Disclaimer: No ownership, otherwise I'd be rich.
AN: Finally, the last chapter of this one-shot gone wild. Thank you to everyone who reviewed, threatened and guilted me into getting my raggedy ass back to work. You ROCK!
The trip to St. Louis would be short one person.
"Do all three of you really have to go, just to drop off a bell?" Cassie asked two days later when Dean called to find out how Melanie had been sleeping since their little visit. Jack sat at the table across from Sam on the bed while Dean spoke with Cassie.
"We need to shag ass to another job after we're done there." Dean explained.
"Actually," Sam interrupted, wincing because he really didn't want to say this. "Dean, you should probably stay here while me and Jack drop the bell off."
"What?" Dean asked frowning.
"What?" Jack asked looking at Sam.
"St. Louis isn't exactly a great city for you to be setting foot in right now." Sam said with a significant look to his brother. The whole wanted killer thing didn't tend to go over well with the police when said suspect decided to waltz back into the city limits.
"Cassie let me call you back." Dean hung up so they could speak freely.
"You're still dead, do you really want to risk someone there seeing you?" Sam asked bluntly.
"Ooo-kay." Dean nodded his head, apparently he hadn't thought about that. He sent a questioning look at Jack, to get her opinion.
"We would have had to turn around and come this way again anyway." Jack shrugged. "We'll just pick you up when we're done."
"Be careful." Dean told them as per habit as he walked them out to the Impala.
"Not the most dangerous trip in the world, Dean. We'll call when we're on our way back." Sam assured his over-worried brother.
"I'm not worried about your asses. You fuck up my car again and you're both dead." Dean threatened, glowering at Sam.
"Your concern is over-whelming." Sam scoffed.
"You be good Dean." Jack teased sliding him a sly smirk over the hood of the car and opened the passenger side door.
"You first." Dean retorted. He tapped the hood of the car, stepping back when Sam turned the ignition. He watched them drive away till he could no longer make out the shape of the Chevy.
Jack reclined in the front seat, putting her feet up on the dash board . Sam smirked and rolled his eyes, nobody would dare to do that if Dean was in the car. But he was listening to the only modern music he'd heard in weeks on the radio, so Sam wasn't about to call Jack on anything.
"Gotta say its good to hear something besides Metallica or Motorhead." Jack said turning the radio up a little louder.
"Don't know how you guys can stand that stuff." Sam shook his head.
"Sensitive ears?" Jack asked teasingly.
"Yeah, from a friggin cannon going off next to ears a few days ago." Sam replied with a good natured scowl.
"I think my ears are still ringing from that." Jack said, amazed that they weren't both deaf after that fiasco. "Hell of a ride though, right?" She waggled her eyebrows at Sam.
"You're a freak." Sam deadpanned.
Dean didn't like being left behind, he also didn't like the piss-poor reason Sam had given. He was pretty sure that the actual reason Sam had given Dean an excuse to stay behind was so Dean could spend some time with Cassie, say bye, tie up some loose ends. That's what he and Cassie's relationship was; one giant loose end. What possessed Dean to even suggest coming here in the first place was anyone's guess. Maybe he wanted something familiar in the chaos he called his life, maybe he'd just been feeling nostalgic when they finished the Black Dog job, or perhaps it was just a decision based on too much cough medicine when he was sick. He wasn't sure himself.
Dean killed time packing his things up so he'd be ready to leave as soon as they got back and wandered over the diner for some lunch. He was halfway out the door when his cell phone rang.
"Speak of the devil." Dean muttered to himself looking at the caller ID.
"Hey," Dean greeted Cassie. "I was just going to grab some food."
"You're still in town?" She asked.
"Yeah, Sammy and Sparks are dropping the bell off and coming back for me later." Dean told her.
"Why don't you come over here for lunch, Dean." Cassie replied.
"Alright, gimme a minute, I'm hoofin it today." Dean said snapping the phone shut. He had a vague sense of foreboding but shrugged it off. When wasn't there some kind of bad hanging over them?
Twenty minutes later he was knocking on Cassie's front door.
