for. Kinda funny how it works when you let me share some of the weight, isn't it?"

He smiled up at her. "What would I do without you?"

"Crash and burn," she said with a grin.

The moment was interrupted by Dean's return. He smacked on the window and waved them out. "Come on. I got us a room and I ain't hauling in the bags by myself."

Jess climbed from the back seat and took the med kit she was handed, the same one he had used at their apartment. Sam had collected the duffle with their things in it while Dean was shouldering his own as well as carrying a smaller bag he held by its straps.

The first thing they tended to was injuries. Dean restitched Sam's side and wrapped the ankle that he'd twisted. Sam subjected Dean to a quick inspection, but deemed that he'd survive with just a few bruises. When that was through, Sam pulled Jess over to look at her side and clean the scraped skin on her arm. "Well, you got your first hunting scar," he said as he bandaged up a deep cut just above her elbow.

Jess turned and examined the placement. "I hear boys think scars are sexy."

Sam kissed the bandage lightly. "Definitely."

Before Jess could reply, Dean jumped up and pushed past them. "If you two are going to start making googley eyes, I'm going to go wash my everything."

Before Sam could stop him, Dean had snapped the bathroom door shut and clicked the lock in place. Through the thin door he shouted, "Don't forget the guns, Sam!"

Sam scowled at the closed door. "You're an asshole," he shouted over the sound of the water starting up.

"What's he talking about?"

Sam glowered mutinously at the bags they had just brought in and stomped over to rummage through them. "A stupid rule he made up when we were kids," he said. "Whoever lost first shower had to clean the weapons. He totally made it up because he was too lazy to do it and didn't think I could beat him to the bathroom."

She noticed he had already sat with the smaller bag Dean had carried in and laid out his knife and the two guns he'd carried earlier while he was griping. Despite his grumbling, he began working his way through the weapons, oiling the knife and disassembling the guns to clean them. It was almost mesmerizing to watch. He never hesitated or stumbled. His nimble fingers worked from muscle memory as he muttered darkly under his breath about his brother.

When he'd finished with his own guns, he picked up the shotgun Dean had carried earlier and did the same with it. He was nearly finished by the time Dean came strolling out with a towel around his waist, humming to himself. Sam paused in his task to pull a set of clothes and a couple of toiletries from his duffle and hand them to her. "Go on," he said. "I'm going to finish these up."

She kissed his forehead then locked herself into the bathroom. She let the water wash over her and felt the tension she'd been carrying all evening start to ease. The water pressure was crap and the water lukewarm at best, but scrubbing the dirt off her skin and washing her hair made her feel nearly human again.

She cut off the shower before she was really satisfied, aware Sam was still waiting. She shrugged on her spare clothes then took a moment to study her reflection in the mirror. The girl staring back at her looked exhausted. Jess realized she hadn't properly slept since Sam had disappeared on Friday. She'd only had an hour or two in the last twenty four hours. The sleepless night as she wrestled with the enigma of Sam's past felt like a lifetime ago.

She felt so different to how she'd been just that morning when she'd known Sam was keeping secrets but had been sure of the world around her. She'd wanted answers and now she had them, not that she was sure what to do with that knowledge. She knew monsters existed. She'd seen a ghost with her own eyes, even watched it go up in flames.

Sam was right about one thing, it definitely changed how she saw the world. Everything felt just a little rougher around the edges.

She got why Sam had tried to escape all of that. Some other girl might have fallen in love with the romantic notion of dark heroes and rough and tumble men. Another girl might have got caught up in the adrenaline of the hunt. But Jess saw the horror that underpinned this reality. She saw the long thankless nights and the home treated injuries. She saw the constant looking over your shoulder that came along with the job and she suddenly understood Sam in a whole different light.

Sam was so much stronger than any of them had given him credit for. He'd seen the horror in the world, had been exposed to it for his entire life and decided he wanted better for himself. He'd stood up when it became apparent that he was the only who could change his situation and clawed his way free. He'd known he might be giving up everything for just the chance to escape, and he'd done it. Jess didn't know if she'd ever been that brave in her whole life.

There was a knock at the door. Jess jumped, blinking at her reflection. "Jess?" Sam said, quietly. "Are you okay?"

Jess huffed and pulled her wet hair back from her face into a loose ponytail. She gathered up her dirty clothes and opened the door. "I'm good. Shower is all yours." Sam nodded and let her pass. He looked like he might say something, but just slipped into the bathroom and closed the door.

