On the second night, Jess sleeps alone. Her roommate is a big girl, with breath that is loud, gurgling, like every gasp takes substantially effort.
Jess feels it in her chest, like she's the one who's laboring for air, and dreams of a weight on her lungs, hot and hard, like a big dog or a bigger man.
The yellow eyed woman is heavy and anvil like, and the weight of her stare is even heavier. She says, "Mama's little idiot, you've done it now. Could ye? Could you, without you could, could ye?"
And Jess pushes her hard, but her hands catch on air and she's trapped. "I can," she wheezes. "I can, I will, I can."
Up ahead she can see the plain of pikes and a fresh head is decorating one of them. Nine are empty. It should smell of rot, of death, but the only scent on the air is that of ripe, fresh grain, like it's just been threshed.
"If you fail," the woman promises her, "You'll be there too." She leans forward and licks a tear from Jess' cheek. "That will be a kinder fate than if you succeed."
Jess reaches deep into her pocket and her fingers close on a charm of blue string and silver eyes. A bracelet, one she'd left at home on the kitchen table, at her last home before she'd come to Stanford. She does not question that she has it here, just takes it and throws as hard as a few years on the volleyball team have taught her.
The yellow eyed woman hisses, but Jess is already gone.
\\
The second time Sam and Jess have sex is after the hoopla with Sam's dead roommate dies down. Sam can't talk about it and Jess can't ask, but when they're finally kissing it doesn't seem to matter.
They're in Jess' room again, door locked and chair pushed under it, and fuck her roommate if the bitch wants to come in. But...
Sam goes slow, like she's glass and linen and Jess is red, cheek pressed to the pillow, not looking him in the eyes, not like this, when he's between her legs. Tongue and fingers, and she moans, and flushes. Twitches like a dying thing.
"It's okay," he whispers, soothing hands on her thighs, and all she can think is that she forgot to shave them for a few days and there's probably stubble. She shakes and closes her eyes. Whimpers at the flick of tongue on oversensitive flesh.
"Jess," he says, like it means something. Everything. If she looks him in the eyes she'll see everything. Sam's voice is slow and rueful and he says, "Jess."
His hands are on her cheek now, thighs sliding over her thighs. "Fuck," she whispers. "Oh fuck." She lets him make her look him in the eyes and sees that he'd red too, flushed to the roots, pinpoint pupils and eyes more brown than blue.
"It's embarrassing like this, isn't it?" he admits when she can't. And the words aren't quite right, but enough. "Doing it slow?"
Jess says, "Yeah. I. Yeah." Her nails dig into his back, but not too far and any marks they leave will fade. "I never. Like this."
"It's okay," he mumbles, pressing his cheek to her cheek. Gentle. "It's okay. I have. We- we'll figure it out."
Jess lets her legs fall all the way open, rubs her heels down his calves and doesn't say, 'who? who?' like some kind of screech owl. She says, "Sam. Sammy."
And he says, "I miss you. I miss you so damned much."
Jess doesn't remind him that she's right there and he doesn't need to miss her. She knows she took him from somewhere else. Knows it when he falls asleep with his head pillowed on her shoulder.
"I'm sorry," she whispers into the soft hairs on the back of his neck. He says nothing, and Jess wonders if he's really asleep or just pretending. Wonders what he dreams.
She's too twitchy to sleep herself so she gets up and she walks to the window. Paces, really, scuffing her bare feet against the cold floor as if she's trying to wake Sam but he doesn't even twitch. She glares at the lump of him under her covers and can almost feel the shivery sensation of his big hands on her spine, so gentle she aches. Makes her wonder what he would say if she hit instead of petting, screamed instead of soothed.
Sam ate from her hands. Maybe he wouldn't be able to get angry even then.
Jess looks away, out the window. She presses her hands down on the windowsill and blinks when she feels something gritty on her palms.
Salt. A line of it, thick and white in the moonlight, now broken by palm prints where her hands rested. Jess turns around again, but Sam is still asleep, huddled under her blanket and clutching a pillow against his chest like he was clutching someone else.