"Dean," Cassie greeted him warmly, opening the door wide so he could enter. She kissed his cheek and gave him a big smile.
Dean raised an eyebrow, scratching the back of his head in a nervous automatic response to the intimate gesture. He never knew how to react to those sorts of things. He decided he'd be better off just ignoring the embrace and after a couple of awkward seconds Cassie led him into the kitchen where she already had sandwiches set out..
"You don't work today?" Dean asked taking a seat.
"Its Saturday, Dean." Cassie told him with a strange look.
"Oh, right." Dean replied. He'd lot track of what day it was. Hell, it took him a second to remind himself what the hell month it was. There were no such things as weekends off in his line of work.
"What have you and Sam been up to? When you aren't hunting I mean." Cassie tacked on taking a sip from her Coke.
"When we're not hunting," Dean snorting, taking a second to think about t hat one. "Sleeping, eating, enjoying the luxury of being run out of whatever back road town we just saved." He grinned ruefully.
"Have you had a lot of dangerous jobs since the last time we saw each other?" Cassie asked, shifting in her seat, obviously uncomfortable with what they were talking about. At least, Dean told himself, she was making an effort.
He looked past her, his mind flashing to all that had transpired since the last time he'd laid eyes on Cassie. It felt like a lifetime ago. Was it really almost two years? Terrible things and good came to mind. The crash, nearly losing his entire family, finding Jack and then almost losing her too. Every gory detail was etched in his mind and always would be, but he couldn't tell Cassie about those things. He didn't know how.
"Its part of the job." He shrugged, picking up his sandwich to fill the silence after with chewing.
"I was thinking about that, your job." Cassie folded her hands on the table top. "You know Parker? I checked around, his dad runs that place."
"I know." Dean said with his mouth full. What was she getting at?
"Anyway, he's always looking for new mechanics. You said once that your dad own a shop in Kansas." Cassie said smiling at him.
"He was part owner actually." Dena corrected her swallowing his food.
"Dean, you don't want to do this forever, do you?" Cassie asked him, lowering her voice. She leaned in closer to him, closing her hands over his empty hand.
"This is what I do, Cassie. My family needs me. Sam-"
"Sam is a grown man." Cassie interjected.
"This gig is too dangerous to do alone." Dean argued, shaking his head.
"Your dad does it alone." Cassie pointed out.
"Things are different with me, Sam and Jack." Dean said.
"See, right there, Jack would be with him. Though I can see how that might worry you anyway." Cassie said, her mouth tightening in a thin line as she forced herself to say Jack's name. "How did you even meet that girl?" She demanded with a look of distaste. Dean felt a twinge of annoyance, he pulled his hand away from hers, leaning as far back in his chair as he could.
"What's your problem with Jack?" Dean asked bluntly.
Cassie looked taken aback. She composed herself, rising from the table to cross to the fridge, taking out another drink for herself. Dean hadn't touched his.
"I think you could be a lot more than what you are now Dean, if you'd just listen to reason." Cassie said with her back to him.
"Answer the question." Dean said simply.
"I don't trust her." Cassie said turning to face him with her arms crossed over her chest.
"You don't know her." Dean retorted.
'Do you know her?" Cassie shot back with her hands on her hips. She shook her head, giving him her back again.
"Of course I do, she's my friend. She's family." Dean said vehemently.
"Maybe you don't know your friend as well as you think." Cassie said softly. She took a long pull from her drink and walked back to the table.
"What does that mean?" Dean asked, hesitating for a second. Warning bells were going off like gongs in his mind. He glared at her without realizing it and was surprised when Cassie took a step back.
"Nothing. Forget I said anything." Cassie said narrowing her eyes at him, compensating for a moments intimidation.
"No, you brought Jack up, I want t o know what you were going to say." Dean demanded with calm he didn't feel.
Cassie's eyes slid to the hallway and quickly flicked back to him.
"What?" Dean asked rising to his feet at the same time.
"I think there's something you should see." Cassie told him raising her chin a bit, her expression emphatic.