Dean had found clothes and was lounging on the bed closest to the door flipping aimlessly through TV channels. He grunted at her, but otherwise ignored her.

She grabbed her cellphone out of Sam's bag and settled on the other bed. She flipped it open to see there were a half dozen texts from their friends wondering where they were. It hit her then that they had planned to go out for her friend Bethany's birthday. The idea seemed so incongruous with the evening she'd actually had. She couldn't even begin to think how she could explain why they'd been absent.

Finally, she fired off a text to Carol knowing full well that everyone would know the story within ten minutes. We had a family thing come up that we had to go to. I'll tell you about it later. Tell Beth we're sorry we missed it!

She made a mental note to tell Sam what she'd said, just in case. After all, it wasn't exactly a lie. Dean was family and they hadn't been able to go to the celebration. She was beginning to see why Sam had always been vague about his past. This wasn't the kind of thing you just told people.

She set the phone aside and tried to focus on the soap opera Dean had landed on. Her tired mind couldn't quite grasp the storyline. She dozed off to the melodramatic background music, only rousing slightly when Sam snuggled in next to her. She was awake enough to know that he and Dean were talking, but she didn't really care what they were saying. She nestled in close to Sam's warmth and let herself drift back to sleep.

She woke to the late morning sun streaming into the room. She stretched, feeling her muscles pull and protest after her adventure the night before. In the light of day, the room looked even more dilapidated than it had the night before. The carpet was stained at least three shades of brown and had worn through in a half dozen places. The window was missing any sort of drapery while there was a square on the wall that was a completely different color than the surrounding wall paper from where a picture once hung. The wardrobe sagged in the middle, enough so that the door wouldn't properly shut and the TV was missing the front panel that might have once covered the buttons.

The room was quiet. Sam was sitting at the little table working on his laptop. It was a strangely familiar sight, despite the circumstances. Jess watched him for a minute, trying to picture a teenage Sam sitting at a table like that one, working through his math homework while his father and brother prepared to face another monster or talked about ghosts. The thought of Sam doing any sort of homework tickled a thought in her sleepy brain.

With a gasp she sat up. Sam jerked, banging his knee on the table. "Jess?"

"It's Tuesday!"

Sam frowned at her and shook his head. "So?"

"I have lectures today and I missed my lab yesterday. I didn't even email the teacher. I'm so dead."

Sam smiled and turned back to his laptop. "Relax. I emailed all our teachers yesterday. If asked, you were home being graphically ill. Real exorcist style sick."

Jess collapsed back into her pillows. "Oh my gosh. How did I forget?"

"You were a bit preoccupied."

"I'm going to be so behind."

Sam shrugged. "I asked them to send over the homework. It'll be tight, but you can get it done this afternoon."

"And what about you, mister I'm taking twenty two credit hours."

He shrugged and waved at the laptop. "One of the classes is online and I am literally so far ahead, I've scheduled my discussion posts nearly three weeks out. The other three I missed were lectures. I'm about a period ahead in all the reading. It'll just be a matter of turning in the missed homework and making up the test in my civil war class. I missed some serious study time, but I should still be able to pass it."

"Sam," she said. She flopped down against the flat pillows as Dean came back into the room, tucking his cell phone away in his pocket. "I love you, but you're like freakishly smart and I hate you."

"He is like some kind of freaky encyclopedia, isn't he? Wasn't really surprised when they made him valedictorian."

Jess sat back up, looking between the two of them. "Um, I didn't know that. Why didn't I know that, Sam?"

Sam kept typing away at the computer as he said, "Because it's no big deal. It was kind of a weird situation anyway. I had only been at that school for three months when I graduated, so they averaged my grades from all the schools I was in that year. It wasn't really fair to the other kids since I wasn't being scored the same way they were."

"Wait, you went to multiple schools your senior year and still graduated valedictorian?"

Sam hummed noncommittally as he typed something. Finally he frowned and glanced up at Dean. "How many was it? Three?"

"Four, I think. Remember there was that town in Michigan. The one with the werewolf. We had to skip out after a couple of weeks because of the cops. You were pissy because you didn't get your school records."

"Mmm," Sam said, going back to whatever he was working on. "That was the one with the funny looking CPS guy, right?"