Jess sits up for another hour, whispering protection into the glass and wood and plaster of her room, begging for a dreamless sleep. She knows the spell has failed when the dream overtakes her just as she closes her eyes.
\\
On the third night, Jess starts calling the woman in her dreams Baba Yaga. As if the name is enough, she can see the hut behind her more clearly, crooked and wobbling on chicken's legs. Naming her is the right thing to do, Jess is sure of it, even if those burning eyed heads on the pikes seem to follow her even more closely with their eyes.
The Baba Yaga ignores them and breathes with a slow tea kettle sound, reaching out for Jess with her yellow, wrinkled hands. "You think your kitchen magic can protect you from me twice, little gypsy?"
And Jess says nothing, but somehow, from somewhere, she's clutching a knife in her hand, moon sliver shaped. Like the one she found under Sam's pillow when he wasn't watching her.
She holds it, clutching and panting for breath, waiting. Just crouches down, trying to think, to remember this story, the Baba Yaga, because that's all she can do.
"I have a blessing," she whispers. "You can't touch me, I have a blessing."
"Your mother's blessing?" Baba Yaga's fingers graze over Jess' hair. "You used that last night, Jessica."
"No. Not my mother's." Jess sees Sam's smile, blinding, all teeth and happiness. Her Sam now.
"A man of words and not of deeds," Baba Yaga says, and her voice is singsong. Younger and stronger than her face. "That boy cannot even bless himself."
And Jess remembers salt on the windowsill and shakes her head. "He can. He can."
"Still, you used his blessing on the first night." And Jess remembers the hot, heavy arms around her and nods.
"He's still mine," she says, head high. Without waiting for a response, she lunges forward, knife aimed for the fleshy parts of the belly. The Baba Yaga cackles and ducks.
Jess jumps back, but not fast enough and there's a clawed yellow hand holding her own knife to her heart. Baba Yaga says, "A penknife in your heart, girl, if you claim what you can't defend. If I don't take him from you someone else will."
Jess kicks back, heels to instep, but the Baba Yaga is stronger, and the harder she fights, the more caught she is. Her knife draws a red line across her breast.
"And when your heart begins to bleed- you're dead, and dead, and dead indeed," Baba Yaga whispers. And Jess' every movement seems to push the knife deeper.
"Let her go," a voice, familiar, but harder than Jess had ever heard it. Stronger. "You let her go."
Jess gasps and stumbles forward, crumbling into a pile of loose limbs at Sam's feet.
"Fool of a boy," Baba Yaga says and laughs her horrible laugh. "This girl has bound you so hard you don't even see your chains."
"Yeah, pull the other one," Sam mutters, and bends down to pick Jess up. He's big. Easy to forget how big until she's here, swung up into his arms like she's a little girl. Jess wants to tell him that Baba Yaga is lying, but that's just not true. Wants to tell him other things, but there's a line of blood choking back her words.
"You think she'd protect you?" Baba Yaga asks. Light insinuating voice and Jess hides her head in Sam's shoulder, smearing her blood in the thin flannel of his shirt. "She's bound you away from the one who protects you."
"Who says I need protecting?" Sam says, and he turns away, turns his back, like he can, like there's not even a threat. Jess is gasping blood, whimpering, but his hands soothe her down.
The last thing she hears is Baba Yaga's thin, horrible voice. "I can't say which of you is more cursed."
\\
About a week after they bury the first roommate, Sam gets Zach. Zach never explains why he's changing rooms and Sam doesn't ask. It's not just anyone who's willing to room where some kid just died, but Zach acts like he's never heard about that, or he did hear and just didn't care.
Zach doesn't act scared of Sam, which is a key fact. The second fact is that Zach only listens to techno, but he listens to a lot of it. Spins out whole genres of music that Sam can imagine Dean dismissing as nerd noises.