If Dean was better with human nature, or maybe if he didn't give the benefit of the doubt to the people he cared for so much, he might have seen what happened next coming.
He followed Cassie close as she walked out of the kitchen, down the hallway, to the room she used as an office. She reached into the drawer of her second hand desk and pulled out a sealed manilla envelope.
"I haven't opened it, so I don't know what's inside." Cassie said hesitating as she laid the envelope down on the table. Dean eyed it like it was a snake he thought would strike at any moment, before picking it up and turning it over in his hands.
The envelope had Cassie's name and address, was stamped confidential and bore the return address of a man, whose name Dean didn't even see. All he saw were the words "Private Investigator" beneath the label.
"What the hell is this?" Dean demanded.
Cassie had at least the moderate intelligence not to answer and Dean found himself glaring down at the envelope in his hands.
"Are you going to open it?" Cassie asked. Okay, maybe moderate intelligence was giving her too much credit.
"You hired a P.I. to follow Jack around?" Dean growled looking up at her.
"I did not hire him, he helped me on a freelance story I did last year, I asked a favor." Cassie huffed defensively.
Dean broke eye contact with her, looking back down at the parcel. He made a defiant sound in his throat and ripped it open. Some dude following Jackie, what the hell could it be in the envelope? Her grabbing coffee for them at the diner? Entering Melanie's house in the middle of the afternoon with the doors unlocked and no alarms? Then him and Sam would be incriminated too. Common sense, if he'd bothered to listen to it, said that he, Sam or Jack would have noticed some guy sneaking around while they were in town.
He almost dropped the pictures as soon as he saw them.
Cassie hadn't hired a P.I. to follow his friend. She'd asked this man, this stranger, to dig into Jack's dark, sordid past.
The cover letter, he read, said something about the photo Cassie sent him being very helpful, that he'd found out her name was Jacqueline Fontenot and that she sometimes went by the alias 'Eric Shore'.
The first picture, he only gave a passing glance, was a photo of Jack from an Amber Alert when she disappeared, her long red hair framing her smirking face, with her stats written under it asking for any information. The sort of thing that fell on deaf ears mostly, cause who the hell was going to go out of their way to really look hard for a teenaged orphan from the back water bayou of New Orleans.
The mug shot made him recoil from the pictures. The kid in it was death walking.
Jack stared back at him sullenly, beaten down by life. Her hair was shorn till it was even shorter than Sam's was now, her skin was grey and dark circles looked like bruises. Her hollowed out, blank eyes dominated her over-thin face. A look in them that screamed that she didn't care whether she lived or died.
The charge was solicitation.
Cassie was saying something but Dean couldn't make it out. He wanted to burn the papers in his hand, cause there were more of them. More pictures of 'Eric', grainy and probably just security photos from the places in South Boston she'd been. Despair and rage were writ across her features, making Dean feel like he'd taken a hard blow to the body, he caught himself swaying a little bit and forced himself to snap out of it.
"Dean? Have you been listening to a word I've said?" Cassie demanded in frustration. She had to know that it was something along these lines, investigators didn't just drop something at your doorstep without giving you some kind of briefing about what was inside, Dean knew that for damn sure.
"Dean?" Cassie reached out and he jerked back, giving her a hard look that he reserved for the worst things he hunted. She reached down to pluck up a picture he'd dropped in the process, but he snatched it up before she could look at it.
"I can't believe you did this." He said, surprised his voice was so even. He scrubbed a hand over his face, pacing a step or two before turning back on her.
"How the hell could you do this?!" He yelled making her jump back in surprise. "Do you have any idea the trouble you could bring down on us, on her, by doing this?"
"I mean aside from the fact that its none of your Goddamn business!" Dean raged. He clenched his eyes closed tight and took a shaky breath, trying to calm down before he made a mistake and did something that he might later regret. Not likely, but still. He turned back to her and shrugged his shoulders.
"Jack is my family." He said regaining his cool. "I'm not going to make excuses, because there's nothing to excuse."
"I only did this because I care about you." She started to say softly.