Dean chuckled. "Yeah, the one that looked like he was always pouting."

"Wait," Jess said, still processing the fact that Sam had been in four schools in one year, never mind that comment about CPS. "Back up. You can't just say these things then not fill in the blanks. How many high schools did you go to?"

"Apparently four my senior year."

"Yeah, but like total."

This time, Sam just shrugged. "I lost count somewhere around junior year."

"Let's see," Dean said. "There were three your freshman year. I think it was seven for sophomore, but then again, we had to pull you for that second semester so it took an extra year. There were four your junior year. And four your senior year. So eighteen. Give or take."

"Sam," Jess said. "No offense, but how the fuck did you make it into Stanford with a full ride? I lived in one place my entire life and worked my ass off for the little piece of a scholarship I got."

Sam shrugged. "I worked hard, kept lots of records, and had a backup of everything I ever did. And I got a good SAT score. Plus, I was the main researcher for most of the hunts. Like I told you before, I've always been well versed in how to find the information I need and how to put together a report, whether it's on modernist literature or how to kill Japanese spirit monsters."

"And," Dean interjected. "He's one smart little shit."

"Yeah, I think I got that part," Jess said, staring wide eyed at her boyfriend. "Geeze Sam. Literal genius is a bragging point, you know. You should use it sometimes."

Sam just frowned down at his work. "That wasn't the point at all. I mean, it's nice to have the time to pursue all the things I'm interested in and access to the means to do it, but even if I'd only been able to take the minimum classes, even if I'd been paying for all of it out of pocket, I was actually getting to study what I wanted and it wasn't life or death in the same way hunting had been. I am building the life I want from the ground up. Me. It's what I make it. That's the point."

"Sam, one of these days you're going to realize you're special."

"I don't want to be special. I just want to be me."

"You can't be both?"

Sam didn't really answer. She knew he was avoiding the question. He'd been pretending to be absorbed in his work, but she knew he was using it to deflect from the conversation. She turned to Dean, hoping to have some backup in this, only to realize he'd gone quiet too. He was staring at Sam with an unreadable expression. He seemed to sense her eyes on him. He turned away from her with a shake of his head and left, letting the door fall shut behind him.

Sam sighed and seemed to shrink in on himself.

"Did I say something wrong?"

Sam shook his head and looked at her with those big doe eyes he got when he was sad. "No. I did."

"What do you mean?"

Sam looked at the door, staring after Dean. "At the end of this, regardless of what happened over the last few days, I'm still going back to school and Dean is still going back to hunting. The fight may have happened years ago now, but it's still raw for both of us. I shouldn't have said what I did."

"I don't understand. What exactly did you say?"

"For a long time, it was just me and Dean against the world. We were the only people we could count on. Then I left and tore all that apart. We had been so inseparable that I was sure he would come too. It was selfish and stupid. If there was anyone born to be a hunter it's Dean. But you have to understand. He had been my entire world for so long, I just couldn't imagine him not being there. That night he drove me to the bus station. He didn't say a single word to me, but he drove me there, bought my ticket, and snuck four knives and nearly eight hundred bucks into my bag when I wasn't looking. I meant it when I said I'm building a life for myself, but even at my lowest I never thought that wouldn't include Dean."

"I still don't understand," Jess said. She knew all this. She didn't get what might have set Dean off.

"Dean looks at me and he sees the fact that I left. It hurt him nearly as much as it did me. And now he's probably off somewhere thinking that when I said I was making my own way, I meant I wanted a life without him in it, which I didn't."

Jess frowned down at her lap. She wished she could make this better for Sam. Family was just hard sometimes. She had a little sister. She knew what she would have felt if Mel had been her whole world then just left.

She stood, trying to smooth out her sleep rumpled clothes. "I'll be right back."

Sam frowned over at her. "Where are you going?"

"Don't worry about it. I won't be long."

She slipped on her shoes that she had kicked off by the door and stepped outside. She was afraid that Dean might have gotten in his car and taken a drive – that she wouldn't be able to talk to him. She smiled a little when she saw he was sitting in the driver's seat, but hadn't made a move to leave. She walked over to the car, pulled open the passenger side door, then sat down next to him.

They sat in silence for a moment. Dean seemed content to stare out the front windshield and Jess let him. She knew well enough that he probably wasn't in a talking mood. She would let him make the first move.