Third fact, which would also piss off Dean, is that he reads Nietzsche out loud in a big booming voice, and then laughs about it constantly, as if he's telling the punch line to the best joke ever. Fourth, and possibly most important, is that Zach also shares his beer and pot and seems to have tapped into a never-ending supply of both. Given the facts in evidence, Sam is really not going to complain.
So, Sam likes Zach. Likes Jess too, as if liking Jess were relevant, since she's just there, like an axiom. Like Dean used to be. But Sam likes her anyway. And classes. Sam likes classes, likes being able to lean forward and raise his hand and say something without knowing the whole class is sniggering behind their hands and mentally calling him a teacher's pet.
And then there's the girls- women.
Women in black T-shirts that cling to their breasts who catch up with him as he's packing up his notes after lecture and say things like "That was really insightful, what you said. Would you like to come over to my room and maybe talk about Christopher Marlowe?"
It takes him about twice to get that this is code for 'let's fuck'. Sam digs it, almost like he digs Marlowe, and if Dean had been with him he thinks he would have had fun with it, sliding them out of their jeans and pushing their panties aside without taking them off until all their words went somewhere else. But he has Jess, so he doesn't.
It takes him a little to realize the boys are doing it too, in a half angry, half-daring sort of way. And that would not be okay, except Dean isn't here. Still. Dean isn't here, but the tattoo on Sam's back with Dean's initials is still itchy and sore and he pretends to be oblivious.
Instead he pulls Jess onto his lap and tells her about those skanky chicks to make her laugh and smack him on the back of the head in a way that he tries not to let remind him of anyone else.
It's always just so easy with Jess. She makes it easy. Easy to be Sam and Jess and not SamnDean. And not just plain Sam.
He can picture Jess' face if he explains it to her. Somehow, it comes out like one of those 50's hygiene films they watch when they're smoking up. Jess in a poodle skirt, and him with his hair slicked back. A tiled floor, black and white linoleum. Like the lunchroom of a cracked old high school, but in black and white.
In this fantasy, Jess leans over him, low enough that he can see right down her little sweater-vest thing. "You act like no one ever told you it wasn't okay to fuck your brother," she breathes into his ear. Throaty as a black and white movie.
He stares down her sweater, through a filmy scarf, wrapped tight around her neck. He doesn't blush. "Yeah. Well. Yes. No one ever said that. Explicitly."
Jess laughs, light and breezy, and lifts his chin up with the palm of her hand. Sam can't flinch away. "Explicitly?" For some reason, the face he's looking into is Jess', but the voice is suddenly Dean's. Low and amused as hell at his expense. "Dude, this isn't the kind of thing you have to be told, Sam. This is something you just know. Some things are wrong."
And then Sam leans forward and kisses Jess- or possibly its Dean at that point. Kisses harder than he ever kissed Jess, hard enough to draw blood. And sometimes he says a lot to her after the kiss breaks, practically gives a speech.
The speech goes something like this, except it's said between kisses and stripping her and licking the honey between her legs. This is just a fantasy, so he can still actually make speeches then.
Sam says something like, that he knows that he's her first real boyfriend, if not her first fuck. And then he explains that, she, Jess is also his first girlfriend, if certainly not his first fuck. He explains this between soft bites of the sensitive skin around her nipples.
He tells Jess, or possibly, given how flat and brown those nipples are, how there's chest hair and no breasts, possibly he's explaining this to Dean, because this is his fantasy and he can- Sam says that he doesn't actually remember his first time. Oh, he remembers his first time with a girl, with Missy Somers in the ninth grade, swinging on her back porch and the sharp scent of lemonade, but not his real first time.
Sam has never admitted this out loud, but in his fantasy, he slides his dick into Jess and tells her in measured, distant tones, that he can't remember exactly how it started. That there has never been a sharp, delineated first time in his head, when he touched Dean, when Dean touched him back, broad palm and slim fingers on his spine, and it stopped being exactly innocent. When they were little they shared a bed, and when they were older it just seemed- Dean was always there, and no one else ever was.