"No, you wanted to hurt one of mine. Don't even try that shit with me." Dean snarled, low and angry.
"No, I-"
"Shut up." Dean whispered harshly, Cassie's mouth snapped shut.
"You were wrong to do this." Dean told her simply. He shrugged his shoulders again and picked up the envelope, shoving the pictures back inside. He took his lighter out and lit the corner of the envelope, watching the ends curl and blacken.
"You'll burn the house down!" Cassie exclaimed but didn't dare come close to him again.
When the fire spread over the middle of the envelop, Dean reached for a trash can and dropped the burning evidence into it. He watched it burn down, acrid smoke filling his senses. The irony of using fire to destroy Jack's past was not lost on him.
"I'm going to pretend that this never happened and walk away. Not going to hurt Jack by letting her know what a spiteful bitch you are." Dean stated without breaking his gaze with the flames.
"I've hurt people for doing a lot less than this to someone I care about." Dean finally looked at her, his face totally blank, completely devoid of emotion. Capable of anything.
"Don't call me again, don't call Sam, I don't ever want to hear from you after this." He finished. Dean walked out of the room and out of the house without looking back.
Sam called Dean's phone late that night, telling him they'd made it to St. Louis without having to shoot out anymore windows.
"Good, glad you got there alright." Dean told his brother, distractedly.
"What's wrong?" Sam asked quickly. Dean sounded completely robotic, cut off. Something really bad had happened, Sam thought dreadfully.
"Nothing, I'm fine." Dean answered back in that same monotone.
"Bull shit you are," Sam said, standing up from his bed. It was so late that they'd decided to stay the night at a motel near the cemetery and go back to Cape Girardeau in the morning.
"Did she do something to you again?" Sam demanded.
"Did who do something to me again?" Dean asked.
"Cut it out Dean. Did Cassie break things off with you again. I knew it, she strings you along when she needs something and then just-"
"No Sam." Dean interrupted his tirade.
"What did she do?" Sam asked after a beat of silence.
"Drop it Sam." Dean replied. "Just, drop it okay. Please."
Sam was taken aback. Dean didn't say please. Dean said 'Fuck you'. He said 'get your ass in gear' or just gave a look and walked away. He never said please.
"Okay, Dean." Sam said slowly. "Um, we're going to come back in the morning, it was late when we got here and we need to wait a little longer before dropping the bell off so no one sees us."
"Don't bother, tell me where you're staying and I'll get a ride there." Dean said.
"You sure? we have to go that way anyway." Sam asked frowning.
"Yeah, I'm sure." Dean said. Sam dropped it and gave the name and address of the place they'd found.
"See you tomorrow." Dean said by way of goodbye.
"Yeah, see ya." Sam said before hanging up his phone. He stared at it for a few minutes in confusion.
"Hey, you call him?" Jack asked coming out of the bathroom, towel drying her hair.
"Yeah, he's coming to us tomorrow." Sam said scratching his head.
"Why?" Jack asked.
"Dunno." Sam shrugged. He tossed his cell on the nightstand and lay back in his bed, suddenly very tired. "Wake me up when its time to go." He told Jack.
"Sure." Jack sat down on her bed with a demonology text and her headphones blaring.
Dean pocketed his phone and stared down at the photos in front of him. They were a few shots taken of the three of them. Some Missouri had taken when they were at her house. Other were taken by Sam or Dean or Jack of the other tow and a couple on automatic timer that was too unbelievably hard to get right(how the hell can a person who can dismantle and put back together a shotgun in less than two minutes not know how to work an autotimer?!). The Jack in these pictures smiled, scowled, laughed or had a mouthful of food in one. She has emotion, life. Not the same girl at all that was in those terrible mug shots. Dean felt it like a constant heaviness in his chest, all that had been done to Jack, everything she'd overcome. He hated that it had been so easy for some stranger to dig up what she'd worked so hard to bury those short years ago.