"Did Sam send you out here," he asked at long last.

"No."

"Then what are you doing?"

Instead of answering his question directly she said, "Did you know Sam went through three roommates his freshman year because he had night terrors?"

Dean sighed and shrugged. "Sam has always had nightmares. It's par for the course with him."

"Not just bad dreams. He'd wake up crying or shouting. He tackled Darren, his first roommate, to the floor and had a knife pulled on him just because the guy tried to wake him up."

Dean's shoulders slumped and he scowled. "I get it. I do. Hunting was the psychological scar that Sam will never get over. Don't worry. You'll be snug in your little apartment on campus by dinner time tonight."

"It wasn't hunting."

"What do you mean it wasn't hunting?" Dean scowled in confusion, obviously thrown by the turn the conversation had taken and not sure where Jess was going with this. "Was it clowns?"

Jess shook her head, filing that little tidbit away for later. "No, it wasn't clowns."

"Then what?" Dean shifted in his seat so he could actually look at her. He seemed genuinely worried.

"It was leaving you."

"What are you talking about?"

"He dreams you die. Knowing what I do now, I'd bet he's got a whole repertoire of ways that might happen, but in every single one he's ever told me about he watches you die and he can't do anything to save you."

"It's not Sam's job to save me," Dean grunted. He turned back to stare out the windshield again. "It's my job to protect him."

"After what I've seen, I can say with certainty that Sam would die for you, no questions asked."

They lapsed into silence again. Jess thought maybe she should leave it at that, but there was still something she wanted to say. "One more thing then I'll let you get back to brooding. You should know that Sam's never even told me his father's name. He barely speaks about him except to mention that he wasn't around much. I won't lie and say he talked about you much either, but you should have heard the sheer adoration when he did. If Sam and I are as serious as I think we are, there's a good chance you and I might be family one day. I'm glad I got to meet you, even if it was under terrible circumstances."

Dean gave her a hint of a smile. "And I meant it when I said Sam had picked a good one."

Jess smiled at him, then reached out for the door handle. She had climbed to her feet and was turning to close the door behind her when Dean said, "John. Our dad's name is John. That's where Sam got his middle name."

"John," Jess said, trying the name out. She leaned on the open door and looked back into the car. "You know, I'm not sure whether I want to punch him for being an absolute bastard or thank him for giving me Sam."

Dean chuckled. He looked softer somehow. Maybe something she'd said had gotten through to him. "Yeah, Dad has that effect on people."

Dean rolled his shoulders like he was loosening his muscles. He huffed and pulled his keys out of the ignition before he joined her on the outside of the car. Jess watched him walk around the font to head towards the room. "Come on," he said. "Let's go see if we can pry Sam away from his books. I should probably get you two back so you can do your nerd thing."

Jess fell into step beside him. "Good luck with that."

Dean laughed. He paused at their door to wink at her. Before she could blink, he had thrown open the door and barreled in. "Sam!" Jess was pretty sure everyone in the motel could hear him shouting. "I'm bored. Whatcha doing?"

As Jess came in and shut the door, Dean draped himself across Sam's shoulder, putting his face right against Sam's ear. He reached over Sam to poke a button on the laptop keyboard. "What's this button do? What about this one?"

Sam gave Dean a shove, a disgruntled look on his face. "Dude, are you five? That's my junior comp essay you're messing with."

"But Sam, I'm bored."

When Dean went to poke another button, Sam snapped the lid down nearly taking off Dean's finger. "Stop. God, you're such a jerk."

"And you're a whiney bitch. Now come on. Jess and I are hungry. Breakfast time!"

"You know, in the world of unfair things, I think the fact that you can be this chipper without coffee is the worst."

Dean fluffed Sam's hair with his hand, earning a hard smack for his trouble. "Breakfast," Dean sing-songed.

Sam snorted. He rose from his seat and stuffed his laptop into his backpack. Jess was left standing by the door feeling like the odd man out again as the brothers moved in sync around each other, gathering the few odds and ends they'd pulled out the night before and packing everything up. In five minutes, they were ready to leave.

Sam smiled at her and grabbed her wrist as they were walking out the door. He pulled her in close to him, letting his arm drape across her shoulders. "Thanks," was all he said.

She paused just long enough to stand on tip toe and peck him on the cheek. "You're welcome. Now come on, let's go home."