And sure, Sam says, as he thrusts into that warm, perfect ass in front of him, which certainly belongs to someone he likes, sure, intellectually Sam knows what happened was all kinds of fucked up. He's read enough books and journals about the Westermark effect and whatever else, hell he's talked to enough people, to know that. He's not ignorant. It's just that he doesn't… he doesn't feel it.
Except sometimes he's afraid, and, oh, yeah, he ran away from home and everything and everyone he ever knew. Which isn't even relevant, but is an important fact to get out there.
And then because his head is apparently is even more fucked up than even all of this would indicate, then Sam imagines things like Dean and Jess kissing, and ends up palming his cock as hard as he can with his face pressed into the wall. He's always hoping like hell Zach is too stoned to notice, but either way, Zach is too tactful to say a word.
Sam pictures this scenario in his head while he's jerking off so often that he practically gets hard just thinking about it, and that's as close as he wants to get to actually doing it.
\\
When things unravel, there have been ten deaths on campus already. Sam has resolutely not investigated any of them, except for the part where he kept trying to call or email Dean and failed to do it, over and over and over again. But, when things really, actually start, it starts like this-
Zach is laying on his stomach, taking long, drawn out gulps from a joint that Sam doesn't bother asking about the origin of, especially not one Zach passed to him with a casual, "Here you go, buddy."
This is one of Sam's favorite things about school, actually. Right after the actual school part, and then Jess and the easy, playful sex. Zach's apparently bottomless stash and the equally addictive appeal of endless access to the main library, and the special collection once he got the right people's attention acted as twin relaxants.
"Thanks, man," Sam says and takes a deep, long breath, holding in the smoking and letting out the memory of the first time he'd done this.
Sitting half in and half out of Dean's lap and almost choking on smoke because he didn't know how to breathe right, not at first, not instinctively like he was sure Dean could his first time. Until Dean had shown him how, warm mouth on his, all hissing half-growled words, "Come on, don't waste it, dude," and then blowing the smoke directly into Sam's mouth.
He shivers, eyes closed against the sense memory, as if that will keep it out, and almost doesn't hear Zach talking.
And that's when things unravel, because what Zach is talking about is dreams. And witches.
"Yellow eyes, man," Zach whispers. "I think it was a bad batch of weed. Pulling all this subconscious shit out, and fuck. Fuck, I think my subconscious has been watching too many horror movies."
"Yellow eyes?" Sam repeats, and feels kind of stupid, because of course it's bad weed and his brain does not need to start pulling up a list of yellow eyed dream monsters.
"Yeah. Like this creepy fuck old lady with yellow eyes and clawed fingernails. How about you, you having dreams?"
Sam rubs the back of his neck with his palm and gives a half shrug. He's kind of mentally clutching at his detachment, and it helps to express if physically. "I never remember my dreams, so who knows?"
Zach doesn't seem to hear him, just takes another long, slow hit and shakes his head. "And the worst part was the heads, you know? Like, sticking out of these pikes, staring at me and shit."
Sam goes suddenly, abruptly still and his mouth is dry. So dry. Because this- he knows this is nothing good. "Heads on pikes?" he repeats numbly.
"Yeah, freak me out, right? And I swear to fuck that one of the heads was that dead kid's, you know the one you got as a roommate first week?" Zach looks at Sam in this half hopeful way, and Sam knows that's his cue to laugh it off, call it ridiculous. He opens his mouth and just fails to do that.
"Tell me some more about this lady, what did she say?" Sam kind of leans forward, feeling his pulse speed up, just a little. First rush of adrenaline, because this has to be something.
"Heh. You interpret dreams now?"
"Yeah, just call me Freud. I'm serious, what did she say?"
"Okay, Freud, whatever." Zach laughs, and Sam glares at him until he stops. Stares at Sam and actually looks a little bit nervous. "Okay, okay, jeez, don't hit me, man. Like, nothing. She asked me if I wanted to be there. Willingly or whatever. And I said no." Zach bites his lip. Quivers. "I said no. Jesus. Let's talk about something else now, okay?"
Sam lets him change the subject.