Dean stood up abruptly, feeling the need to move come over him. He walked back and forth across the room. He unpacked his weapons, cleaned guns that didn't need cleaning, sharpened knives that didn't need sharpening. Finally he couldn't stand the inactivity and just grabbed his meager belongings and walked away from the little room. He walked to the local bus station, waiting for the first ride out of that damn town. The rest of the night was spent schooling himself not to let anything show. Last thing he needed was for his better halves(quarters? He didn't know) to take one look at him and see that he'd been body checked by this kind of shit again.
Dean took a grey hound to St. Louis at six in the morning.
Jack woke up to a scratching noise. Her eyes flew open at the sharp, metallic sound and she had her gun in hand. Someone was trying to pick the lock to their room.
A tap to her shoulder, Morse code. Quiet. Stay down. Sam said silently. Jack slid off the bed, crouching on the floor next to Sam, with her pistol cocked and ready, her eyes adjusted to the dark and she made out a knife in Sam's hand.
The door was flung open and the light flicked on, temporarily blinding them.
"Dean?" Sam asked squinting his eyes, mid-lunge.
"Good to see you guys are staying careful." Dean said with a smirk.
"You're a jerk." Jack muttered irritably. She got up, commanding her muscles to unclench, it was only Dean. She popped the clip out of her gun and tossed it onto her bed.
"You're going to blow yourself away one day, sleeping with a gun under your pillow." Dean warned, setting down three coffees on the table.
"More likely to shoot you than myself.:" Jack said without any real heat. She yawned, stretching her arms over her head.
"What time is it?" Sam asked rubbing sleep out of his eyes.
"Eleven, you lazy bastards." Dean chastised.
"We got in at seven, ass." Sam informed his brother sourly.
"Long night?" Dean asked.
"Chased by the groundskeeper's dogs, almost lost the stupid bell and were nearly arrested for trespassing, other than that it was peachy." Sam told him, giving Dean the bitch face.
"You wild man you." Dean clapped Sam on the shoulder. "I'm gone for one night and you're cutting loose."
"Yeah, it was a ball, all those strip clubs and body shots." Jack deadpanned.
"You wanna stick around, rest a little longer?" Dean asked turning serious.
"No, its fine." Sam answered for the both of them since Jack was currently inhaling coffee like it was oxygen.
"If you're sure." Dean shrugged flopping down in a chair.
Sam studied his brother intently, the circles under his eyes that showed he hadn't slept much the night before, the careful smirk and closed off pleasant expression on his eyes.
"You okay man?" Sam asked.
"Fine, Sammy." Dean answered too quickly.
"Interesting night?" Jack asked. That was as close to asking for details as she'd get. Jack didn't ask what wasn't offered. Cassie asked too much. Dean banished the comparison.
"Not really, Missouri isn't known for its fast times." Dean said flippantly.
"Lets get outta here." Sam said drinking down more than half of his coffee in one gulp. "The haunting in Wisconsin."
"We never did get paid for this job." Jack complained.
There was no real rush now that they were back together. Sam checked out while Jack and Dean packed up the car. When they were done they sat on the bumper in comfortable silence. Jack spoke first
"You know if-"
"I know."
"Then I'll-"
"Don't have to Jack." Dean laughed thinking about how over-protectiveness went both ways with them. Jack nodded, cracked her shoulder.
A thick lock of knotted hair fell in her eyes. Dean reached out and moved it away from her vision without thinking. Jack quirked an eyebrow at him but didn't ask any questions.
"Hey, all set?" Sam asked coming out of the office.
"Yup." Dean tossed the keys up in the air and Jack caught them.
"You want me to drive." She stated looking at him like he was possessed.
"Get your ass in the car before I change my mind." Dean said sliding into passenger side.
Sam smirked at Jack, his eyebrows raised comically. Jack shrugged, spinning the keys around her finger and got behind the wheel.
"Now just remember your rule Dean, Driver picks the tunes, shotgun shuts his cakehole." Jack told him with a devious look.
"Kill me, kill me now." Dean groaned.
"Suck it up, be a man." Jack said turning the ignition. She pulled out a tape she'd made awhile back. Dean rolled his eyes as it started in the middle of a song.
-FIN